Date: 2016-04-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Splatterpunk; Novels
Description: Three Manhattan rich boys looking for some kicks, a beautiful hill-girl trapped in a life of morbid prostitution, a backwoods town shrouded in a secret so demented that it beggars description. What do these three things all have in common? HEADS The myth is over a hundred years old, and the act more twisted, more perverse, and more utterly hideous than anything imaginable. Rape, mutilation, and torture of the most abominable sort all seem meek by comparison... HEADS Some things are worse than even the devil's work. Far, far worse. HEADS A novel of unspeakable evil. Artwork by Glenn Chadbourne

HEADER 3

Edward Lee

&

Ryan Harding

Necro Publications

— 2017 —

| — | — |

HEADER 3 © 2017 by Edward Lee & Ryan Harding

Cover art © 2017 by Glenn Chadbourne

This edition © 2017 Necro Publications

ISBN: 978-1-944703-26-4

LOC: 2017930085

Book design & typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design
fatcatgraphicdesign.com

Necro Publications

5139 Maxon Terrace

Sanford, FL 32771
necropublications.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

— | — | —

Dedication: David G. Barnett

— | — | —

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

E.L: Bob Hinton and Alex, Frank and Ingrid Festa, Bartek Czartoryski, Matt Lee-Williams, Darren Prosser, Bob Strauss, everyone at Deadite, Robert Johnson at Old Nick, Melissa Bostaph, Chris from B&N, Ryan Harding, Old ER Surgeon, gargirl, Gambino Iglesias, Frank and Ingrid Festa, Troy Chambers, Matthew T. Carpenter, Tom Karpe, Diana Bowman, C. Dunn, moof3r, mec926, Stephen Brissette, J. Bjorne, Tommy Satterwhite, J. Bowen, missy99, Aut, A.Silver, Randolph Lewis II, Kenneth Sohl, Brian Pinkerton, crackjaw, EllieMaren, pesticupake, kresby, disturbian, Eli Brown (thanks for the Barry Richards stuff), mareveltepora, Traube7, Mrparka, and Wilum Pugmire (for saying nice things about Trolley No. 1852!), ttzuma, sikahtik, Demonizer, Kylie and Mark Hatmaker and Re-Voltaire, 27needles, bishopblack, chuckrios, AlexanderBeresford, dutchgorelover, postmant666, DecayedFace, DaFratHO, Darren Prosser, Qwee, Wes Southward, Monrozombi, Zlatko Geleski, David Speed.

R.H.: Ryan would like to say thanks and hello to Querus Abuttu, Jack Bantry, Jarod Barbee, Dave Barnett, Jeff Burk, James Carroll, Suzanne Travola Delaney, Mark Gutmaker, Brian Keene, Ann Laymon, Shane McKenzie, Regina Mitchell, Jonathan Moon, Kim Myers, John Skipp, Bryan Smith, Paul Synuria II, Tristan Thorne, and Brent Zirnheld. And especially to Lee - thanks for sharing the drill!

PROLOGUE

Triple M hadn’t known what hit him, but it might as well have been a Mack truck. I must be seeing things from the gak, he thought—at least when he was able to think again. This idea made some sense: his moniker stood for Meth Man Mike. He sold lots of meth…but he’d used lots of it as well; hence his obvious disregard for the universal axiom don’t get high on your own supply. He’d thought for sure the night would be a cash cow but instead his efforts had left him tied up in the back of a van—with a headache and wet Levis—and the reason he thought he might be seeing things was because one of his abductors, a 300-pound redneck with a buzzcut sitting on the van bench, said, “Hey, Gut! This ’un here peed his pants!”

The man behind the wheel grinned over his shoulder. “Likely as not, he’ll be shittin’ ’em too, Clyde. Just like his girly friend.”

Here was the dilemma: Gut and Clyde both looked and sounded exactly alike. So either Triple M was seeing things or his dope-slinging excursion had been busted up by identical twins.

He’d been ripped off a few times in the past (a hazard of his profession) but he’d never been abducted. It was almost like these two humongous guys had been onto him and Rumbun from the start.

Rumbun, by the way, was Triple M’s squeeze and “business associate,” and the meaning of her moniker can probably be guessed. She had a good “nose” for users looking to cop, so she baited potential meth-heads with her smokin’ hot bod, and if they talked the right talk and proved themselves “cool,” she sent them down the road where Triple M waited to sell them all the product they wanted. The system worked very well.

But not tonight.

The one lummox named Gut—or that was Triple M’s best guess, anyway, but it could have been the other one—had moseyed down the road and good-naturedly greeted, “Hey, fella, how you doing this fine night?” but before Triple M could answer—

WHAP!

—a fist the size of a cantaloupe had introduced itself to the drug-slinger’s forehead, and he was on the ground seeing stars. Not quite unconscious, he heard a roar of engine noise, tires skidding on dirt-top, then next thing he knew he’d been tossed into a van like a sack of flour wearing a black Scarface T-shirt. His attacker stepped in, slammed the door, and the van roared off. The entire grab had taken less than a minute.

Through the proverbial stars, Triple M saw Rumbun tied up and gagged under the bench. So she’d already been pinched before this guy had put the drop on Triple M. Smooth work, but…why? Had Triple M been more coherent at the time, he would’ve rejected the notion that these two fatsos were regional dealers themselves because they simply didn’t sport the vibe. Triple M knew slingers when he saw them, and these guys weren’t it. They reminded him instead of typical backwoods yokels.

Therefore, what reason could explain their abduction of Triple M and Rumbun?

A strong-arm heist? A rapo? But Triple M left most of his cash in the car, and they hadn’t even searched his pockets. And since Rumbun still had all her clothes on, well, rape didn’t appear to be the motive…

Triple M would have a few more minutes to groggily wonder about this, but not many more minutes after that to wonder about anything at all.

««—»»

The wooden double barn doors banged open as the skinny bagman in the Scarface shirt was dragged inside by two husky figures, then dropped on hay-strewn ground. It was a large barn, wanly lit by bare bulbs hanging overhead. One bulb swayed, throwing the shadows of several men.

The skinny bagman groaned in the dirt, his face sufficiently bloodied.

“Good job, fellas,” came a husky, enthusiastic drawl. “This ‘un here’s the bag’a walkin’ shit they called Triple M!”

First it was the speaker’s bulbous face that bloomed into view, then three more identical bulbous faces grinned down at the night’s “acquisition. These faces, by the way, belong to a looming, boisterous tetrad known as the Larkins Brothers. These twenty-something boys were all 6’3”, fat, overalled rednecks with buzzcuts; they were also identical quadruplets. They all had the same huck-and-jive grin, the same beady brown eyes, the same Skoal-darkened teeth. Their names? Gut, Tucker, Horace, and Clyde, but good luck to anyone trying to tell them apart.

“We catched the dumb sumbitch sellin’ the shit in the alley ‘hind Guder’s smoker,” Gut said. Or was it Horace?

“Glad ya didn’t put him in!” exclaimed Clyde, or—no—perhaps that was Horace.

Then Tucker scuffed closer and—THWACK!—kicked the squirming drug dealer between the shoulder blades. Or, well, perhaps it wasn’t Tucker at all, perhaps it was—

What difference did it make!

“Triple M, huh, well lemme tell ya sumthin’, Triple M. We know ya been sellin’ that meth shit ‘round town, and fact the matter is, we’se simply just cain’t have us none’a that, no sir.”

Triple M gagged, groaning. “I didn’t sell nothin’…”

“Been pushin’ that shit awhile’s what we heard,” one brother, probably Gut, said. “Tippin’ kids over right’n left, ruinin’ their lives and ruinin’ the town, turnin’ hard workin’ folks into junkies. Why, ole Joe Shaeffer offered to suck my dick just t’other day and he’s a church-goin’ fambly man!”

“Actually, Joe ain’t a meth-head,” Tucker informed him. “He just likes suckin’ him some dicks.”

“Is that right? Well, now that you mention it, he shorely didn’t attach no price ta that offer. Well, be that as it may, Meth Makin’ Moron, drug runnin’ scumbags like you is poisonin’ our town and we’se right sick of it.”

“No! That’s bullshit!” jabbered the captive.

“Aw, we’se can prove it.” It was Clyde, beyond a doubt, who’d made this assertion. He slipped a Samsung Galaxy 4 out of his overalls. “See, I got me this slick pitcher of ya on my fancy phone, sellin’ it ta Connie Reed.” Then the mammoth quadruplet leaned over with the cell phone and showed Triple M the wares of his proof.

On the cell phone screen, sure enough, there was the Scarface-shirted captive handing a minuscule packet to a young hillbilly girl with essentially a child’s face but breasts worthy of Playboy.

Tucker’s voice boomed his irritation throughout the barn. “Connie Reed ain’t but 13, boy! What’s wrong with you? Hookin’ kids on the meth so’s ta get ’em whorin’ fer ya!”

The dealer squirmed among several, well, several loogies in the dirt, as if the downward glare of the four brothers was the sun and Triple M was the ant under the magnifying glass. “I swear, man, I don’t deal nothin’! That was a pack of gum I gave her!”

Tucker’s deep chuckle could’ve been the sound of an ill-maintained diesel motor chugging to start. “Pack’a gum? That what you’re sayin’, boy? Well, how’s ’bout we ask that cute li’l blondie girlfriend’a yers, see what she have ta say?”

Gut dragged in a slim, impressively curved blonde in cut-off shorts, a dirty halter, and a gag through her mouth. Her wrists were tied, and her outward physical state suggested the bad end of a raucous physical encounter. The black-eye looked quite racoonish, and it was clear most of the spunk had been throttled out of her, for she barely had any energy left to resist.

“Me’n Gut caught this sap-trap tryin’ ta hide round the alley once she made us,” Clyde expounded with a touch of pride in his drawl. “We mussed her up a tad for her effort, just for the fun of it.”

Gut added with a hoarsy chuckle, “T’weren’t hard to find, neither, Tuck. She were leaning up against the wall but her tits was stickin’ out so far they plum gave her away!”

A cacophony of laughter burst through the barn. Gut sat the very worn-out woman down in a chair, and, “Speakin’ of tits,” he said, “check these out,” and then his big hot-dog-sized fingers divorced the woman’s halter from the subjects of Gut’s observation.

Tucker squinted at the anatomical marvel: breasts large as duckpin balls fronted by dark-pink nipples round as the bottom of a beer can. “Fer peter’s sake, brother! Them’s gotta be damn near the best set’a milkers I ever seed on a gal!”

Horace concurred, “I’d write home about ’em if I weren’t already home!” and with that blaze of wit, more laughter exploded about them, and Horace gave his crotch a subconscious squeeze.

It was no surprise, then, when the four captors each took a turn at fondling their charge’s breasts like patrons in the produce section. As for the woman, she just sat there without resistance, barely moving, her teary eyes wide over the gag.

As Clyde exercised his turn at the non-consensual breast exam, an eyebrow rose as if some anomaly had been detected. “Well, no wonders why this gal’s dumplins is so big. They’se implants!”

“Ya don’t say?” Gut remarked.

And Horace added, “I thought somethin’ felt a bit off about ’em.”

Tucker re-plied the breast again for a closer deliberation. “Danged if you ain’t right, Clyde. ’Tis a rare thing ‘round these parts, yes sir.”

Gut scratched his buzzcut head in perplexity. “But what ’zactly is a implant, Tuck? What is it they’se plant in ’em?”

“Bag’a salt water’s what I heard.”

“No! Well ain’t that the oddest thing!” Gut replied.

Tucker nodded with some further thought. “Odd is right, fellas, and damn unnatural, too. It give me a sure-fire hankerin’ of curiosity.” In a split-second, the giant man’s giant hand produced a prodigious folding knife, snapping it open with a magical expertise.

Now some reaction found its way into the form of the woman, who tensed up in the chair and mewled beneath the gag. When she tried to rise, Gut’s hands clamped her throat and slammed her back down. “What’cha fixin’ ta do, Tuck?”

“I reckon he’s got a mind to cut that tit right off,” Horace speculated.

“No, no, fellas,” Tucker countered. “What I look like, a fuckin’ barbarian? Naw, I figgur I’ll just give that big gorgeous tit a jab, and then, Gut, you can put a good hard squeeze on it, and we’ll see what up’n comes out.”

This information was met with unanimous murmurs of approval, then—schlup!—the knife was plunged once into the breast and as quickly withdrawn. The blonde women squealed, clenched up, and Gut’s hands encircled the fleshy orb and compressed upon it with considerable force.

From the rent, a single plume of water shot a good ten feet, as if spat from a fountain.

Awe and wonder dominated the expressions of the four brothers, and much hooting, hollering and high-fiving ensued. A very different expression was found on the face of the blond woman.

“Damn, if that weren’t somethin’!” Tucker celebrated.

And Horace, “Ain’t never seed nothin’ like it!”

Gut licked at some of the water on his hand, then nodded. “And you was right, Tuck. Gal’s tits is plumb full up with salt water.”

And the “gal” was now quite a sight, sidled over in the chair with her halter down, one breast stuck out grandly, the other flat as a proverbial pancake. The amount of blood effusing from the knife-slit was much less than one might expect…but that was beside the point.

Tucker’s tone took on a sardonic edge. “Damn silly-ass world we live in, I’ll tell ya: gals spendin’ thousands’a dollars just to have their tits pumped up with salt water. Anyway, we’se had our fun, now it’s back ta business, fellas.”

“Damn straight,” one of them assented, and gave the all-but-forgotten Triple M a hefty kick in the kidney.

“Ugh!” went Triple M.

Tucker re-addressed the now bleary-eyed blonde. He patted her cheek. “Sweetie? Now that we’se fixed up yer tit job, you need to tell us somethin’. This lowlife boyfriend’a yers? He the one you says been sellin’ meth?”

Mouthing the word “yes!” against the gag, she wagged her head in the affirmative.

“She’s a lyin ‘ho!” Triple M yelled. “I never saw this bitch before in my life!”

Horace stared down at the guy, arms crossed. “Save your bullshit, fella. We ain’t got time fer you nor the girl. But just you hear this: You ever set foot in this town again, yer dead meat.”

A great exhalation of relief poured out of Triple M. “I swear to God, man! I’ll leave town, I’ll never deal here again—never!”

At that, Tucker clapped his hands together as if a great revelation had just been made. “Oh! So ya admit yer a worthless meth dealin’ dickface after all! Well ain’t that just peachy? Clyde? Gag this piece’a shit and hook him up.”

“Shore thing, Tuck,” and then Clyde lashed the dealer’s hands together, grabbed a chain-hook, and attached it between the dealer’s wrists, all with such speed and precision that one would presume he’d done this before. A moment later, the unfortunate young man with the Scarface t-shirt was hanging before them all by the chain.

Where before the brothers were all looking down, now they all looked up at Triple M. “I’m beggin’ you guys! Lemme go, I swear I’ll quit slinging. I’ll give you my whole stash, plus the five grand I got back at my apartment! My girl’ll let all of you teabag her! Please!”

Tucker, by the way, for those to whom it had not yet occurred, was viewed as the leader of the quartet. After all, he was the oldest, having been ejected into the world through his dear mother’s vagina all of six seconds before his identical brothers. Perhaps with this advanced age came wisdom and leadership traits. “We don’t want yer fuckin’ stash, boy, ‘cept to drop it in the outhouse, and we got no use fer ill-gotten gains. We’ll teabag yer girl without your say-so or hers neither. Naw, best we rough ya up a little, so’s ta teach you a lesson.”

Clyde, Horace, and Gut then proceeded to strip Triple M bare as he hung before them.

Next, Tucker informed the girl, “Sweetie? We’se don’t stand fer no drug dealin’ in our fine town, so’s just you watch what we do ta lover-boy here.”

“Golf-ball job this time, Tuck?” Gut inquired.

Then Horace: “Shit, I’se was hopin’ fer a raw-ballin’—”

And Clyde: “Or a good ole fashion dick-gnarlin’ or box job—”

But Tucker rejected these suggestions. “Naw, brothers. We done plenty of those and’ll do plenty more. See, I wanna make the very best impression on our pretty little one-titted guest.” He nodded resolutely. “Golf-ball job.”

The order was given, and Clyde, Gut, and Horace all deposed themselves to their pre-assigned tasks. Clyde bopped Triple M once hard on the head, not enough to kill him but just enough to produce near unconsciousness, after which he put his knife to work, slicing around the drug-dealer’s chest just under the armpits. Then the blade gently glided around the lower neck and across the shoulders. When he was done, the intricate incision circumscribed Triple M’s body in a most tactical fashion. Blood flowed grandly, turning a spot on the dirt floor to crimson mud.

“Lookin’ good,” Tucker appraised, standing to the girl’s side.

Gut slipped the blade of his own knife carefully under the skin just over the young man’s shoulder blades and then, with a grotesque skill, he yanked some of the skin out farther until a “pocket” was formed.

After this, he fingered a golf ball into the “pocket.”

Clyde slipped a pre-made loop of rope around the now skin-covered golf ball, and he tightened the loop down hard and screwed a lock clamp just above the knot.

“Start ’er up, Horace!” Gut yelled.

A motor roared to life, chugging rhythmically. A revving sound ensued, and the rope connected to the golf ball grew taut in an instant.

The blond woman’s eyes slowly followed the rope back to the other end of the barn, where Horace contentedly operated a stationary winch.

The motor revved further, slowly, in increments, until no more slack existed in the rope, and a very unhappy Triple M began to sway backwards in mid-air. Arms and legs churned to no effect; the dealer’s vocal responses need not be described.

Tucker grabbed the girl’s head and forced her to watch. “Ya don’t wanna miss this, sweetie. It’s a hoot.” He then nodded to Horace.

The motor-noise trebled; Triple M’s body now hung at roughly a forty-five degree angle, and amid a crackly wet peeling sound, all of the young man’s skin was pulled off from the armpits down, quite like a pair of overalls. There was a bit of resistance at the groin, then more resistance as the “skin-suit” prolapsed entirely at the dealer’s feet. It might also be appropriate to add that the dealer’s screams sounded quite machine-like and seemed to dwarf the sound of the winch motor. Finally, then, those stubborn connective tissues which kept Triple M’s skin suit attached to his feet—

—SNAPPED.

The winch whined at the release of tension, actually catapulting the great bag of skin over Horace, rope and all, where it slapped! against the barn wall, throwing random droplets of blood hither and yon and leaving wet smears where the skin suit hit with greatest force. The motor chugged to a halt.

The four giant-sized brothers applauded with gusto.

“Dandy job, boys!” Tucker complimented, trading high-fives with Gut and Clyde. “Best dang golf-ball job we had in a long spell!”

“Yeah!” Horace agreed. “Even better’n that knocked up junkie chick we skinned that one time!”

Triple M continued to scream in lurching waves, each burst from his throat causing his dangling body to bend backward. And when Tucker said, “Gut? Why don’t you give that fella somethin’ to really scream about,” the slightly younger brother was all too happy to oblige. He produced a large jug of home-distilled 200-proof grain alcohol and began to splash it liberally all over the young drug dealer’s raw, skinless body, and the sounds that issued from his throat at that point could scarcely even be called human. The freshly exposed bloody muscles glistened under the alcohol, like an oiled body builder stripped of his bronzed flesh. Moments later, the nerve-flaying pain caused him to either pass out or die.

The rather hackneyed term “sheer, unadulterated horror” was the most apt way to describe the look on the blond woman’s mortified face.

“So much fer him, huh, sweetie?” Tucker remarked. “Don’t’cha worry none. What we’re gonna do ta you won’t hurt near as much as that.” He paused in what seemed an appropriate gesture of effect. “But it’s shore as hail’s gonna be a lot more fun!”

Gut and Clyde stepped apart, and between emerged Horace, grinning as he raised a power drill fitted with a 3-inch hole-saw. By now, the “sheer, unadulterated horror” was corrupting the perceptions of the blond woman with one deflated breast. She began to hear in cosmic echoes (human chortling and the revving of the power drill which sounded more like a jet engine) and see through a warped, grainy ocular veil that shifted and prolapsed, and what she saw, or thought she saw was this: the shapes of those mammoth, chuckling identical quadruplets rubbing their crotches and then stepping out of their overalls, while the wobbling voice of one of them said, “Let ’er rip, Gut,” and another, “Open this here tramp’s coconut, ’cos I’se got me a big one ta dump in it,” and then two hands that felt large as baseball gloves clamped the sides of her head, locked her face forward, and through that veil of impending death via depravity, the 15,000 rpm hole-saw began eating a circle into her forehead…

CHAPTER ONE

It could’ve been a Travel Channel film clip augmenting a show about the breathtaking natural beauty of the wilds of that great country called America: an endless chisel-sharp sweep of pristine mountains, rolling hills, and forests that were shockingly green. It was the acme of summer in the Great Outdoors, and it was through this stunning vista that the shiny BMW SUV soared.

The only thing more out of place than the $80,000 loaded-to-the-max luxury vehicle were its occupants: three 30ish men with upscale cosmopolitan good looks: Brice Parks, his older brother Augie, and Clark Silber. These men were success personified, confidence incarnate, and silver-spoon-born, and they all possessed a subtle “prickish” air that seemed to drift about them like the expensive cologne they all wore. Rolexes decorated their wrists (real ones, not knock-offs), and given the quality of their salon tans, one might peg them for Palm Springers rather than Manhattanites. Even their casual t-shirts, sneakers, and faded jeans were actually high-price designer wear from preposterous 5th Avenue clothiers because, well, they wouldn’t be caught dead in anything without a “label.” What would their peers think? When these men wanted a hamburger they did not go to McDonald’s for a $3.00 Big Mac, they went to DB Bistro Moderne for a $150 Kobe beef double truffle. Clark wore an obnoxious gold chain around his neck as though he fancied himself a major-league pitcher. Brice wore a just-as-obnoxious diamond pinkie ring.

It was Brice behind the wheel, while all of them marveled at the spectacular scenery. He said, “I guess we’ve officially arrived at the boondocks.”

“Yes sir!” Augie exclaimed, riding shotgun. “Exit Manhattan, enter the land of redneck hosebags, moonshine, and rube strippers!”

“Eee-ha,” Brice muttered with a bent of the sarcastic.

Clark, leaning up from the back seat, inquired, “Hey, Augie, why’s your brother so uncool with this road trip?”

Augie scoffed. “Aw, he’s still boo-hooing about Marcie dumping him—”

“I am not!” Brice insisted in a not very credible manner.

“Brice, relax,” Clark offered. “Wanna know the truth? Augie and I envy you. At least you weren’t stupid enough to marry your gold-digging, big-tit bitch.”

Augie slapped Brice on the back with a laugh. “Yeah, buddy bro! You’re off the hook, but me and Clark’ll be paying alimony till we fuckin’ croak.”

Brice’s lack of enthusiasm could not have been more plain. “Oh, yeah, that makes me feel much better. And Marcie was not a gold-digger.”

“Just keep telling yourself that, bro. She’d stop to put out an armored car before she would a burning school bus.”

Brice frowned at Augie.

“Come on, shake it off, Brice” Clark said. “We’ve all been burned by women—it’s part of life. All this natural beauty will get your mind off it—”

Augie laughed, crassly as always. “Yeah, natural beauty and a piece of ass from a backwoods whore!”

Brice maintained his sullenness but Clark, who seemed taken aback, pointed out the window. “Hey, guys. How’s that for some natural beauty?” Brice and Augie looked on with astonishment at the stunning tree-topped mountain. Such breath-taking vistas had an effect of awesome appreciation, even to rich, spoiled, wise-aching elitists as Augie, Clark, and Brice. Silence filled the BMW’s interior as more natural wonders streamed past them in the window. Sights like these really caused one to realize his or her insignificance when juxtaposed to the immeasurable splendor of the world, and it made Brice, in particular, question his own cynicism as well as his Ivy League denial of spirituality. It made him wonder where it all came from. “Wow,” he murmured. “I’ve never seen anything like that except in National Geographic.”

It was Augie who ruined the moment of self-reflection, which was usually the case. He slapped Brice on the back hard, laughing. “The only mountains I remember from National Geographic were the tits of those tribal women. They had bones through their noses and about forty rings around their necks.”

Clark chuckled at this.

“Trust me, Augie. There was more to National Geographic than nudity.”

“Well, buddy bro, I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like Krazy Sallee’s, either.”

“That’s the strip joint supposedly full of all these backwoods whores, huh?” Clark asked.

“Yeah, Clark, and there’s no supposedly about it. I have it first-hand, these chicks are all tens in looks and zeros in morality. Now that’s my kind of gal!”

Brice’s frown returned in full force. “I think all this backwoods whore stuff is a crock. I’ll bet your Wall Street pal Gurgler was pulling your leg—”

“Gurgler?” Clark echoed.

“Yeah, man. Rich Gurgler, friend of mine who works the exchange floor. He told me about this place in—”

Clark winced. “His name’s Gurgler? First name Rich, as in Richard? Shit, I hope nobody calls him Dick.”

“Plenty of people do,” Augie laughed. “He came here last year to go fishing with some SEC analysts. Said it was the best time of his life.”

Brice doubted it. “Right now, he’s having the best laugh of his life, Augie. It’s a wild goose chase. We’re 10 hours out of New York looking for some hick burg that’s not even on Google Maps.”

“So many negative vibes, man! Buddy bro, out in the boonies a lot of the towns aren’t even incorporated. They’re, like, fuckin’ redneck tribal villages or some shit. It’s America’s third world.”

“Yeah,” Clark added, “and a lot of the ‘residents aren’t even in the census; their families have been here for hundreds of years. They’re one step up from squatters. They probably still have one-room schoolhouses, though I bet half those kids never go to them.”

“Listen to the good doctor. And trust me, if Gurgler says it’s here, it’s here.”

“Yeah. Gurgler,” Brice said with no confidence whatsoever. “We’re driving hundreds of miles on the say-so of a guy named Dick Gurgler. You know”—Brice paused—”I wouldn’t be surprised if you made the whole thing up. No one is named Dick Gurgler. Did you happen to get some restaurant recommendations from Jack Hoff?”

Augie laughed. “You’re all fucked up, Brice, and that’s why I’m proud to have you for a brother. And quit worrying. Gurgler said this place is between Luntville and Crick City—”

Now Brice laughed. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of those towns!”

“—and they are on the map.”

Brice just kept shaking his head. “Augie, we’re never gonna get to this strip joint ’cos it doesn’t exist, for shit’s sake. I’ll bet a c-note it doesn’t…”

««—»»

Brice sighed as he opened his Balenciaga wallet and transferred a $100 bill from it to Augie’s hand.

“I love taking money from you,” Augie chided. “It’s better than taking candy from a welfare baby! And now maybe you’ve learned your lesson: doubteth not the wisdom of thy elder brother.”

“Yeah, and the sage prophet known as Dick Gurgler,” Brice said and put his wallet away. “Go blow yourself.”

“Spoken like a true sport!” Augie turned to the two-story pile of an edifice before them; he extended his hand in a gesture of revelation. “And I say unto thee: behold! Krazy Sallee’s!”

The three men stood before the dilapidated wood-plank building, and it was not awe with which they appraised the place so much as astonishment. “I guess they don’t have safety codes and building inspectors in West Virginia,” Clark said.

“Or anyone who knows how to draw up a fucking blueprint,” Brice added. “This dump can’t be operational.”

Even Augie, in his forced enthusiasm, had some doubts that such a rickety old tavern could be allowed to serve the public. “Come on, guys, this is the boonies, not the Avenue of the Americas. Things are different down here, it’s a different way of life. People aren’t so fussy about how a place looks.”

Brice laughed. “Augie, the place looks like it’s about to fall down. It can’t possibly be open.”

Augie indicated the gaudy sign just under the peaked roof, which read: KRAZY SALLEES! GIRLS! COLD BEER! GIRLS! NO COVER, OPEN SIX TIL? surrounded by a neon border that buzzed a tacky flickering orange even in the broad daylight. “The sign’s on, which means they got electricity. If a place was shut down, that light wouldn’t be on.”

Brice added a pedantic criticism, “And they didn’t even spell Sallee’s right. The second S should have an apostrophe ’cos it’s possessive.”

“You are a nerd and a half, man.”

Clark chimed in, “It’s not exactly Scores, Augie. I mean, I’ve never seen a strip joint so…dumpy. It doesn’t even look safe. Remember when all those people burned to death at that concert because the club couldn’t handle all the pyrotechnics? I bet those guys wouldn’t even play here.”

Just then, a beer truck pulled up on the side, and in a few moments, a fat guy in coveralls wheeled a hand truck full of beer toward the front door. He paused to arm some sweat off his brow, shot the three New Yorkers a frown, then trundled his wares into the bar.

“There’s your answer, men,” Augie said with some relief. “Sure, the place looks like shit but they wouldn’t be getting a beer delivery if they weren’t in operation. Besides, I like the whole idea.”

“The whole what idea?” Brice asked him.

“This is a slice-of-life bumpkin whore bar, the real thing. No phony New York veneer, no cosmetic surgery queens with fuck-you faces. These girls will do anything for a few bucks, they’re down and dirty rednecks. Shit, their fuckin’ fathers taught ’em how to fuck. They were probably doing three-holers before they hung up their training bras!”

“Keep your voice down, man!” Brice whispered.

Across the street, several rustic old men sat in chairs in front of a general store. They were scowling.

Augie flapped a dismissive hand. “Aw, those old fucks didn’t hear me; they got potatoes in their ears ’cos they can’t afford Q-Tips. I’ll bet every one of ’em has a fucking food card and are on SSDI, haven’t worked jobs in fifty goddamn years. It’s zeros like that who suck the tax-payer’s tit flat, and when they can’t walk anymore they’ll be in Medicaid nursing homes, and we gotta pay for that too.”

Brice was shocked by his brother’s rather heartless exposition. “Jesus, Augie!”

Clark added, “And why are they looking at us like we’re the Taliban?”

“Territorialism, Clark,” Brice speculated. “To them, we’re the evils of the Big City tainting their honest, down-home town. Folk like that don’t take kindly to outsiders—especially outsiders in a brand-new 80k BMW.”

Augie smirked. “Listen to you with your folk. Shit, Brice, this town is dying. These people are so poor they shit in a hole in the ground and gotta use the corncob twice. By the time we’re finished dropping cash in this piss-pot, your folk’ll be kissing our rich, successful, seven-figure-per-year asses.”

An odd, drifting pause followed Augie’s rant—a pause which somehow seemed eerie. Above them, high atop the strip joint’s peaked roof, an exceedingly large crow fluttered its wings and squawked once.

All three men looked up.

“Hope that’s not an omen,” Clark said.

Brice fidgeted in place. “Come on, let get moving. Sallee’s doesn’t open for hours. We need to find a motel.”

“Hell yeah!” Augie said a bit loudly.

They got in the SUV but as Brice steered away, his eyes held momentarily on the group of old men across the street. Their crevice-faced grimaces looked like carved masks, but then one of them suddenly grinned and winked, right at Brice.

Brice drove off as quickly as he could.

««—»»

Krazy Sallee’s was an indefensible dump, but the motel a block away made it look like the Taj Mahal. It was a three-story mansion circa 1910, whose roof actually sagged inward, and a few higher-level windows were boarded over with plywood. Of exterior paint that may have once covered the ancient edifice, there was now no vestige. A sign out front read: DUE DROP IN: ROOMS - $29

“Jeez! They spelled ‘inn’ wrong!” Brice observed. “Wrong ‘due,’ too.”

“Turn off your Nerd Mode, will ya?” Augie said.

“What a shit-hole,” Clark put in his two cents. “It looks like the fuckin’ Munsters’ place.”

“It’s in worse repair than the strip joint,” Brice added. “This has got to violate every building code on the books. Another special from their own personal Frank Lloyd Wright, I’d be willing to bet.”

Augie just shook his head. “Listen to you snobs. What, you can’t stay in a place that’s not the Helmsly Suites?” His footsteps creaked over the porch planking as they approached the entrance. “We’re trying something new, what’s wrong with that? And besides, I’ll bet there’s a hot-as-shit chick working the front desk.”

“Bet you my hundred bucks back that you’re wrong.”

Augie pointed at him. “You’re on, buddy bro. You know, I’ll almost feel bad putting you two hundred in the hole before you even nail your piece at Sallee’s. Maybe I’ll put a fuck on the desk chick to cheer myself up, ’cos she’s going to be F, I, N, E, fine.”

She wasn’t. The woman working the front desk was late ’60s, fat, and all of five feet tall. She had her hair up in a bun, and her b.o. was made even worse by the cheap perfume she attempted to cover it with. She sported a top cut low enough to show off a depressingly modest cleavage, which looked to be smeared with some kind of black grime.

“You’re in luck, Augie,” Brice murmured as they approached the desk. “I don’t see a wedding ring.”

“Goddamn!” He slapped the hundred-dollar bill in Brice’s outstretched palm. “Choke on it.”

“Why, what a wonderful surprise!” the woman behind the desk exclaimed. “City fellas! We get ’em passin’ through fairly reg’lar. Let me guess…” She brought a finger to her chin. “New York City!”

“Good guess, ma’am,” Augie addressed her, a little glumly. “We just drove down, figured we’d stay a week or so. It’s a…beautiful town you’ve got here.”

The woman howled laughter. “No need ta be polite, son. Our town’s a redneck shit-pit’n you know it. Bet’cha someone tolt ya ’bout Krazy Sallee’s, huh?”

Augie had to grin. “Oh, no, ma’am, we heard there was a fabulous library here— oh, oh!—and the fine arts museum!”

The lady howled more laughter, slapping the counter. The outburst went on long enough for the situation to become uncomfortable. For fuck’s sake, Brice thought. The lady sounds like a hyena.

“Son,” she said as Augie signed them all in, “you got yerself enough shit ta fill a horse trough, and I like that! Cain’t fool me—you boys come here ta git’cher willies waxed Southern style. So’s just you all have a dandy time! And ta show ya how much we appreciate ya staying with us, I’ll give ya our presidential suite at no extra charge!”

After mounting two flights of stairs, Brice, Augie, and Clark soon found themselves standing in the open doorway of their accommodations. Augie grinned in an almost childlike thrill, while Brice and Clark simply stood slack-jawed.

“Presidential suite?” Brice questioned.

“Yeah, if you’re the president of fucking Chad,” Clark replied.

“Don’t be fussbudgets!” Augie criticized. “This is the change from the city we needed. Slice of life, boys! A dump like this? It’s refreshing.”

Brice’s face lengthened from his frown. “Refreshing? The room smells like piss, Augie.”

“Quit bitching. This’ll be a blast!”

Brice’s eyes took in the “suite.” Handprints smudged the peeling wallpaper, suspicious stains blotched a carpet that looked half a century old. Two smaller rooms branched off from the main, both cramped, dirty bedrooms with sagging beds. Duct tape covered several cracks in the windows, and, of all things, one of the few uncracked panes was smudged by lips prints that Brice hoped were from lipstick and not blood. Clark looked appalled into a waste can full of Ice House beer bottles, fast food bags, empty Skoal tins, and multitudinous empty condom packets.

In the left bedroom, Augie grinned out the window, then laid down on the bed with his fingers laced behind his head, testing the squeaky springs. “I’m laying claim to this room, guys.”

But Brice and Clark barely heard him in their stupefaction. They were eyeing (with some trepidation) the atrocious pull-out couch in the main room. The crackly upholstery appeared to be knife-slashed.

“Let’s give the maids a little credit,” Brice said. “At least they managed to pull up all the crime scene tape.”

Clark proposed, “Let’s flip. Loser gets this-this-this…thing that might’ve been a couch back when Eisenhower was in office.”

Brice pulled out a quarter. “Sounds fair enough,” and he flipped the coin. “Call it, doctor.”

“Heads.”

Brice caught the coin, then slowly opened his palm. Please, please, please, he begged the fates. But the flip came up heads. “Lucky me,” he muttered.

As Clark meandered into the second bedroom (if one could actually call it a bedroom), Brice grimaced as he pulled open the sleeper couch. He thought of all the urban legends where dead bodies were stashed under beds or inside the mattresses of hotel beds, and wouldn’t have been surprised if all those stories got started here at the “Due Drop In.” He caught a minor break when he didn’t find a dismembered body, but he immediately lurched back anyway, first from the foul trashy odor that wafted up—a dirty-laundry smell blended with a tinge like garbage in the sun—and second from the detailed vision his eyes now beheld of several used prophylactics. “Oh, for shit’s sake!” he yelled.

Augie strolled back into the room. “What’s wrong, Brice?”

“What’s wrong? Oh, nothing much—just a bunch of used rubbers in my bed!”

“Aw, forget it,” Augie dismissed. “Like Uncle Stewie used to tell us when we were kids, a little nut never hurt anyone.”

The words locked Brice in place; his mouth dropped open. “Uncle Stewie said that?”

Augie smirked and rolled his eyes. “It’s a joke, Brice. Jeez.”

Brice was close to the limitations of his tolerance. Perhaps it was some unconscious, self-depreciating impulse that triggered his next move, as he bent down, grimacing, and pulled up the flimsy mattress’s corner. “Oh-oh my—What is…” and a moment later, betwixt the tip of his thumb and the tip of his index finger, he raised an age-yellowed rubber glove with one brown finger. He gave Augie a mute look of horror.

“Would you relax? It’s probably just the maid’s.”

“Oh, right, and I guess it was the maid who just decided to finger her asshole in our ‘presidential suite?”

“Try it on. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Brice shuddered. “No way, Augie! This is beyond the pale.”

“Yeah,” Clark agreed, coming back into the room with a very queasy look. “The dead roaches on my floor sound like potato chips when you walk on ’em, and my bed’s making scratching noises—”

“Cool! So is mine!” Augie exclaimed.

“They’re probably bed bugs or some other nocturnal parasite. We could get Chagas disease, man, or trypanosome disorder.”

“If we’re lucky,” Brice muttered.

Augie frowned the comment away. “Good. Then our stuck-up Manhattan blood’ll kill the little fuckers. We’ll be doing the joint a favor.”

“You’re not hearing us,” Brice raised his voice. “This motel is unacceptable. The place would send a hazmat team heading for the hills. It’s filthy, it stinks. There are so many handprints on the walls you’d think this was the fuckin’ Blair Witch Project. Shit, I’ll bet people have died on that couch. Forget it. We’ll have to find another motel.”

Augie’s shoulders slumped. “There aren’t any other motels; that’s what Gurgler told me. This is the only game in town.”

“Dick Gurgler. Great. I guess he’s our travel agent now.”

“Listen, fellas,” Augie said. “So what if the place is a shit-hole? Think of it as an adventure! I want something different on this trip!”

“Well, this is certainly different,” Clark pointed out. “I’ll bet we all get staph infections.”

Again, Brice muttered, “If we’re lucky.”

“How about this? I’ll slip a hundred bucks to Aunt Bee downstairs and tell her to get the place cleaned up. We’re here to party. We’re here to be out of New York. Now, let’s split, grab a bite, and then get ready to pound some white trash pussy!”

“Aw, fuck,” Clark sputtered. “What the hell.”

Brice sighed in resignation. “All right. Shit, I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this. Let me get my mace.”

“What do you need that for?” Augie asked, as if the notion were absurd.

“In case someone tries to mug us, genius.”

Augie laughed. “Don’t be a wussy. This is Petticoat Junction, man, not the fuckin’ Bronx. There’s no crime here…”

CHAPTER TWO

The grave took awhile to dig, even for two big strong young men like Horace and Guts. (Digging graves is a lot harder than one would think, nothing like in the movies!) It was an appropriate time and place for such a thing, however—a wonderful, atmosphere drenched cliché: deep in the midst of the woods, crickets chirping and birds cawing. There was an occasional hoot of a distant owl, and the branches of gnarled, primeval trees gave the impression of skeletal arms reaching out. So dense were these woods that even at five in the afternoon, it could have passed for evening. When Gut and Horace finished digging, they stood leaning on their shovels, huffing and wiping sweat off their brows with brawny fat forearms.

“Ready, Horace?” Gut inquired.

“Dang straight, brother,” Horace assented.

The hole was about two and a half feet deep (not the mythical six-feet so common in lore). It was hardly necessary to dig much past two and a half—in these dense woods? But the grave took twice as long to excavate than usual for this time they were digging for two.

The hole looked like a black sump in the soft forest ground; imaginative persons might envision a hellish abyss or some cryptic lair for a nameless monstrosity. The first body was that of the hapless drug dealer known as Triple M, minus nearly the entirety of his epidermis of course, which made for macabre vision in the shunted light.

FWAP! went the body when the pair of brothers tossed it into the grave. “So much for that fella,” Horace said.

“Yeah. Beddie-bye time.”

Gut hauled the grave’s next tenant closer to the hole: the just-as-hapless young blond woman. By now the corpse had been deprived of all of its apparel, and one with perhaps a deviant bent might try to envision what had been done to that pale but still-rather-attractive physique in the preceding hours. It hardly mattered in the long run but…it was merely an interesting conjecture. The most attention, however, had been paid to the three-inch-wide hole in the woman’s skull, an evil aperture in which pink-white brains could still be glimpsed.

Gut chuckled. “Yeah, we shore filled this ’un’s head up with nut.”

“We shore did, Gut! We shore did! Like the ole saying goes, who needs poon when ya can hump a head?”

FWAP! went the body when it was tossed beside the skinned drug dealer.

Again, the absolutely macabre vision presented itself: that of the woman’s pallid face, oddly lucent, uniquely agape in the suffix of this most unconscionable death.

Horace lifted a shovel-full of earth but just as he would empty it, Gut said, “Hold up there, bro,” and he stood at the side of the grave. The sound of a zipper going down could be heard, then, “Ahhhhhh…”

“What’cha doin’?” Horace asked the rather needless question.

“Takin’ a pee, what’s it look like?” The glittery stream of Gut’s urine cascaded onto the blond woman’s face, making her appalled expression appear almost reactive and understandably more appalled. Gut chuckled, “Got to have out with the old beer ta make room fer the new!” The stream was manipulated down the woman’s face, then down her breasts (one deflated, one still standing out grandly), then the pubis. In a few moment’s time the aghast corpse shined like oil. Eventually, Gut directed his seemingly endless urinary flow back to the woman’s face, filling her mouth. “And I shore’s shit cain’t think of better place fer me to pee than right smack-dab in this here drug-whore’s pie hole, huh?”

Horace watched in a sort of forlorn fascination. “Looks kind’a, well, kind’a fun.”

Gut glanced over. “You mean ta tell me you ain’t never peed on a dead gal before? Dang, brother, you need ta get out more. Step right up!”

Horace paused, shrugged, then deposed himself to follow his brother’s example. There was really no reason to decline the invitation. It made for a curious sight: the agape mouth of a nude, one-breasted dead woman being urinated into in the middle of the woods by two huge men who looked exactly alike.

Soon they both zipped up, filled the grave back up with earth, and high-fived. “All in a night’s work!” Horace remarked.

“Dang straight, brother,” Gut replied. “I kinda wish we’d thought ta try ta fill up that skag’s titty, though, back’t the way it was.”

“Hell, you shoulda said somethin’ ‘fore now, Gut. I bet we coulda blowed that thing up big as a watermelon! It woulda sloshed around like a water balloon.”

“Yeah, but we got a more important sloshed to worry about now—it’s Miller Time!”

Both mammoth men lumbered away, whooping, but as they did so, and quite unbeknownst to them, a figure emerged from the brush some minutes later; the figure of a man, a short spindly man with longish unkempt hair, five-o’clock shadow, with his left earlobe missing.

He froze in place just at the foot of the grave, listening.

Eventually the receding footfalls of the brothers abated, then a pair of car doors were heard thunking closed off in the distance. An engine started and then the sound trailed off as it drove away.

Safe now, thought the spindly figure.

He lowered to his knees and immediately began to dig out earth with his bare hands. The process wasn’t a difficult one, for the two brothers hadn’t even tamped the earth back down once the grave had been refilled. It didn’t take long before…

“Damn,” the man muttered. “I knew it…”

The grave wasn’t at all deep. He’d uncovered the corpse of the blond woman to the waist, and then canted her body upward as if to deliberately inspect her head.

Dirty hands brushed away more dirt and urine-generated mud, until the figure could make out details of the 3-inch hole in the skull.

“I knew it,” he repeated under his breath. “Another header,” and with that acknowledgment, he unbuckled his pants, and…

Well, what he did after that needn’t be described.

««—»»

The diner defined the colloquialism “Greasy Spoon”: ‘50s-style tables (probably not intended as a throwback, so much as that was just what they had), a raised counter, the sounds of cooks arguing in the back. Portly waitresses cruised back and forth between tables, their hair in buns and their faces over-make-upped. Augie and Clark both sat content in one of the window booths whose upholstery was a tacky bright red. Brice was absent for the moment, in the men’s room.

“So what’s with your brother?” Clark asked. “He seems to be all tensed up. He’s not still busted up over Marcie, is he? That was a while ago.”

Augie was inspecting the fake mosaic pattern of the table top. “It’s not just Marcie dumping him, it’s the screw-job move the bitch pulled after that. Hard stuff.”

“What do you mean? What screw-job?”

Augie nodded. “Marcie left him right after he lost the Bryson account. That was a half-mil-per-year retainer. I always told him she was a gold-digger. Now he’s learned the hard way.”

“Brice is a sharp lawyer, too sharp to fall apart because of one account. Shit happens.”

“Yeah, but the kick in the ass was who Marcie left him for. Derrick Hathoway—”

Clark acted shocked. “What! I thought they were both—”

“Yep,” Augie finished for him. “They were best friends since Harvard. And wouldn’t you know it? Hathoway’s the guy who landed the Bryson account. The minute that bitch found out Hathoway got the gig, Brice was history.”

“Wow, that is hard. Not one but two knives in the back.”

“Yeah, but he’s gotta wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, look at you and me; we both got the shaft from gold-digging bitches but we’re not boo-hooing about it. There’s treachery in all our professions. I’ve been back-stabbed by other brokers, and I’m sure you’ve lost patients to other doctors. We can’t just fold over every hard knock. Brice needs to snap out of it.”

Suddenly Clark took an impatient glance over his shoulder. “Speaking of Brice, where the hell is he?”

Augie chuckled. “Yeah, he seems to be taking an awful long time to piss. Hope he’s not back there sobbing.”

««—»»

Brice felt weighed down by some unplaceable lethargy; he was absolutely dejected in the cramped and none-too-fragrant diner men’s room. After washing his hands he took out his iPhone, without even being consciously aware, and found himself thumbing through the snapshots of his photo gallery. The first photo showed Brice smiling alongside his friend Derrick Hathoway, both in their graduation caps at Harvard. Looking at that photo now made him feel a hundred miles away, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. The next photo, however, was worse: Brice next to a stunning, busty blonde whose facial beauty beamed like a beacon of light. They were arm in arm, both emblazoned in an aura of love.

This, of course, was Marcie.

The thought croaked in his head like a voice anyone’s but his own: I need to delete that picture…just like she deleted me…

Just before a tear would come to his eye, he gulped, gritted his teeth, and shoved the iPhone back into his pocket. He deleted nothing.

Brice wended his way through the diner, which was full of noisy chatter and amicable hayseeds. Several times he nearly bumped into other patrons, until he caught himself and focused. His ruminations about Marcie, Derrick Hathoway, etc., weren’t letting go of him. Get your shit together, he demanded of himself. Don’t ruin everyone else’s time just because you can’t get over a shitty relationship. Eventually he made it back to the booth and sat down. “Why do I have this feeling you guys were talking about me?”

Augie waved dismissively. “Don’t be so self-absorbed, bro. You’re not that important; it’s not all about you. You act like you think you’re the center of the universe. Well guess what? You’re not.” Then he paused, blurted a laugh, and slapped Brice on the shoulder. “Just kidding, buddy. And if you wanna know the truth, we were talking about you.”

“Just try to tune him out, Brice,” Clark said. “It works for me.”

“Clark wishes he could be as cool and witty as me.” Augie looked back at his menu. “So what are we having, guys?”

“The funnel cakes sound good,” Clark said. “And, wow, muskrat casserole! That might be interesting.

“Might be, might not be.” Brice winced at the menu. “Cattail waffles, chicken livers, chitterlings? No way. Oh, and look how they spelled early bird: b-u-r-d. Can you believe that?”

“What a tube steak,” Augie said.

“I believe the word is pedant,” Clark appended. “One who points out the errors of others to aggrandize himself and belittle others.”

“Aggrandize this,” Brice replied, pointing to his crotch.

Augie bulled in, “Come on, kids. Enough grab ass. Let’s order… Oh, cool! Barbecued deer ribs!”

“This is mortifying,” Brice went on about the menu. “Last night I had braised pheasant tenders in mustard-sorrel sauce at the Four Seasons, and now…this.”

Augie took on a scolding tone. “Brice. We’re in redneck land—”

“Keep your voice down!”

“Nobody heard me, Mr. Paranoia, and when we’re in redneck land, we eat redneck—the finest cuisine they’ve managed to scrape off the highway. Christ, you’re still crying ’cos there’s no Starbucks. Now, I’m having the chicken-fried steak. What about you, Brice?

“I’m not hungry.”

“We’ll be drinking tonight, man,” Clark advised. “Get some food in your stomach first. It’ll forestall excess alcohol absorption through the lining of your duodenum.”

“Thanks for the technical tidbit, doc,” Brice said. “Look, I’m just not hungry.”

“Always the life of the party,” Augie sputtered, then he looked back and forth impatiently. “So who does Brice have to sue to get some service in this greasy spoon?”

Just as the complaint left his lips, a broad shadow loomed across the table. Brice, Augie, and Clark looked up to see a large, pot-bellied man in an out-of-date white short-sleeve dress shirt, faded slacks, and suspenders. He was in his sixties, with a red nose, and a ubiquitous buzzcut. His expression was totally deadpan.

“Howdy, fellas. Name’s Eamon Martin. Just wanna welcome yawl ta our humble town. I’se what’cha might call the mayor ‘round here.”

Brice, Augie, and Clark rose to shake hands. “Good to meet you, sir,” Augie said. “This is my brother Brice, he’s an attorney; Clark’s a bigtime doctor, and I’m Augie, I’m in finance. We’re from—”

The man’s drawl seemed to crackle with authority. “New York City, so’s I heard. We get city fellas come through ever so often, mostly young, sharp, squared-away fellas like you, comin’ ta have a good time.”

“That’s what we’re here for, sir, a good time in your humble town.”

“And we want visitors ta have a good time,” Eamon clarified. “The only thing we don’t want is no hippie pot-smokers’n druggers and what not. That shit we don’t tolerate, no sir. Dat shit’s fuckin’ ever-thang up, it is, ruinin’ the whole country. And the blammed goverment don’t do doody squat about it, lettin’ hardcore druggers out’a prison on good behavior, and it seems like ever dang day another state in this fine union makes pot legal, if that ain’t a kick in the face’a law-abidin’ citizens.”

“We couldn’t agree with you more, major,” Clark said.

“Eamon, son, call me Eamon. But anyways, I can tell by lookin’ at you boys, yawl ain’t inta none’a that.”

“Oh, no, sir,” Augie assured. We’re just looking to have a few beers and maybe—”

Eamon’s expression remained utterly deadpan. “And maybe gander some tits’n box over at Sallee’s, then drop some sap.”

Brice, Augie, and Clark stared in astonishment.

Do we have some gaudy neon sign like the one over at Sallee’s announcing our intentions? Brice wondered.

Eamon didn’t miss a beat. “Our titty bar’s got a repper-tayshun, boys, and word gits ‘round. We gots gals that blow them citified chicks up north right out the blammed water. Home grown, mind ya. No fuckin’ implants, none’a this leeposuction nonsense. Our gals is real, boys, and they’se even got hair ‘tween their gams, none’a this silly shaved shit like the city or waxin’ or whatever they’se call it.”

Brice and Clark remained slack-jawed, but Augie’s enthusiasm couldn’t be retrained. “Sir, I love your town! You’re speaking our language!”

Eamon thumbed his suspenders. “Our gals is true Southern, boys. They don’t fuss and priss about and stick their pinkies out drinkin’ pink champagne, and I can tell ya one more thing, they don’t whine when ya put one in ’er rear. They’se say it’s good luck for citymen ta get some good Southern shit on their sticks.”

The disquisition left Brice, Augie, and Clark speechless, as Eamon turned toward the diner counter and snapped his fingers. “Let’s git some service over here fer our New York City friends,” his voice trumpeted. Then he turned back to the table. “Have fun, boys. Thanks fer stopping by our town.”

“Thank you, sir,” Augie replied.

“Oh, and just one tad of advice. Don’t go over ta Backtown. Nothin’ but trouble there.”

“Backtown? What’s Backtown, sir?” Augie asked.

But Eamon had already moseyed away to talk to other diners in various booths farther down.

Brice, Augie, and Clark looked at each other in bewilderment.

Eventually Augie whispered fiercely, “Was that priceless, or what? Holy shit!”

“Never thought I’d hear a mayor advise tourists to ‘drop some sap,’” Clark added.

“And I loved that ‘shit-on-his-stick’ line!

But Brice seemed sullen. “Not exactly a typical weekend getaway for three Harvard grads with seven-figure salaries.”

“But what was that place he mentioned?” “Augie posed. “Backtown? I wonder what the hell that is. If things get that wild at Sallee’s, Backtown must be like fucking Bangkok or something. I bet that—”

All conversation ceased when a waitress came to the table. When she opened her mouth to speak, more than a few missing teeth were well apparent. “Hi, fellas! I’m Ida’n I’se pleased as punch ta be yer waitress!”

“That’s great, Ida. It’s wonderful to meet you,” but then he cut to the question at hand as directly as possible. “We were hoping you could tell you something, please.”

“Anything, sweetie. Just don’t ask me about my sex life ’cos it just might be more’n you can handle,” and then the ripped out a cackling laugh.

Augie laughed along, however speciously. “What’s Backtown?”

Ida’s reverie abated abruptly as an ax blade slamming into a stump. “Backtown? Never heard of it.” She cleared her throat. “Now, are you handsome boys ready to order?”

“Yes, Ida. I think so,” Clark said, addressing his menu.

“And since yawl are in redneck land—” Ida winked right at Augie, “—I do hope ya wanna eat redneck…”

CHAPTER THREE

Dutch was his name, and slinging gak was his game (“slinging gak” meaning that he was involved in the esteemed enterprise of purveying crystal methamphetamine to the drug-addicted public). This synthetic controlled substance went by many street names beyond the aforementioned “gak”: ish, hillbilly crack, tinkerbell, christy, glass, ice, quartz, swogle-filler; but it was all the same to Dutch: money. He could either work like the rest of the world or sell gak. Work was hard, this was easy…or usually easy because today he hadn’t sold squat. Too deep in the sticks, he supposed, scanning the dirt-paved parking lot. He sold lots of product in the bigger towns like Waynseville, Crick City, Russellton, but most people had never even heard of Luntville. He’d heard some things too (not-cool things) that suggested this area was no safe environ in which to sell hard drugs, but this only amped up Dutch’s. He liked challenges; however, this challenge was starting to look like a loser.

The punk tapped an ash off his 305 Menthol, not much caring where it landed and then dissipated on the hood of his car, make and model not discernible unless “Piece Of Shit On Wheels” could be thought of as a designation. He was waiting in the parking lot of some dive bar. By the time it had just started to get dark, they’d been in this ass-crack town for six hours (“they” being him and his squeeze, Beezy). It seemed odd that no one had so much as looked at them, much less shown any interest in scoring. Junkies in Crick City ran up to him like little kids chasing the ice cream truck, but Dutch’s sales total for the day so far was zero.

Just then a redneck in a pickup truck pulled in, parked, and loped into the bar through the back door. He cast Dutch nary a glance.

Fuck you, you redneck fuck. What the hell’s wrong with you people? It was almost as though he was being deliberately avoided, but that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Ridiculous and impossible. He and Beezy had never been in this town before except for a few drive-throughs. Nobody could possibly know who they were.

The car hood indented as Dutch sat upon it. He looked at his watch. Waste of time, he thought, frowning. Unless Beezy’s copping some decent tricks, we need to blow this Gomer Pyle shit pit.

Then, as if in answer to his ire, advancing footsteps were crunching the gravel in a gait that told him it was Beezy. Eventually the trashy yet attractive woman emerged from sooty darkness into the annoying glare of the parking lot light.

“Well?” Dutch queried. Please tell me you been slingin’ and suckin’ for the last two hours.”

“Fuck,” she said, hands on hips. “Got one trick, one blowjob, and that’s it. Some farmer-looking motherfucker.”

“How much he pay?”

Her smirk looked as one who’d just sipped lumpy milk. “A piss-ant ten bucks.”

“Cheap fuck! Did he want any meth?”

“Nope. Says he don’t do that shit. Says no one does here.”

This was not cool. Dutch had a point crew to pay two days from now in Pulaski. The last guy who’d asked for an extension from these charming dudes had gotten one ball crushed with flat-tongs, and they stuck sewing needles in the other one, lots of sewing needles so that his remaining family jewel looked like a sci-fi porcupine. Not the sort of people you wanted to tell Sorry, but I don’t have your money today, unless you were just that curious about how many needles someone could jab in your nut before you passed out.

Sputtering, Dutch flicked his butt and watched the fireball explode spectacularly against the bar wall.

“Gimme a swogle, Dutch,” Beezy asked, getting a little fidgety. “I gotta fire up.”

Dutch grimaced at her. “You shouldn’t be doing any of that shit. You see what it does to our customers. For fuck’s sake, Beezy. Before long you’ll lose your looks, then you won’t be able to do shit.”

“I’ll never lose my looks,” she whispered, then leaned into the car, found a pipe, and started hitting it.

Shit head… Dutch had no choice but to visually survey her rump as she was bent over. How she kept that buxom hourglass figure as a gak-head, he’d never know. Good genes, he guessed. She looked just like that brunette bombshell who got fired from that dancing show, Brooke Something-or-other, but of course Brooke Something-or-other didn’t have speed lines on her face, nor was her teeth turning gray and falling out on a regular basis. But in the not too distant future, as much as he liked having her for squeeze, he knew she’d eventually turn into a flesh-covered skeleton with implants, and he’d be slitting her throat and dumping her body just like the last couple.

“Yeah,” she said when she sprang back up. “Fuckin’ good ice you sell!”

He just shook his head now that she was wired. “I haven’t sold anything today, remember. We gotta split, try somewhere else.”

“Fine with me,” Beezy acknowledged, twitching. “Something about this place gives me the creeps anyway. But I keep hearing about this place nearby, Backtown. Let’s find that. It’s a big trailer park or something. I’ll bet you sell fifty Fat Bags and I’ll suck fifty hillbilly dicks! We’ll rake in some dough.”

But it was that one word—Backtown—that stalled Dutch’s thoughts. “I’ve heard about Backtown too, like, dealers have disappeared there.”

“Disappeared? For real?”

“Yeah. You know the gig. We gotta be careful who we sell to ‘round here. This ain’t Pulaski; lotta these poo-putt Gomer Pyle rednecks hate dope dealers.”

But Beezy seemed intrigued, her reality-killing gak high making her more brainless than ever. “I like the mystery! Let’s go! You really think dealers have disappeared there?”

“I know they have,” Dutch said. He was getting pissed. But she always did get off on an element of danger. “Remember Clint Filcher? Said he was going to sling product in Backtown and that was the last we saw him. Cops found him in his car pushed off Governor’s Bridge Road. Fucker’s pants were pulled down and his cock and balls chewed clean off. Not cut off, chewed off.”

Beezy’s dilated eyes went wide. “Chewed off? By what, an animal?”

“No one knows,” Dutch said. “But I don’t know many animals that close car doors.”

Beezy shuddered, but then—

More footsteps could be heard on the gravelly dirt, and inaudible male talk. Two hulking figures seemed to materialize in the glaring lot lights.

“Here comes fresh meat,” Beezy whispered. “And look at the size of ’em! They’re huge!”

Dutch squinted through disbelief. Yes, they were huge, all right, but they were also…identical twins?

“Hey, guys. How goes it?” Dutch chuckled, trying to make a joke. “Gee, I guess you guys might be brothers.”

“That we is, fella,” one said. “And we’se doin’ all right, I suppose.”

Well, these guys didn’t look like druggers, but they didn’t exactly look gay, either. He lowered his voice. “Look, this here’s my girl, Beezy. She’ll suck a mean one, and for less than those rip-off bitches at Sallee’s. Only twenty bucks. Beezy, give the boys a peek uptown.”

The twins were already eyeing Beezy, and then she struck a slutty pose and flashed her bare breasts.

“Damn!” the brothers said simultaneously.

“Yeah, damn,” Dutch remarked. “If there’s a better set of tits in the entire great state of West Virginia, I’ve sure as shit never seen ’em. This girl will do things to your junk you never dreamed possible. She’ll swallow your junk like a garbage disposal. And you both can even have a go at downtown, and for only thirty bucks each, or, what the hell? Fifty for the both of you,” and with this offer, Beezy cut a vulpine grin and flashed a perfectly hair-free pubis.

The second brother shook his head, impressed. “That’s a cooter like ta make me do a Rebel Yell but, see, we just done drained our peckers already in a right cute li’l blondie.”

“Yeah,” the other one agreed, snorting. “Yeah! Just the cutest thang!”

“What we’se lookin’ fer, see,” the first one said, leaning over to keep his voice down, “is some kick, ya know?”

“Some kick, huh?” Dutch said.

“Yeah, man. And we gotta horse-choke wad’a cash too. You got any coke, any meth?”

Cha-CHING! Dutch thought. Looks like I read these goobers wrong. I LOVE IT when I’m wrong. He curled his index finger, inviting the dude in between his car and another. “I got Fat Bags, Little Boys, shit, I got mongo meth. Shit keep ya flyin’ fer two days, and it’s only twenty a pop.”

“Shee-it, yeah! We’ll take all you got, brother,” and then the gigantic redneck reached for his wallet. Dutch was smiling like a ten-year-old having his first gander at a Hustler, but when he glanced over the guy’s shoulder, the smile vanished and his eyes went wide. Fuck! A shakedown!

The other brother had already slapped duct tape over Beezy’s mouth, and was mauling her breasts and lifting her off her feet at the same time. Dutch reached for his shank but in the space of a second, a loop of rope came around his neck from behind and then he too was being held aloft. In his consternation, he was able to see that a third man had been the one who’d roped his neck—a third man who looked identical to the other two.

This was as well-synchronized as a Brazilian mob abduction. Dutch’s vision dimmed as a van pulled up from nowhere, stopped, and the side door slid open. Grinning over his shoulder from the driver’s seat was a fourth man who looked just like the others.

Tape was mechanically slapped across Dutch’s mouth too. He and Beezy were tossed into the van. The door slammed shut, and the van pulled off.

The last thing Dutch heard before losing conscious was this: four identical voices simultaneously hollering the same thing…

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee-HA!”

««—»»

“Partyin’ heaven at quarter of seven!” Augie’s voice trumpeted when the next round of drinks arrived, for that’s what the time was now, and after only opening its doors forty-five minutes ago, Krazy Sallee’s was more than living up to the first half of its name. “Pandemonium” might be the best word to accurately describe the interior environment of the establishment, for this was indeed one loud, rowdy, redneck strip joint. Flashing lights throbbed ceaselessly about the stage and seating area; music was pounding; and then there were the patrons…

This was a class of society that, to the likes of Brice, Augie, and Clark, would seem as far removed from their own class as the Third World. Rednecks, rednecks, and more rednecks, all guffawing, rebel yelling, slamming beers, and raising blue collar, unrefined, hard-drinking Hell in general.

But this is not an assessment of southern demographics.

The establishment’s most salient features were, of course, the dancers, and here they cavorted in grand (and predatory) style. Those who were not showing off their wares on the multiple dance floors were sashaying next to nude amongst the customers; each and every woman easily ranked at least an eight on the Male Sexist Pig ratings chart. At least a dozen such women were apparent, teasing the unruly audience before their own times came to hit the dance floor.

Pole dancers, entirely naked, spun with expertise or climbed upside-down up said poles. One curvaceous blonde stood butt-to-crown with legs widely parted, then slowly leaned forward, bowed her spine, and with not much effort successfully brought the tip of her tongue to the bottom of her vagina. This achievement incited applause akin to when Colonel Edward White became the first American to walk in space. Other such demonstrations of dexterity were performed as well, involving lit cigars, tennis balls, and balloons, which would hardly be necessary to describe.

Clark, the esteemed Upper West Side physician, sat up front and currently had the back of his head resting against the edge of the dance floor, while yet another nimble gentlewoman plucked five-dollar bills from his mouth—mind you, without using her hands. Along the back wall were a row of eager, slovenly rednecks sitting in fold-down chairs, each with still more topless and g-stringed strippers doing their lap-dance thing (evidently, this was the “budget” section), while higher rollers arm-in-arm with the cream of the dancing crop disappeared through beaded curtains: the “V.I.P.” section. Augie, however (likely the highest roller now in attendance), remained quite content at the table with Brice, “motor-boating” the prodigiously breasted blonde who sat facing him in his lap. “Let’s see how long ya kin hold yer breath, sugar!” she shrilled and closed her massive bosom around his face.

Augie held his breath for a commendable amount of time.

Brice was the odd man out, however. He scarcely noticed the blonde, or any of the dancers, really. He appeared deaf to the thundering music, and blind to the array of erotic festivities ensuing about him. Instead, he sat depressed at the table, nursing a beer. Every man in the place, it seemed, was having a good time…every man but him.

He was glumly peering at the photo gallery on his smart phone. Why don’t I delete all these? he asked himself for the hundredth time. He could never calculate an answer, save for the evident possibility that he was an unknowing masochist. The snapshots, of course, were all of Marcie: Marcie sunning herself at the Hamptons in a killer bikini, Marcie all decked out in her ski outfit the time they went to the Ellicotville slopes on the one-year anniversary of their first date; Marcie in a diaphanous black evening dress at the Christmas party Brice’s firm threw—she was blowing the camera lens a kiss. Lastly, Marcie curling her finger at him, in the bedroom, dressed in her $700 Guia La Bruna bra and panties.

Brice had deleted most of the pix of she and him together, though.

Get over it, you wuss, he told himself. You got used and dumped, like lots of guys. Be a man and get over it.

Easier said than done when his own friend jammed the knife in his back. Back in college, one of Derrick’s ex-girlfriends made a play for Brice and he turned her down. She had been beautiful and intelligent, but he chose loyalty to his friend, because that’s what you were supposed to do. Yet Derrick swooped in to take the Bryson account from him, and worse yet, Marcie. And all he had were these pictures of her and some guy who looked like him, but was way too happy, too trusting.

He put the phone away in a daze, looking around at the hot hayseed strippers, barmaids flashing their breasts, and naked strippers spinning like tops on the ubiquitous brass poles. This sucks, he thought but when he leaned over to ask Augie when they might be leaving, his face was still completely submerged in the blonde’s awesome cleavage. And Clark was still feeding bills to the stage girls via his mouth.

Doesn’t look like they’re gonna want to leave any time soon.

Brice, in his glum fugue state, nearly jumped in his seat at the sound of the waitress’s lilting southern accent. “Wow, hon, didn’t mean to startle ya!”

Brice released a long breath. What’s WRONG with me? Only now did he notice the young woman, a late-20’s blonde with girl-next-door good looks, and an overall attractive vibe that didn’t suit a rowdy strip joint. Off the top of his head, Brice would’ve guessed she worked here only because more respectable jobs weren’t available. “Sorry,” he finally replied. “I’m kind of out of it today.”

Her eyelashes fluttered. Her blue eyes were so dark they looked like sapphire. “I guess this really ain’t your kinda place. To tell you the truth, it ain’t mine either. Ready fer another beer?”

“No. Yeah. Uh, I don’t know…”

“Now that’s what I call makin’ a decision!”

Brice laughed genuinely for the first time in a while. “Sure, I’ll take another, thanks. I’d ask my brother there if he wants another drink but, as you can see, he’s not really capable of answering questions right now.”

The waitress chuckled when she glimpsed Augie, whose head was still half-devoured by his companion’s bosom. “I’ll bring him another anyway; I have a feelin’ he’s gonna need it when Junie’s through with him.” She leaned a little closer to Brice. “You must be one’a the New York City fellas, huh?”

“Yep. Word travels fast.”

“In this one-horse town? You bet it does,” but then her gaze took on an edge of concern. “You feelin’ under the weather. Ya look like you’re not havin’ the best time.”

“I—”

“None’a the ladies ta yer likin’?

Brice’s sensibilities seemed to drift off in multiple directions; he’d barely heard her, and was barely cognizant of his answer. “The ladies are beautiful. It’s just that…I guess strip joints have lost their charm for me by now. I’d much rather have a drink with you somewhere else, when you’re off work.”

The girl smiled more brightly than ever. “I hate this place too, just work here as a side job. And, dang, I don’t get off till two, then I got somethin’ else ta do.”

At once Brice felt like a perfect ass. “Sure, I understand. And I’m sorry. I guess every guy who walks in here asks you out.”

“Pretty much. But so far the only one I’d wanna go out with is you.”

A mild shock gave Brice a nudge. “Oh, cool. But didn’t you just say you had something—”

“Gotta stop by my grandma’s tonight, get her medications straight. But I’m off at ten tomorrow. We can do somethin’ then if’n ya want.”

Brice had to shake out of disbelief when he realized she’d accepted his offer. “My name’s Brice, by the way.”

“I’m Sarah May, and I’ll be right back.” Her down-home smile turned with her as she spun round and departed for the bar. Brice sat in a warm daze. How do you like that? I just got a date…with a redneck waitress.

At that moment a gasp resounded, and Augie’s face was finally separated from the blond stripper’s monumental cleavage. “I think you just set the record, sugar!” she exclaimed. Augie nodded, still huffing; he tipped her a fifty and off she went.

“Thought you’d never come up for air,” Brice remarked. “You should take up snorkling.”

Augie wore a dizzy grin. “It was like being eaten…by tits. Ah, but I see you’re still sitting there like a bump on a log. Have you even gotten a lap dance yet? Quit moping!” but his depreciation dissolved when the waitress returned with their drinks. Augie became all eyes.

Sarah May plunked Augie’s drink down without a word, then gave Brice his beer. “There ya go, Brice.”

“Thanks. Sarah May, this is Augie.”

Augie was at his leering, immature best. “Ah-OOO-gah! A beautiful name for a beautiful woman!”

Sarah May smirked. “Hon, that line and a buck won’t even get’cha a happy-hour draft in this place.”

Augie deflected the slight. “So, Mary May—”

“It’s Sarah May, like I said,” then she leaned closer to Brice. “Your buddy here don’t listen, does he?”

“Sarah May,”Augie corrected. “Sorry. So. When can you and I go grab a lap dance?”

“I just wait tables, fella. Don’t do none’a that lap-dancin’. But if I did, it ain’t likely I’d do one with you.” Back to Brice, she half-whispered, “’S’shame yer buddy here’s such a butthole.”

Brice laughed. “Actually he’s my brother, and he’s got an excuse. He’s a stockbroker.”

“Yeah,” Augie added. “I gamble with people’s retirement accounts!” and then he swallowed half his drink in one pull.

Brice shook his head. “Say, Sarah May, let me ask you something. What or where is Backtown?”

The very word, Backtown, seemed to throw Sarah May into a controlled state of alarm; at once, she was distraught. “Oh, Brice, please don’t’cha be goin’ there. It’s a bad place, mostly just a bunch’a creekers’n, alkies and cock-fightin’n dirty stuff. The place ain’t nothin’ but trouble, so please don’t go. Full of nothin’ but redneck bad-asses.”

Augie barged in, no surprise. “We can take care of ourselves, sweetheart.”

“No,” she declared and grimaced at him. “You can’t. Not in Backtown. Don’t care how big’n strong ya are—and, mind ya, you don’t look that big’n strong, sweetheart—but them rubes in Backtown are bigger’n stronger. Last summer, couple of pro football players stop here on account they heard about Sallee’s, but then those big dopes got wind of Backtown, and I told ’em, just like I’m tellin’ you, I told ’em not to go cuz they surely get more’n they bargained for, and them boys just laughed and went anyways, and—”

Augie barged in again, with his usual clunker wit. “And let me guess! They were never seen again!”

“Oh, they were seen again that same night down at Doc Houghton’s all-night clinic, with black eyes, busted lips, and broke teeth. Those big stoops got their asses up’n kicked. Them Backtown boys sent ’em packin’. They drove out’a here in their fancy hot rods, cryin’ for their mommies.”

“I’ll bet they were with the Patriots!” Augie said and guffawed.

Brice took her arm. “Ignore him, Sarah May. We appreciate the tip, and I can tell you, one place we won’t be going is Backtown.”

She bought a hand to her chest in a gesture of relief. “Thank you,” she said. “I got more tables now, sweetie, but I’m sure lookin’ forward to seein’ ya tomorrow fer our date.”

“Believe me, I’m looking forward to it too.”

Sarah May gave him a peck on the cheek, then whisked off with her drink tray.

Augie slapped Brice’s back, hard. “Why, you old dog, you! All this time I thought you were over here moping about Marcie but you’re actually putting moves on the hottest chick in the bar! How’d you get a date with her?”

Brice shrugged. “I asked. And before you get any ideas…I don’t think she’s a hooker, and she’s definitely not your type. She’s too nice for you.”

Augie nodded contemplatively. “Yeah, you’re right. Nice girls don’t dig me.” Then he perked up. “But I wonder what she meant by the ‘dirty stuff’ in Backtown.”

“Don’t know, don’t care, and we won’t find out because we’re not going. We’re outsiders here. We’d be morons to put our noses where they don’t belong.” Then he looked around, distracted. “Where’s Clark?”

Augie laughed, pointing to the main stage. “He just paid a c-note for a three-girl floor-dance.”

Brice frowned at the spectacle. Just now Clark lay prone on the edge of the dance floor while three naked strippers slithered all over him. Redneck applause rained down.

“He’s definitely in his element.”

“All those breast exams get him hornier than a jackal,” Augie said.

Brice excused himself for the men’s room. The trek forced him to wend through the crowded bar and politely fend off strippers asking for dances. One girl rubbed his crotch, another grabbed him and tongue kissed him, but Brice pulled away. He just wasn’t in the mood. When he finally pushed into the men’s room, he was grateful for the reduced volume of pounding music. But the quiet was short-lived. Suddenly, a male voice boomed from one of the stalls, “Ooo, hail-yeah, baby! That’s the dang best mouth-fuck I ever had! You could out-suck a fuckin’ milkin’ machine, you could!”

Brice heard a female giggle in response, then the stall door open and out limped a generic redneck fastening his belt. He was followed by a barely dressed redhead stripper, who grinned, popped her dentures back in, and compressed her breasts for effect. “Hey, babe. I’ll suck yer doo-dads right out’cher blammed pee-hole!”

“Uh, no thanks,” Brice said. “I gotta drive.”

She frowned and stalked out right behind her previous client. Brice smiled, bemused, at his surroundings: wood-plank walls, rubber machines on the wall, and a smell worse than most gas station bathrooms. While urinating, his eyes had no choice but to scan the various graffiti on the smudged wall, mostly hand-scrawled phone numbers and less-than-erudite remarks such as NEED A BLOW? CALL UP JOE! and CODY DRUCKER SUK HIS DOG’S DICK! and DRINK BEER, PEE BEER and WHAT’CHOO LOOKIN HERE FOR? THE JOKE’S IN YER DADDY’S HAND!

But Brice’s gaze was arrested by the next graffito: a crude hand-scrawled sketch in black magic marker. A male stick-figure stood with an obvious erection, while a female figure lay prone as if levitating. She had circles for breasts, dots for nipples, squiggles for pubic hair. Her eyes bulged and her tongue stuck out. But the male figure…

Brice squinted as if the drawing might be illusion.

The male stick-figure appeared to have its erection half-buried in the crown of the female’s head. Below was penned: LINETTE KYLER DESERVS A HEADER!

Brice’s eyes narrowed at the sight. Crude and amateurish as the sketch clearly was, he found the after-image deeply disturbing.

The door banged open behind him, sending a jolt up his spine.

Standing before him was another preposterously well-endowed stripper. She wore dime-sized pasties over half-dollar-sized nipples, and a g-string about the size of a Dortito. She snapped gum and cocked a hip. “Hey, City Man, how’se about I hook my mouth right up ta yer nozzle’n swaller yer business? Twenty bucks. I’ll spit shine yer fuckstick so good, you’ll see yer own reflection in it!”

By now Brice was annoyed, even though he shouldn’t be; after all, he was in a backwoods strip joint. However, her intrusion had grated his nerves. He’d been contemplating the bizarre graffito and its disturbing overtones.

“No, thanks,” he replied rather gruffly. “I’m, uh, I’m on leave from divinity school…” and then he squeezed by her out of the ramshackle john.

At once he was re-swallowed by raucous clamor and headache-inducing music. But when he’d shouldered his way back to the table, he found it empty. Sarah May walked by with a tray of beers; she winked at him.

“If you’re lookin’ fer yer buddies…” She finished by pointing to the stage

Augie and Clark were both lying on the stage as no fewer than six gorgeous strippers crawled all over them. The crowd was roaring.

Brice rolled his eyes. “What else can you expect from Harvard grads, huh? Look, I’ll be right back, I’m going outside for some fresh air.”

Sarah May’s smile beamed. “Don’t forget our date tomorrow!”

Brice could’ve laughed. “Sarah May, no force on earth could make me forget that.”

She shuffled away, shot one more smile over her shoulder, and disappeared into the crowd. Brice found the door, nodded to a bouncer, then stepped outside.

The inexplicable disgruntlement followed him out. Perhaps he was just tired. He muddled around outside the bar, glancing errantly at the crowded parking lot. A low moon hung over the treeline. Crickets trilled en masse.

A date with Sarah May. His elation at the prospect faltered slightly as he tried to imagine how they’d fill up a whole evening with conversation. Small talk in a cacophonous bar was one thing, but how well would he really relate to someone who didn’t have the advantages and upbringing he did? They might hit it off, but it wasn’t like he’d start driving ten hours to Hicktown every weekend to see her. Anyone back in the real world would die laughing at the idea, Marcie especially. It was a charming distraction, but surely a dead end.

Next thing Brice knew he was eyeing more snapshots of Marcie on his smart phone. He didn’t even remember taking it out of his pocket. It was like he thought the right picture at the right moment would allow him to travel back to that moment and do everything all over again. Keep the Bryson account, keep Marcie, spare himself all the moping and depression.

“Hey, fella. What’s goin’ on?”

Half-alarmed, Brice looked up and saw the long-haired, tacky redneck standing before him. The guy seemed amiable enough.

“Not much. Just kind of loud inside.”

“Aw, yeah, man, Sallee’s is one rockin’ joint, and the gals?” The long-haired man whistled. “I ain’t never seen so many gals that great-lookin’ all in one place.”

“Yeah, they are pretty hot.”

Now the man shuffled his feet, ran a hand over some serious five o’clock shadow. He seemed suddenly awkward. “Look, friend, I ain’t no bum’re nothin’ but I just lost my job at the farm co-op, the damn economy, ya know? Now, I got me another job part-time warshin’ dishes at the ‘Roads but I don’t get paid till tomorrow. Could you hit me with a buck-fifty just so’s I can go in and get a draft?”

Brice had to push his sentience past the pervading dreary thought. “Yeah, sure,” he muttered, found a ten in his pocket, and gave it to the guy.

“Man! Thanks! You city fellas rock! Look I’ll pay ya back, serious.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brice told him. The guy seemed genuinely down on his luck. “But let me ask you something. What’s the deal with this Backtown place? What is it, a bar?”

The man reacted as if surprised. “No, man, it’s a park—a trailer park. Gotta bad rep but it ain’t all that bad. Craps, cock-fightin’, cards—other stuff too, ya know? The gals ain’t as good-lookin’ as here but they’ll do anythin’, fer cheaper. “

“Oh, I get it.”

“But if ya go, don’t fuck around with no drugs’re nothin’. They ain’t into it. Don’t ask for nothin’ like that, not even weed. Serious.”

“We don’t do drugs. Never have, never will.”

But now the man flashed grin. “But they got dynamite ‘shine!”

“Shine?”

“Moonshine, man! Panther piss! Shit’ll grow hair on the bottom’a yer fuckin’ feet, man!”

Brice smiled. “I think I’ll stay in my element and stick to Bud Light.” At that instant, however, the bizarre bathroom graffito came to mind. “But let me ask you something else. I just saw something weird. It said something about…a header?”

The man stalled. “Where, uh, where’d you hear that?”

“Inside, in the john. It was just some graffiti. Don’t know why but it kind of bothered me. What exactly is it?”

The man made a hesitant expression. “Aw, a header’s just…it’s just this thing. A local…hell, I don’t even know what to call it.”

“Like a local legend? A backwoods myth?”

“Naw, well, it ain’t no myth neither. It’s a thing folks do ta get back at other folks who done ’em wrong.”

Brice looked in disbelief. “Come on. If somebody does you wrong, you…fuck their head?”

“Don’t believe it if ya don’t want. Probably best that way anyhow. But do yerself a favor—don’t ask no one else ’bout that stuff. Town like Luntville likes to keep its dirty laundry in the hamper, if ya know what I mean.”

Brice remained perplexed; what’s more he remained in an indefensible state of curiosity. “You can’t be serious, man. I know this is the boondocks but—”

“I can tell ya don’t believe it, and there ain’t no reason ya should,” but then the man made a downcast smile. He lowered his voice. “Saw one git planted just today— dope dealer. If you really wanna know, I can prove it to ya, but it’s risky. I’d need ya ta lay a hundred on me.”

Now Brice frowned. It had to be a con. “You’re pulling my leg. Forget it, man.”

“S’right. And like I just said, it’s probably best ya do just that—forget it. My name’s Stoody, by the way, and thanks for the ten-spot. I’ll get’cha back.”

“Name’s Brice. Take care.”

Brice watched him disappear through the front door. Stoody, he thought. Yes, his tale sounded unbelievable but then Brice asked himself, Why on earth would he make something like that up? He asked for a hundred bucks but when I said no, he dropped it cold. The whole thing just sounded uncanny.

Brice shrugged and went back into the bar.

If anything, it was louder now, and more rowdy. His ears were ringing when he got back to the table, where Augie and Clark—now back from their shenanigans on the stage—had reseated themselves. Brice plopped down and immediately complained, “Hey, guys, this place is too loud, and to-to—”

“Redneck?” Clark said behind a tipsy grin.

“Well, yeah.”

“Glad you said that,” Augie commented. “Clark and I were thinking maybe we should split.”

“I’m all for that!” Brice explained.

“Yeah, bro. And you can come back tomorrow for your hot date with Sarah June—”

“Sarah May.”

“Whatever.”

Brice started to get up. “Gimme a minute. I’m gonna say goodnight to her, then we’ll head back to the motel, have a couple more beers, and check ball scores.”

“No, no, Brice,” Clark informed. “We meant we wanna go somewhere else. After all, it is our vacation.”

Augie added, “Yeah, man, this place got old fast. We want something really down and dirty, ya know?”

Brice was flabbergasted. He gestured around the entire premises. “This looks pretty down and dirty to me. We’ve got spittoons full to the brim, strippers sitting on guys’ faces. I got offered two blow jobs just trying to go to the bathroom.”

Clark snickered. “Were the guys not cute enough for you?

Brice flipped him off. “They were women, asshole. You could trip over a chair in this joint and end up in an orgy. What more could you possibly want?”

Augie was resolute. “We wanna go to Backtown.”

“Yeah, Brice,” Clark chimed in. “Couple of the dancers just gave us the scoop. According to them, Backtown makes this place look like Romper Room.”

Brice winced. “Come on, it’s just a bunch of cock-fights, moonshine, and weathered whores!”

Augie grinned. “Cool! I’ve always wanted to try some real backwoods corn liquor!”

“And they’ve got card games out the yin-yang,” Clark continued. “I haven’t had a good poker fix in a while.”

“You and your damn poker…”

Augie nudged his brother. “Come on, Brice. Like I said, I want down and dirty, I want something different—”

“Cock fighting?” Brice said, mouth agape.

“Sure! Anything, man! Anything we can’t see in fuckin’ Manhattan. I’m so sick of Scores, the Mayflower cocktail lounge, and the Vault. I want action.”

Clark leaned in, “Let’s give it a shot, Brice. If it sucks, we’ll leave.”

Brice sputtered. He knew this was a losing battle. “Shit, all right. I can’t believe you guys. We’re pig-shit rich professionals from New York who graduated with honors from Harvard, and now we’re going to see cock-fights, for God’s sake.”

“Yeah!” Augie celebrated, and high-fived Clark.

Brice got up. “Meet me outside. I’ll pay up and say good night to—”

“Mary July?”

“Funny.” Brice had to squeeze through a phalanx of patrons milling about. When he finally made it to the bar, Sarah May was waiting on drinks from the barkeep.

“Sarah May? We’ve got to leave, but it’s been a pleasure.”

She turned with a beaming smile. “Don’t forget about our—”

He winked. “Tomorrow night, at ten,” and then he handed her a $100 bill. “Keep the change.”

Her eyes widened, then she gave him a fervent kiss on the mouth. “Thank you so much, Brice! You got no idea how much that’ll help me!”

“Have a good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He smiled and waved a final time, then headed down the bar toward the exit. What a beautiful, wonderful woman, he mused, his prior pessimism momentarily forgotten; he felt in a glittery fog.

But the pleasant contemplation snapped like a matchstick when something on the bar top caught his eye. He stopped in his tracks, bent over and looked down close.

Immediately, his brow furrowed.

What the HELL?

On the bar top, someone had knife-scratched a crude drawing into the wood: a male stick figure inserting its penis into the head of a female stick figure.

CHAPTER FOUR

Full dark had arrived, and with it, a growing sense of disapproval in Brice. He drove while Augie rode shotgun and Clark sat in back. Augie and Clark were well on their way to drunkenness, laughing about the antics back at the strip joint as they swilled more beer. Jeez, these guys think they’re still freshmen in college, Brice thought as he took the SUV down a dark wooded road. A rind of moon followed them through gnarled trees.

“Yeah, Augie, Dad would be real proud,” Brice continued to voice his disfavor. “He spent a fortune sending us to Harvard, made us successful by providing us with opportunities almost no one else gets, and here we are: on our way to a trailer park to watch rednecks shoot craps and bet on cock-fights.”

Clark amended with excitement, “One of the ‘ho’s at the bar said they have dog-fighting, too!”

“Oh, even better! You guys just keep climbing the rungs…”

“Hey”, Augie jibed, “maybe my man Michael Vick’ll be there. Arm like a fuckin’ cannon, man.” But then he turned a stern glance to Brice. “And lemme tell you something, bro. Sure, Dad paid for Harvard, but he didn’t make us successful. We made ourselves successful, because we’re smart, and we’re motivated, and we’re simply better than the shitheels of the world.”

“Thank you, Friedrich Nietzsche. And the sad thing is, you believe that.”

Augie polished off his beer. “Damn right I do, Brice, because it’s true. All of us. We’re the cream of society’s crop, fellas, and everyone else…they’re the little people. You can’t tell me we couldn’t buy and sell these Luntville sister-fuckers a billion times over.”

Clark was slurring his words a bit now. He’d never been much of a drinker. “Amen to that! Fuck ’em. We work hard, so we can play hard.”

“Fine,” Brice resigned to it all. “You guys want to pick up whores, what was wrong with the whores in the bar we just left? Those girls were smokin’ hot.”

Augie shook his head in some mysterious abstraction. “Yeah, and they were too smokin’ hot, ya know? Only difference between them and the strippers in New York, is these girls have redneck accents. I want hookers that are different, man. Groaty, low-class, foul-mouths, and shitty tattoos.”

Brice had to belt out a laugh. “You have a shitty tattoo, Augie. So that means you’re low-class?”

“What?” Clark exclaimed. “You’re shitting me. Augie has a tattoo?”

“Show him, Augie,” Brice prodded, grinning. Show him, four-point-oh Harvard grad.”

“Hey, I’m proud of my tattoo,” and then he pulled up his Tommy Bahama shirt, revealing a sizable and detailed rending of a shark with jaws wide, maw crammed with countless jagged teeth.

“What the hell is that?” Clark asked, squinting over his glasses.

“It’s a shark for fuck’s sake! What’s it look like?”

“Why the hell would you have a shark tattooed on your chest?”

“Initiation for my brokerage,” Augie explained, admiring the work in the visor mirror. “All floor traders get one. It’s, like, the team insignia. You know, the shark tank, eat or be eaten?”

Brice laughed again.

“What are you hee-hawwing about, bro?” Augie turned back to Clark. “Get this. Last year Brice got drunk at the Amber and was gonna get a heart tattoo with Marcie’s name on it—”

“Shut up, Augie!”

“—but I talked him out of it.”

“You gotta be nuts to let some flunkie stranger stick ink-filled needles in your flesh. You can get all kinds of blood-borne diseases. Hep, HIV, tetanus, not to mention MRSA and staph.”

“Leave it to the good doctor to spoil the party,” Augie said. “It’s just self-expression.”

Clark was rubbing his hands together. “The only one I want to express myself to tonight is a redneck prostitute!”

“Oh, no diseases there!” Brice pointed out. “We’ll probably drive back to New York with your dick on ice in a cooler.”

“Yeah,” Augie said, his cynical self. “These ‘ho’s have had more cum go through ’em than a sperm bank. I’ll bet if you took all the spunk just one of these girls has douched out of herself, it’d be enough to fill a fuckin’ bathtub.”

Brice’s belly quivered. “A charming observation, Augie.”

Clark grinned and unfurled a ribbon of condoms. “My friend Mr. Trojan will take care of all such potential hazards.”

“You of all people should know rubbers won’t stop everything, doctor.”

Clark scoffed. “I’ll shoot my payload and do an emergency scrub down with some high-grade bacteria killer. Not that over-the-counter stuff for rubes.”

Augie laughed. “Sounds like you brought some douche to a gunfight.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Clark jammed a middle finger between the seats. “When your dick turns into a flamethrower, don’t come crying to me.”

Brice sighed. Relevant conversation now, he knew, was futile. When these two drank…they drank. “So how far is this place?”

“One of the hosebags told us it wasn’t much more than a mile,” Clark informed. “Then turn left on…”

“Tick Neck Road!” Augie blurted in glee. “Who needs Madison Avenue when you’ve got Tick Neck Road!” He slapped Brice on the back, a persistent and quite annoying habit. “I’ll tell ya, Brice. Down and dirty is what I need—”

“Yeah, yeah. You keep saying that, down and dirty—”

“I’m sick of fussy Upper West Side escorts and their phony smiles and their man-hating, money-grubbing ways. The bitches act like they’re doing us a favor by taking our cash.”

“Yeah,” Clark added, “and when you get right down to it, the action’s nothing to rave about.”

“Fuckin-A. But these jerkwater girls? Shit, they’ve been around the block times ten. They’ve had more dicks in their pussies than the Lincoln tunnel’s had cars.”

“And they’ve chugged more cock than I’ve chugged Heineken,” Clark finished the round of misogyny.

“Eloquently said, gentlemen,” Brice remarked. “You speak with the refinement of kings.”

Augie feigned a redneck accent: “I say I’se gonna dump me a great big sloppy fuck inta some stanky wat trash puss-aaaaaaaaah!

More laughter and high-fives from Augie and Clark. Brice just groaned and drove. It was looking like he was in store for a long night.

««—»»

An onlooker who might errantly glance into the Larkins’ barn would likely see the most macabre event of his or her life: Beezy the meth hooker lying on her back, on a sturdy wooden table, her mouth open, her eyes unblinking as they stared dead into the high ceiling. A brawny hand and wrist blocked her ear and the side of her top head; hence, any onlooker would not actually be able to see what was happening in detail. However, the steady PAP! PAP! PAP! sounds coinciding with the action of a brawny man’s hips bumping the top of Beezy’s head might eventually lead said onlooker to a most ghastly revelation after enough time had passed for the image to sink in. Much the way the thruster was sinking into Beezy’s mind. She may have departed this mortal coil, but she still had dick on the brain.

The “brawny man” was Horace Larkin, and he was currently engaged in a most uncommon manner of sexual intercourse. The humping action of his hips buffeting the top of Beezy’s head sped up, and so did the PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

A stout, authoritative voice rose up and said, “Git it, son. Give that noggin a good fuckin’ like the dirty bitch deserve.” This voice, by the way, belonged to one Eamon Martin, the mayor of Luntville.

“Yeah, Horace!” piped up Gut Larkin. “You go, guy! Whup her brain ta puddin’!”

“Hump it, boy!” Eamon added. “Don’t pussy foot with it—hump it!”

“Git yerself a big ole dick goober right up in ’nare!”

“Hump that head, boy!” Eamon cracked. “I say HUMP it!”

Horace, in the throes of imminent coital crisis, now gripped the sides of Beezy’s head hard as he could, to effect the most forceful thrust of his erection into her brain matter. His hips sped up, sped up, sped up…

Horace’s belly heaved before him as his back arched and his teeth ground. “Aw, shee-it! I’se almost, I say I’se almost there!”

Eamon nodded approval from the wedges of shadow in the barn, an approval like, say, that of a father rooting for his son in a little league baseball game. Eamon clapped a few times. “Fill her junkie-whore head up son! Let her know what a real man is.”

And Gut added, “Give ’er yer cock-cream, brother! Some good ole pecker-syrup!””

The moment seemed at hand. Horace stiffened, vibrated in place as his hips pounded onward. “Uh - uh - uh…aw, fuck, I think I’se…yeah boy! Ooo! Yes sir! I’se a comin’! I’se a comin’!”

In the “afterglow,” Horace’s 300-plus-pound frame nearly collapsed. The finishing thrusts slowed then stopped, just as did the jolting jiggles of the dead woman’s bare breasts. Eamon and Gut gave some finishing applause to the performance; Horace, with a gushing fat grin, pulled up his overalls.

“Way ta go, Horace!” said his brother. “That’s treatin’ a gal the way she wanna be treated!”

Eamon added, in his natural deadpan expression, “Yeah, real romantic-like and gentlemanly. Don’t’cha ferget to bring her some roses and a box of chocolates.”

Horace and Gut burst out laughing and popped open some beers.

Eamon shuffled to the table, pinched the dead girl’s cheeks, looked at her teeth, then gave her breasts a squeeze like a housewife testing melons in the grocery store. All poor Beezy could do now was stare upward, agape-mouthed and cross-eyed.

“Yeah, boys, I’d say we done pumped enough cum in this ’un’s head fer one night, huh?”

“Yes sir, Mayor!” Gut replied. “We shore did!”

“Won’t be no more drug-selling from her. Kids these days. They know right from wrong, but choose wrong ever time.” The mayor tsked. He grabbed a shank of Beezy’s hair, lifted her head up, and looked with calm curiosity into the three-inch-wide hole at the top of her cranium. “Tarnations, boys. I say this bitch’s brain looks just like the cheesecake Karla Croner sell ever Sunday at the street market.”

Horace took a peek. “Aw, yeah, Mayor. The cheese cake with them neat cherry swirls!”

“Um-hmm. Looks like it but I don’t reckon it taste like it,” then Eamon released her hair; her head fell back with a clump.

Gut and Horace roared more laughter.

The barn doors banged open, and in walked Tucker and Clyde, drinking beers and hamming it up.

“There they is,” Eamon addressed. “You boys find any more dope dealers out there?”

“No sir, we shore didn’t,” Tucker answered. “And it was high’n low we looked.”

Clyde, admiring Beezy’s nude corpse, said, “Wish we could find another one looks like this. Umm-mmmmm!”

“Hail of a body on this ‘un,” Tucker joined in on the appraisal, “and tits like ta make ya howl at the blammed moon.” Then he squeezed a lifeless breast. “Cain’t really reckon if she got them implants like that blondie splittail last time.”

“Didn’t much think on it,” Horace reflected. “A’course, only one way ta find out.”

“Yes sir!” Tucker whipped out his buck knife and, with no more deliberation than cutting a butter-slot in a big dinner roll, slid the razor-sharp blade through the left breast’s girth. There was no gush of saline, as was half expected, only a sluggish trickle of darkened blood.

“Natrull!” Tucker concluded.

Eamon nodded. “She’s still warm. You fellas can go ahead’n take a poke if’n ya like, or’se we got a fresh one over here, still kickin’,” and his hand gestured to another table on which lay one very bound, gagged, and shit-scared fellow named Dutch. He squirmed in his bonds.

“Aw, yeah,” Tucker recalled. “That swamp scum fucker we’se caught sellin’ the meth ‘hind Crossroads.”

“Yeah, boy,” Eamon said. “We wanted ta save him till yawl got back.”

Tucker cocked a brow and rubbed his crotch at the speculation. “Well, shee-it, Mayor. I’se had me a fine nut last night but I shore could go fer another.”

“Me’s too, Mayor,” Clyde chuckled. “My peter’s riled and fit ta spit, it is.”

“He don’t seem too bright ‘tween the ears anyhow, so I reckon we’d be doin’ him a favor spunkin’ up his brain fer him.”

“‘Nature does abhor a vacuum,’” Eamon noted sagely.

Horace projected, “But we’se gonna muss him up first, ain’t we, Mayor?”

“A’course, boy,” Eamon assured. “Cain’t let these low-lifes off easy. They need time ta think on what they done a’fore we send ’em on ta meet their Maker.”

Gut’s eyes lit up. “Want me ta raw-ball the bastard, sir?”

And Horace suggested, “Or’se how ’bout I run the rifle barrel brush down his pecker hole like we done ta that fella from Pulaski? Never heard a man scream like that, no sir!”

Eamon contemplated options, stroking his chin as if he had a Van Dyke. “Naw, don’t seem to me that that’s festive enough.”

“Festive?” Tucker questioned.

“I want this fella jumpin’. Don’t like his face, I guess.” Eamon turned to Gut. “You got anything in the traps?

“Yeah I do, Mayor. Caught a possum couple days ago. Was savin’ him fer kabobin’ on the grill.”

“So it ain’t et in a couple days?”

“No sir. Wanted ta git some fat off it so’s the meat ain’t too marbled. You know how greasy that possum fat can be.”

Eamon nodded, and said with finality, “Fetch the critter.”

Horace grinned. “Box job, Mayor?”

“Yep. Get it. It’s time we done kicked this night up a notch.”

Gut and Horace departed, to return moments later with Gut hefting a large cage trap of the type animal-control crews used to catch creatures the size of, say, large raccoons.

This trap, however, contained a fat, saw-toothed, two-foot-long possum. The animal did not look happy.

Horace brought in a big metal box with a sliding screen on top.

Tucker elucidated, “Dandy idea, Mayor. Box jobs always been one’a my favorites. Ask me? It’s kind’a, well, distincteriv.”

“That it is,” Eamon agreed. “And festive.” Then he pinched the cheek of Dutch, who remained shivering and gagged on the table. “Know what a box job is, boy?” Eamon waited for effect, even though the drug dealer could by no means answer the question. “No? Thought not. Well, be patient an’ we will enlighten ya…”

As if hosting a seminar, Horace held the box up, looking through the screen, then he angled the box over Dutch’s face so that he, too, could look through the screen. At the bottom of the metal box was a hole, roughly four inches in diameter. Horace was grinning into that hole in order that Dutch get a foreboding glimpse of Horace’s face.

“Peek-a-boo, I see you!” Horace enthused.

Dutch mewled through his gag.

Naturally, the question foremost on Dutch’s mind would be this: What’s that hole there for?

Eamon clapped his hands several times, the way a basketball coach might, to offer confidence to his team. “Git to it, boys. I just know yawl’ll make a dandy job of it. Let’s git this ’un done early so’s we can have us a few more beers.”

“You got it, Mayor!” one of the brothers said.

First, Tucker unbuckled Dutch’s jeans and pulled them down, and then pulled down Dutch’s briefs (which, interestingly enough, had prints of Sponge Bob on them). After this, Horace placed the metal box over Dutch’s groin.

And after this?

Both men reached into the box and began the task of pulling Dutch’s horror-shriveled genitals through the hole at the bottom of the box.

“Dick and nuts, boys. Dick and nuts,” Eamon urged.

Dutch’s eyes raged over the gag as Horace and Tucker continued to manipulate his genitals. Horace gave the shrinking penis a good stretch, to afford some length. Tucker caged both testicles in his fingers and pulled as if they were two persimmons in a small rubber bag. Both grinned at their duties, and neither batted an eye at handling another man’s genitals. Clearly, they had done this more than a few times in the past.

Eventually they both withdrew their hands.

Meanwhile, in the cage, the captive possum waddled desperate circles, hissing, and bearing its formidable sawblade-like teeth.

“In ya go, fella!” Gut said, and slid the wire door open, tilted the cage, and—
plop!

When the possum slid from the cage into the metal box, Clyde quickly slid the screen closed.

Somewhere a clock could be heard ticking faintly.

“The critter eatin’ yet?” Eamon asked

Tucker, Gut, Horace, and Clyde all glanced inquisitively into the box.

“Naw, Mayor,” Tucker answered. “He just snufflin’ around fer now.”

The possum’s feet were heard clicking on the box’s metal floor. The tempo and tenor of this sound was quite interesting, and slow, not frantic. It seemed, in some introspective sense, to denote speculation on the part of the enclosed animal. And then—

Dutch’s body bucked against his bonds, and his face twisted into a rictus of unspeakable, incomprehensible, and unfathomable agony. His shrieks through the gag sounded like a big dog trying to bark through a muzzle. Then Dutch’s bucking gravitated to outright convulsions.

And from the box, now, wet, deliberate eating sounds could be heard.

Tucker, Gut, Horace, and Clyde all howled in glee as Dutch’s body agonized on the table, his back arching, his heels and fists thumping, and all the while, of course, he continued to communicate his experience through soul-upheaving screams through the gag.

“That’s the spirit, son,” Eamon said, patting the drug dealer on the shoulder. “Bet that puts some spark in yer day, huh?”

“Hungry li’l bugger, I’ll say that,” Gut observed.

“He went fer the nuts first, Mayor!” exclaimed Horace.

Eamon nodded. “They usually do, boys, they usually do.”

The grim cornucopia of sight and sounds in that barn (the yellowish glow of dim, overhead bulbs; the four identical-looking brothers grinning delightedly down into the box; the bound, gagged, and convulsive Dutch on the table; and then simply the box itself) might best be described as maniacal or even satanic; and all of this was effectively augmented by the grating, machine-like eruptions from the captive’s throat.

“Atta boy, Mr. Possum!” Clyde cheered. “Eat up all’a his junk! Boner appetite!”

And Tucker: “’Tis a tad funny the way his nuts crunched whiles they’se were being et.”

“Dang straight!” said Horace. “And lookit how the critter’s teeth is goin’ through the fella’s dick like it’s a blammed hot dog!”

“Yeah, brother!” Gut added, “but a real little hot dog!” and then all four brothers exploded into laughter so raucous it completely obfuscated the drug-dealer’s lurching screams.

“Come on over’n take a look, Mayor,” Tucker invited. “You’re missin’ all the fun!”

“Naw, boys,” Eamon declined the offer. “I’se seen my share’a dicks get et. Believe you me.”

Finally, after an excruciating stretch of moments, Dutch’s screams ebbed away, and his body went limp.

“Looks like this drug-dealin’ trash either up’n died or passed out cold,” Tucker ventured.

“But we shore made his day!” Gut celebrated.

No more noises came from the box.

“The critter done yet?” Eamon asked.

Tucker nodded through a big grin. “He just lappin’ up blood now, Mayor.”

“No more meat left ta eat!” said Horace.

And Clyde: “I say he made short work’a this fella’s peter!”

“’Twas short work ta begin with!” Horace had to add, and then came more uproarious laughter.

When Gut finally took the box away, a ragged, bright-scarlet flesh-crater occupied the area of space that had formerly hosted Dutch’s genitals. Were one to glimpse the possum, however, the animal would be seen as sated, content, and with a very bloated belly.

“Get him back in the cage,” Eamon instructed. “Give him a couple days ta shit it all back out ’fore we get ’im on the grill. I don’t much take ta the idea of eatin’ possum meat that been nourished on a drug-dealer’s cock and balls.”

“Dang straight, Mayor,” Gut observed. “L’il fella’s breadbasket is full up.”

Gut carried the box out of the main sector of the barn. Tucker, meanwhile, rummaged through wooden shelves laden with tools. In no time, he grasped the well-used power drill fitted with a 3-inch hole-saw.

“Now, Mayor?”

Eamon thumbed his suspender straps. “Yeah, I reckon there ain’t no better time than the present.”

With nonchalance, Tucker revved the hole-saw, mashed his big hand down on Dutch’s face, and applied the saw to the middle of the top of the man’s head.

“There ya go!” Horace celebrated.

“Yeah, Tuck!” Clyde urged. “Open that piece’a shit’s coconut right up!”

“Remember,” Eamon instructed. “Don’t muscle it, son. Let the saw do the work, then ya get yerself a much finer cut.”

Amid the cataclysmic grinding sound, it was actually with finesse that Tucker let the saw-bit sink a millimeter at a time into the top of the captive’s skull. Some foul-smelling smoke rose from the action as the sound of steel sawteeth cutting through bone held steady. Eventually the revving sped up and changed pitch; Tucker released the drill’s trigger and pulled the bit out.

“Dead solid perfect,” Eamon approved.

When Tucker had removed the saw-bit, a perfect disc of scalp and bone came out with it. “That’s the ticket,” he said and gave his crotch a squeeze. “My dick’s dancin’, it is.”

Clyde gave his own crotch a similar squeeze. “Ya know, much as I like ganderin’ a nekit gal, I gotta say there’s sumpthin’ about watchin’ a head get hole-sawed that make me even hornier.”

“I hear ya,” Horace concurred. “I’se feel I could run at a heap’a cinderblocks with my dick out and bust plumb through!”

“Amen to that,” Eamon said.

“And lookit!” Gut exclaimed in a manner that was like rejoicing.

All the other men looked wide-eyed at Dutch’s body. The arms and legs minutely shivered. The man was not quite dead.

“Hot dog!” Horace enthused. “The drug-dealin’ little shit is still kickin’.”

“’Tis a rare treat,” Eamon intoned. “Don’t happen often but when it does, it’s like a blessin’. I think the word is tenacious.”

“What’s that, Mayor?” Clyde asked.

Tucker scratched his head. “Yeah, sir, I cain’t say I knows that fancy word.”

“Tenacious, boys. This fella here be proof as ta how tenacious the human body can be. One time I read how some fella workin’ construction fall off a four-story building and gots hisself impaled on a piece’a rebar. Mind you, it go in his asshole, cross his body, and come out his shoulder, and that motherfucker lived. Was fine’n dandy in a week, ‘n’fact. Same thing here, boys.” He patted the shivering man on the shoulder. “This fella done got his dick et off, then he get a hole cut out’a his skull, and he’s still alive. Yes, sir. That’s what we call tenacious.”

Tucker fell into thoughtful reminiscence. “Oh, yeah, Mayor. Couple years ago, when you was out on yer deer hunt, me’n Clyde was drivin’ back from Crick City and see this colored gal on the road with a flat tire. You ‘member this, Clyde?”

Clyde paused to take his mind back, and started at the recollection. “Yeah, yeah, that colored gal from Warshington Dee Cee with that fancy li’l foreign car. And tits?” He whistled. “Tits for miles.”

“Hail, yeah. A big-titter and a half this one was, Mayor,” Tucker went on with his tale. “Tits stickin’ out’a her fancy dress like to knock down a fuckin’ brick wall. But anyways we pull over an’ offer to help change her tire, and dang if’n it weren’t the strangest thing. Instead of sayin’ thank you, this feisty bitch pull a gun on us—”

“A gun you say?” Eamon asked, surprised.

“Yes, sir, a big ass revolver she pull, and then she start talkin’ real nasty and mouthin’ off ’bout how she heard all about us backwoods crackers’n how all we do is drink moonshine and rape women’n beat ’em up and whatnot, and sayin’ if we try any’a that with her she’ll show us what fer.”

Eamon’s brow furrowed. “Well I hope you boys didn’t call her no racial slurs. I know I teached ya better’n that. All folks is equal, whether they from the hills or the cities, or white or black or Injun or Chinaman.”

Tucker seemed aghast. “Aw, no way, Mayor, you know we ain’t like that one bit. Only folks we look down on are drug-dealers, theefs, and dumb blondes.”

“Good boys,” Eamon said. “So’s what happened then?”

“Like I was sayin’, she were waving that gun ’round, sayin’ she was gonna give us what fer—called us rednecks, too, if that don’t beat all—and yellin’ ’bout how she gonna fill us full’a holes. So’s we just shrug and tell her that ain’t no way to talk ta two fellas offerin’ ta help but if that be the way she feels, we’ll just be on our way, so me’n Clyde we just mosey on back to the truck.”

Clyde was getting riled (and squeezed his crotch a few times). “Yeah, Mayor, we done just like ya told us, don’t start nothin’ and there won’t be nothin’, and just ’cos she talk shitty ta us don’t mean we’se justerfied in pullin’ a ruckin’ on her. Ain’t nothin’ but words, ya know?”

“That’s right, boys. Punishment need ta fit the crime,” Eamon said.

“Yes, sir, that’s just what we was thinkin’,” Tucker went on, “but ‘fore we can even get back to the truck and leave, she start mouthin’ off again.”

Eamon chuckled. “Just like a city gal. Think they’re all superior-like just ’cos they’se from the city and hill folk ain’t nothin’ but a bunch’a bumpkins. High-falutin’ a lot of ’em is.”

“Well, this gal I’se talkin’ ’bout was high-falutin’, all right, and her talk get downright mean when we was walkin’ away, sayin’ we’se just a bunch’a fat dirty rubes probably cain’t count ta three, and how we ain’t fit ta pick the…Clyde? What she say?”

“She say we ain’t fit ta pick the pebbles out’a her tires,” the brother replied, “and we’se so dirty we could kill flies on a shit-pile by our stink.”

“Yeah, Mayor, and then—then she yell back at us just as we’re gettin’ in the truck, ‘Yeah, just like a cracker to run away, you pussies ain’t nothin’ but a bunch’a white trash hillbilly cowards!’ she say and then—then—”

“Then,” Clyde eagerly stepped in, “she up’n take the cake when she throw her head back’n laugh and say how our daddy must’a beat off in our mouth ever day when we was tots ’cuz he were so poor he couldn’t afford baby food, and then—then—”

Tucker’s expression darkened. “Then, sir, she say our mama suck dog dicks.”

“Boys, ya showed great restraint tryin’ to walk away from that,” Eamon said, arms crossed, “but when they start talkin’ ’bout your mama… All bets is off.”

“Yes, sir, after I start up the truck, I’se pop it in reverse and back right over that dirty mouth cooze.”

“I’ll bet that put a damper on her bad talk,” Eamon said with a rare smile.

“That it did, Mayor. Broke both her legs, it did. We throwed her in the back, then hook her fancy car up to the hitch and haul it to Drucky Dehenzel’s shop, then—ta make a long story short—we take her screamin’ to high Heaven into Drucky’s garage, and I don’t gotta tell ya that we three had ourselves one hell of a header, we did.”

“Yes sir!” Clyde hooted.

“We fuck that big-tit bitch’s head twice each, and then we’se have a few beers and spend the rest’a the day takin’ that car apart so’s Drucky can sell the pieces to his people in Huntington. And ya know what, Mayor?”

“Tell me, son.”

“At night fall we’re fixin’n ta bury the bitch’s body but—no! No, lie, Mayor. She were still alive. Runned over, legs broke, and head humped hell for leather by three horny fellas, and she was still twitchin’!”

“Tenacious,” Eamon said, impressed. “Gals often is even more so than dudes.”

Clyde was nearly out of control in the lusty recollection, rubbing his crotch now with vigor. “But that ain’t the hole story, Mayor. See, just as we’se marvelin’ ’bout how this city gal was still kickin’, the back door open and who walks in but Spud Kline.”

“Oh yeah,” Eamon acknowledged. “Tater Kline’s boy. Poor Tater, he die’a dick cancer years back when yawls were little, but ole Tater? Had the biggest dick in town, twelve inches and then some. That poor fucker could entertain the whole bar all night long with his dick. He’d git it hard and flip a quarter clear across the room, could flip beer mugs too, or pop a peanut in his mouth. Hell, he’d lay out on the damn bar with that foot-long boner stickin’ up straight as a flag pole, and all the gals’d play ring toss with funnel cakes. ’Course, them funnel cakes wasn’t et afterward.”

“Yeah, well, see, sir, his son, Spud Kline got a pecker on him probably longer—”

“’Tis fourteen inches,” Tucker informed. “They’re measurin’ it all the time. One time they’se held up a pipe wrench side by side and Spud’s was a head longer.”

Eamon whistled. “Now that’s a dick that means business.”

“It shore is, Mayor,” Clyde went on, “and he meant some business that night he walk in to Drucky’s. He look over’n see we been havin’ a header and just the sight of it make his giant dick hard as a rock. Could see it growin’ in his pants—”

“Thought it would bust out!” Tucker remarked.

“Damn near did, I say. So we tell him, ‘Go ahead’n tear yourself off a piece, Spud. She still alive,’ and Spud, he don’t say nothin’, he just drop his pants, grabs those big titties, and sinks his wood right in. Hail, even when he hit rock bottom, it look like his dick weren’t but halfway in. And he pound away on that city tramp and each time it go in, her feet kick up and her hands fly in the air, and Spud, even once he had his nut, she were still jerkin’ ‘round on the table.”

“’N’fact,” Tucker added, she didn’t up’n die till he pull his dick all the way out—”

“And, and!” Clyde couldn’t say fast enough, “I swear when he done so, it sound like a cork poppin, and then all that nut pour out’a her head like milk out a pitcher, yes, sir!”

“And the moral of the story, boys,” Eamon added a finish of wisdom, “ain’t only that our God-given bodies are tenacious but also that sometimes the most just way ta teach someone the error of their ways is?”

“The hard way,” all four brothers said in unison and broke into a round of laughter.

“Now git with it, boys,” Eamon cracked, and gestured to the still-quivering Dutch. Tucker bulled up first, pants already down, erection already bobbing, and—one, two, three—

Started humping away.

CHAPTER FIVE

“There it is!” Augie enthused, looking out the window. “My favorite road in the whole world!” The comment was made when Brice’s SUV passed a bent, bullet-dinged road sign, TICK NECK ROAD.

“Lets get ready to rumble!” Clark exclaimed.

The next sign they idled past read BACKTOWN PARK. Brice made no accommodating remarks when he pulled his $80,000 vehicle into an unpaved parking lot full of dented pick-ups and old, hubcapless cars. Members of the indigenous population—namely rednecks—meandered to and fro, some inebriated into stupors, some riled, others keen-eyed and focused for a night of down home entertainment. Hoots, hollers, and rebel yells resounded in the distance.

Minutes later, Brice, Augie, and Clark were walking down a dirt road lined on either side by dilapidated mobile homes. It was a neo-medieval scene: before many of the trailers, fires burned in metal drums over which rednecks cooked skinned squirrels on racks. Chattering, smudge-faced children in holey clothes scampered in all directions; bent-backed old women trudged along with sagging bags of groceries or buckets of well water. Dervishes of country music were aswirl, one song melting into the next so that only a mishmash of notes could be heard, and none of them intelligible, just a sustained wave of twang and plucking. Countless elderly people in wheelchairs stared outward from make-shift porches. Some tamped pipes, others clutched beer cans or jars of clear fluid in crabbed hands.

“Hey, Clark, look,” Augie said. “There’s your dad! Aren’t you gonna say hello?”

“Funny fella, your brother,” Clark said to Brice.

“Tell me about it.”

Brice thought about the old codgers across from Krazy Sallee’s earlier in the afternoon and wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the sentinels out here had been among their number. They looked interchangeable with their scowling expressions, and while initially it seemed like they were offended by the presence of people who knew wi-fi wasn’t something you got from Chinese take-out, Brice noticed they were actually ignoring the three of them completely.

Mangy dogs scuffled about, and rats of alarming size could easily be glimpsed cavorting beneath trailers, and amid piles of trash, broken furniture, rusted cars up on blocks. Brice winced at the sudden revelation of reality. This was America’s Third World, a tragedy of poverty that most never saw, and few cared about. Jeez, I better never forget how lucky I am, he thought.

“Looks just like 5th Avenue to me!” Augie guffawed. “Say, was that a Burberry shop we just passed?”

“The haves and the have nots, that’s what this is,” Clark said. “Lucky for us we’re members of the former.”

Augie smirked. “Not lucky, Clark. We’re superior.”

“You’re so compassionate, Augie,” Brice muttered.

“Hate to tell you two libs that it’s our predestination to be better than these broken down hayseeds. They haven’t done anything with their lives. We have.”

“Humanitarian of the Year.”

“Best to just sterilize this cut of society. Save billions in fraudulent disability payments and government subsidies. Shit, no wonder the U.S. Treasury’s broke. Every one of these old fucks is sucking America’s tit dry, and if it’s not them, it’s the illegals and the fuckin’ anchor babies and the damn ghettos and the fuckin’ homeless bums.”

“That’s what I like about Augie,” Clark jested. “He’s full to bursting with charitability and love for his fellow human beings.”

Augie gave a sardonic snicker. “Fuck that, man. These genetic rejects aren’t my fellow human beings.” His eyes gestured several trailers down, where a group of young pregnant women sat barefoot on teetering front steps, yacking away and smoking cigarettes. “And check out those flop-tit fat tramps. Bet they’ve been perpetually pregnant since they started growing hair on their cuts. They just pump one fuck-baby out after another to up their fuckin’ food cards that we gotta pay for so they can stuff their faces with every fattening thing in the grocery store while their kids run around rack-skinny.”

“Is he always this ugly when he’s got a few in him?” Clark asked Brice.

“All that and more…” The worst part was Brice knew his brother was dead serious in his views. “We better find some hookers and get Augie off his Orwellian kick.”

“Hookers! Yeah!” Augie yelled and turned a few heads.

Clark was looking around. “Speaking of hookers, where are they? And where’re the cock-fights and moonshine?”

Brice rolled his eyes. “What, we just walk up to somebody and say ‘Pardon me, but where’s the whorehouse?’”

“Why not?” Augie said. “You think these scum fucks will be offended? Half of them will probably tell you they’ll service you right where you stand.”

Brice pointed farther down, where the lights were brighter and the sounds of revel louder. “Looks like things are picking up down this end.”

In moments their steps took them deeper into what Brice could only think of as an abyss of flashing lights, staggering drunks, shouts, laughter, and run-down-looking women giving them sultry looks. He thought of the midway of a carnival, only here the carnies were indistinguishable from the patrons. Rednecks to the left, Brice thought, rednecks to the right. Sitting on the porch of the next trailer were beaming-eyed girls in halters and cut-offs. One pushed her tongue against the inside of her cheek in a gesture of oral sex; another lewdly and deliberately parted her legs wide. And a third had the word SWALLOWER printed across her top.

“Did you see that?” Augie asked with some enthusiasm. “There’s a party!”

“Augie. Look at them. They’re in their early teens. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I know, I ought to be.” Then he cracked a laugh. “But I’m not!” He turned to the girls and called, “Up late for a school night, aren’t you?”

Their countenances all displayed nearly identical expressions of confusion, although the one girl’s tongue was still rather comically planted in her cheek .

Augie hooked a thumb over his shoulder as they passed by. “They probably dropped out when Bush was still president.”

“Which one?” Clark asked. They both snorted laughter.

Another wave of rednecks shambled by, swigging beers and drinks, back-slapping. It was odd how none of the locals seemed to take note of the trio of New Yorkers in their Dockers khaki shorts, Tommy Bahama shirts, and $200 tennis shoes.

“It’s kind of like Bourbon Street in New Orleans,” Clark observed, “only—”

“—only instead of tourists,” Augie elaborated, “it’s clogged with rednecks.”

Clark drew on some sarcasm. “Come on, Augie. Where’s your political correctness? We don’t call them rednecks anymore. They’re rural lower-economic-status Southern Caucasians. It’s mean to call them rednecks. Words hurt, Augie. Rednecks are people too.”

Augie trumpeted laughter. “Sorry! I mean Americanus White Trashus!”

But just then Clark held his hand out, slowing them down. He, as well as, his comrades had all noticed the same thing: a stunning girl with long shining hair, a short jean skirt and bikini top, with body contours akin to a centerfold’s. But they could only see her from behind.

“Talk about a brick shit-house,” Clark said, wide-eyed, and even Brice had to raise a brow at the woman’s perfect curvature.

“Finally, pay-dirt,” Augie said. “Watch me bust a move…” and then he parted from the group, approached the shapely woman from behind, and tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, lovely lady. Me and my friends are looking for some fun. How about the four of us go and find some?”

By the time the woman had turned completely around, Brice, Augie, and Clark were rendered speechless, until one of them muttered under his breath, “Holy shhhhhhhh….”

The head connected to that perfect body was warped. Her forehead was swollen, and her eyes were misaligned and way too close together. And her mouth—

“Holy shhhhhhhh….”

Her mouth hardly resembled a mouth at all; instead it was a twisted up aperture of flesh. Brice thought of the garlic knots he’d ordered recently at Il Mulino last week.

Some facsimile of a smile seemed to twitch into her face, and then the woman said this: “Gwuh-gwuh-gwuh.”

Augie was understandably taken aback. “Um-uhhhhh…”

“Ga-ga-ga-ga…gaaaaaaa!”

Brice and Augie looked down.

“Holy crap,” Brice whispered. “She’s all messed up.”

“Hydrocephalus,” Clark diagnosed, “autism, fetal alcohol syndrome. Poor girl’s a dart board for congenital birth defects.”

“There’s the salt of the earth for you,” Augie spat. “Her mother probably knocked back moonshine through the whole fucking pregnancy.”

Now the woman fisted her hands and stamped her flip-flopped feet as if aggravated. “Yuhl-yuhl-yhullllll,” she blabbered.

Brice, Augie, and Clark stood amid the uncomfortable scene, shuffling their feet. Suddenly, however, a big muscular upbeat redneck appeared. He stepped before them. “Dang it, Babba! What’choo doin’ botherin’ these boys?”

“She wasn’t bothering us,” Brice assured.

“My name’s Loger, boys, and this here’s Babba,” the big man introduced. He couldn’t have been a nicer guy, with a big friendly shucksy grin. “See, she done took the wrong turn on her way back ta her pa’s house. Does it all the time.” At this point, Loger gently turned Babba around back toward the entrance. He made a brief gesture with his hands, and at this Babba drooled and nodded her head yes.

“All right, I thought so. You always take the wrong turn at the ole cemmuh-tree where Uncle Septimus be buried. That way, Babba,” and Loger pointed down the road. “Understand now? That’s how ya git home. Go on now.”

The young woman stared, drooled from the knotted twist of a mouth, and blinked. She looked down the road with her pushed-together eyes, then nodded. Awkwardly, then, as if slightly palsied, she began to walk down the road.

Loger faced the three Manhattanites. “’S’shame ’bout Babba,” he explained. She just didn’t come out her mama’s belly right. Ole Unc Septimus, he used ta have this fancy way of sayin’ it, ’bout how Babba was borned as what they used ta call a Natural, and how, lemme see if I can remember the ’zact words… Babba be one that ‘proverdence didn’t see its way fit ta endowin’ with all her intellect, nor the aspect commonly bestowed.’”

“Will she get home all right?” Brice asked. “I’d be happy to drive her if you gave me directions.”

“Aw, that’s mighty neighborly of ya, friend,” Loger said, “and I’se ‘preciate it, but Babba, she’ll git home just fine, always does.” The man addressed them more directly. “So you’se must be the fellas from New York City, huh?”

“Yeah, we got in earlier today. And we heard—”

Loger grinned. “Shore. Yawl heard ’bout Backtown. Ever one does. Plenty’a good times ta be had in Backtown.”

“We’re just looking to have a little fun, that’s all,” Brice said, but then Augie tipsily interrupted, “Hell, man, we’re looking for the whorehouse! We wanna put the blocks to some redneck whores—”

Brice gritted his teeth and nudged Augie away, where Clark took him aside.

“Sorry, man,” Brice said. “As you can see, our ill-mannered buddy is a little drunk.”

Loger maintained the same shucksy, down-home grin. “’S’all right, we’se all git that way sometimes. But this ain’t where the action is, ‘tis down that way, at the end.” Loger pointed farther down the way and lowered his voice. “We got some real purdy gals trickin’ out their trailers, and just about anyone you pass’ll sell ya some good ‘shine, and if it’s gamblin’ ya want, just you go knock on Marley’s double wide and tell him Loger sent ya.”

“Thanks, Loger. And, again, sorry about our pal.”

Loger dismissed it with a wave of hand. “Just you ferget it. Have fun now.”

Loger walked off. Brice rejoined Augie and Clark, who were standing off a bit, then smirked at Augie. “Damn it, Augie. Do you want to get all our asses kicked? You don’t come to a place like this and start calling people rednecks!”

Augie sighed. “All right, sorry. Guess I’m a little off the hook. I need to get laid, man. I want some down and dirty pussy.”

“What’s with you and all this down and dirty stuff? Are you a damn cave man or something?”

Clark was bemused. “Your brother’s referring to our primal limbic selves, following our basic impulses, our very ids. Brice, there’s a caveman in all of us. It’s unhealthy to repress that.”

Great, I’m gonna have trouble with you too?” Brice shook his head. “You and your fuckin’ cavemen. We really are out of our league here, guys. I hope you both realize that.”

“Nonsense,” Augie replied, chuckling. “We came here for a kick, so let’s get it. And, shit—did you get load of the drop-dead-gorgeous bod on that mush-face retard?”

“You’re out of control, Augie,” Brice snapped. “For God’s sake.”

“Bullshit. I’m tired of dicking around, and I sure as shit didn’t come all the way from Upper West Side to lollygag around a trailer park. I want a sloppy, big tit white trash whore with a clump of pussy hair bigger than the divots you leave at Bethpage Country Club…speaking of playing with a handicap.”

Augie and Clark laughed out loud, high-fiving.

Brice, as usual, could only frown. These guys are hopeless.

««—»»

As the next hour ground on, Brice felt more and more detached from everything. He’d thought that doing this road trip with Augie and Clark would get him out of the dumps and help him forget about Marcie. Too much time had passed; he should’ve been over it by now. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, mostly what filled his mind were images of her. Not even a redneck trailer park in full party-mode could buff the edges off. This road trip was a huge mistake, he thought. I can’t believe I let Augie talk me into it.

Brice remained at the edge of a gravel sidewalk, tapping his foot in utter boredom. The hoots, hollers, and crush of music had doubled in the last hour, pounding a headache into his brain. Where the hell are they? he thought, looking at his watch. It can’t possibly take this long to get laid, but finally a long, loud “YAAAAAAAAAAA-HOO!” shot out of the trailer, in Augie’s all-too-familiar tone of voice. He and Clark staggered down the sidewalk toward Brice, Augie grasping a pint bottle of what could only be corn liquor.

“So how was it,” Brice asked. “You guys finally get your minimum daily requirement of ‘down and dirty?’”

Augie guffawed. “Shit! My girl hauled my ashes like they never been hauled, and she had two nipples on one of her tits!”

“Sounds enchanting.”

Clark grinned, catching his breath. “And-and-and my girl - her name was Betty Sue—”

“Why am I not surprised?” Brice remarked.

“—and, and she could put both knees behind her shoulders, man! And I swear I got her off!”

“Sure you did, Clark. A couple times, probably, right?”

Augie shoved the pint bottle toward Brice. “Try it, bro! I bought it from some guy inside. It’s the real McCoy!”

Brice made a hesitant face, took one sip, then spat it out with a grimace. “That shit could run a lawn mower, man! It’ll give you brain damage!” and then he threw the bottle away.

“Hey!” Augie objected.

“No more for you! You guys have had your down and dirty fun, so let’s get out of this wasteland.”

“Aw, no way, Brice!” Clark said. “We’re just getting started!”

“Yeah! We’re gonna take another crack at some more girls,” Augie boasted.

Brice laughed. “You’re dreaming. You guys are too drunk; you’ll embarrass yourselves.”

“No way, Jose. We just need some time for…what’s it called, Doc?”

“Erectile refraction sufficient to restore ejaculatory competence,” Clark reeled off.

“Yeah! That’s it!” Augie said. “We’ll do a little gambling till the ole Johnsons are up and ready again!”

Augie and Clark high-fived yet again, and Brice moaned. He begrudgingly followed them deeper down the main drag. To their left, a drunk redneck girl with a bombshell body in cut offs and halter staggered by in the opposite direction. Most of her exposed skin was covered with tattoos.

Augie sniggered. “Get a load of the tramp-stamps on this shit-faced floozy.”

“She must’ve fallen asleep on the funny pages,” Clark chuckled.

The hugely bosomed girl staggered to a halt, then leaned on a post, evidently to keep from falling. Brice didn’t at all find tattoos attractive but there was something about them that always induced him to look. This particular woman’s skin was littered with a mess of skulls, “Freebirds,” hearts with knives through them, and the like. Around her navel was the most elaborate tattoo visible: that of a girl bent over and grinning over her shoulder. Where her anus should be was the woman’s navel.

“Classy,” Brice said. “That’s a keeper if I ever saw one. I don’t even want to think what might be on her crotch.”

“She’s too drunk to fuck,” Augie said. “Come on.”

Brice made to follow his friends but at the last moment something snagged his eye and held him in place.

It wasn’t the drunk woman; it was a man who passed her, probably just as drunk: a big, muscular working-class redneck with a tractor hat, grass-stained jeans, and work boots. He was shirtless, and when he turned, Brice glimpsed the prodigious tattoo emblazoned on his back. I HATE WIMMIN, and below that was a tattoo-drawing of a male stick figure inserting its penis into the skull of a female stick figure.

Beneath that was one more word: HEADER.

Brice’s eyes went wide as he stared at the bizarre ink-crafted effigy. He blinked, then—

Augie grabbed his arm. “Brice! Come on!”

“Hey, Augie, did you see the tattoo on—”

Augie glared. “What are you talking about? Come on! Clark’s down here.”

Next trailer down, Clark seemed to be negotiating with a bearded old hayseed in a straw hat. “That’s right, son. Roulette, poker, black jack, craps.”

“I could go for some poker,” Clark enthused.

But Augie seemed disgruntled. “Where’s the dog-fighting, pops?”

“Sorry, son. Saturdays only.”

“How about the cock-fights?”

The old man shook his head. “’Tis over, ya up’n missed it by a ‘our,” and then he winked and pointed to a metal drum with a roaring fire in it. Plucked chickens roasted in baskets over the flame. “Them’s the losers.”

“Damn,” Augie muttered.

The old man flapped a hand. “But we’se got better’n cock-fights and pits. Say, I’ll bet you’re them city fellas I’se been hearin’ about.”

“How could you possibly tell?” Brice remarked.

The oldster laughed hoarsely and slapped Brice on the back. “I like you, son! You’se just et up with a case of the smart-ass! But if’n ya want somethin’ ya likely ain’t seen never before—”

“Yeah, man!” Augie bulled in. “That’s exactly what we want!”

“Hock Party’s ‘round back,” the man said and jerked his thumb behind him. “Ten buck ante.”

Clark looked perplexed. “A what party?”

“Hock Party, son, Hock Party.”

“Presumably not an intellectual pursuit,” Brice said with a smirk.

But Augie was riled. “Oh, cool! A good ole fashioned spitting contest! Let’s go!”

Brice was outraged. “You’re not serious!”

Augie and Clark both dashed around the trailer. Brice, now at a total loss, turned to the bearded old man. “Is that really what this is, sir? A spitting contest?”

The old man cracked a laugh. “Ya just might say that, son, ya just might.”

“No offense to your culture, but I just can’t believe a spitting contest is anybody’s idea of fun.”

The man winked again. “Just you go take a look-see. If’n you got this in the city, I’ll eat my hat.”

For shit’s sake, Brice thought. He walked glumly, shaking his head, around to the rear of the trailer.

The scene that greeted him was nearly medieval. Kerosene torches lit the clearing behind the trailer; beyond that were dim woods. Over twenty men congregated on the left, all rednecks, all guffawing, high-fiving, swilling beers. In all of their eyes shone a gleam of anticipation that seemed somehow taboo.

On the right, on weedy grass, were two folding lawn chairs.

What are the chairs for? Brice wondered. Spectators? Judges?

One of the men impatiently shouted, “Hey, Tex! Let’s git this show on the road! I got me some spit ready!”

A taller redneck with a bobbing Adam’s apple was collecting ten-dollar bills from even more late arrivals. “Hold your horses, Donny Boy. Gotta collect. ‘Sides, the girls ain’t here yet.”

Girls? Brice wondered. Please tell me there aren’t spit groupies or I’m turning around and driving home right now.

He, Augie, and Clark finally moved up the line. “Ten spot each ta play, fellas,” the tall man, Tex, said.

Augie looked to Brice and Clark. “Let’s do it, guys! Hell, when I was a kid, I could out-spit anyone!”

“Kind of makes Valedictorian look like a pinch of shit, huh?” Brice said.

“I’m in,” Clark said and followed Augie in shelling out ten dollars. “And…did you say something about girls?”

Before Tex could answer, Augie shoved Brice. “Come on! Don’t wuss out!”

Brice paid and said, “I can’t believe I just entered a spitting contest. Dad’s turning over in his grave.”

Augie grinned. “Only if we lose. Besides, he’s probably been spinning since we pulled into town.”

The sea of murmuring and idle chat came to a sudden halt as two shadows approached the chairs. “Here they is!” someone shouted, and then came an upsurge of applause and whistles.

Brice watched wide-eyed at the alien spectacle. The two shadows belonged to two women: one, an obese lady in her ’60s, with disheveled gray hair sticking up, jowls, and fire in her eye; the other, a shapely 20-ish girl with lank brown hair, a lot of turquoise jewelry, in cut-off jeans, a dingy white halter, and ratty flipflops. She was not wearing the happiest of faces.

“What’s this all about?” Brice asked Tex, who was pocketing the roll of ante money.

“Aw, there ain’t much to it,” the man said. “Just watch the festivities. The old ’un’s Dora; she’s won more times than anyone, over a dozen I’d say. The splittail with the tits is Carly Ann, and she ain’t no slouch neither. Eight times it be that she won. Both of ’em got up over a hunnert in the past, and they’re both hot to win ’cos they need the money. Winner gets half the pot.”

“This isn’t a spitting contest, is it?” Brice asked.

“Well, son, it is inna way.” Tex chuckled. “Just you watch and see, and ya can go get in line too, if’n ya like. Don’t know why ya wouldn’t.” Then the man walked toward the seated women, and at the same time most of the other men present all formed two even lines behind each chair. The young woman, Carly Ann, seated herself in the left chair. Dora sat in the right, and she clapped her hands together once, loud, and grated to Carly Ann, “Save yerself the trouble, bitch! I’m going home with the money, and you ain’t goin home with nothin’ but a belly full’a spit!”

If looks could kill, Carly Ann’s glare could be a deadly weapon. “Shut your wrinkled face, ya old drunk cunt! I ain’t just gonna win that money but I’m gonna beat your old fat ass ta boot!”

Dora cracked a laugh. “I’m gonna love it when you lose, then you’ll have ta suck dick the rest’a the night just ta make your trailer rent! Only thing you do right is suck dick’s’what I heard. ’T’was yer useless pappy who taught ya.”

“Don’t you talk about my dear departed pa, ya fuckin’ fat mummy!”

Dora gruffed a laugh. “Shee-it, your pa’s roastin’ in hell right now and got the devil’s dick up his ass…and he likes it! And ever-one know your first rug-rat come from his peckersnot!”

“I’ll kill ya, ya old bat!” but just as Carly Ann rose from her chair, Tex grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back down.

“None of that, Carly,” Tex calmly told her. “’Tis against the rules ta get out the chair. You two gals wanna scrap, ya do it after the party.”

Brice stood, agape. The cogs of his mind were turning, and so were Augie and Clark’s. Hock Party, he thought. Both of ’em got up over a hunnert in the past.

And the clincher: Belly full’a spit…

“Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking?” Augie asked.

“It-it just can’t be?” Clark said. “Can it?”

Tex whistled. “Listen up, ever-one! A’fore we start, let’s welcome our three guests from the city!” and then he opened a hand toward Brice, Augie, and Clark, who all remained speechless at their introductions.

Everyone in the yard applauded and whistled.

“Now, let’s show these city lads how to do things right!” Tex finished, and as if on cue, the first man in Carly’s line stepped right up behind her chair, and the first man in the right line stepped right up behind Dora.

Carly Ann and Dora each tilted their heads back.

Then they opened their mouths wide.

The two men were clearing their throats, wet and raucous buzz saw noises.

Tex raised a hand like a flagman at a race, then he dropped it and shouted “One!”

The two men behind the chairs, nearly simultaneously, each let a wad of phlegm fall from their mouths and into the gaping mouths of Carly and Dora, upon which both recipients swallowed.

The next two men stepped up, cleared their throats and—

“Two!” shouted Tex.

—deposited their sputum into Carly and Dora’s mouths.

Then:

“Three!”

“Four!”

“Five!”

Like that.

When the original lines had cycled completely—at the count of sixteen—Tex called time out, and inquired of the participants, “How ya feelin’, ladies? Ya ready for more?”

“Lots more, Tex!” snapped Carly. “We ain’t even broke fifty yet and tonight I’m breakin’ one fifty! Day that withered old cow eats more loogies than me is the day I croak!”

“Well then, croak, ya cum-filled tramp!” Dora whipped back, “and I’ll dig the fuckin’ hole ta bury yer pussy-stinkin’ self in, ’cos what we just done ain’t even a appetizer far as I’m concerned, and hear this, head queen: you is goin’ down!” and this latter part of Dora’s exclamation was accented by several sharp jabs of her finger.

And then…the cycle began anew.

Kurrrr-HOCK!

“Seventeen!”

Kurrrr-HOCK!

“Eighteen!”

And so forth.

Brice felt buzzed in the stupefaction of witnessing this absolute human disgrace in the flickering lamplight. Some of the men in line were actually rubbing their crotches in the sheer arousal of watching these two women willingly debase themselves. Carly’s nipples were erect, poking through the thin material of her halter top, as if she was aroused by the debasement as well. I can’t believe I’m seeing this, came the numbest of all thoughts. I can’t believe something like this could ever happen…

When he turned to Augie and Clark, to insist they all leave—

Where the—

—they weren’t there anymore. But seeing where they went required only a tilt of his head.

They were both in line.

“Twenty-five”

Kurrrr-HOCK!

“Twenty-six!”

Kurrrr-HOCK!

Brice ran over to where Augie stood, in Carly’s line.

“Augie. Please tell me you’re not going to do this,” he said like an automaton. “Please. Tell me you’re not going to spit into a woman’s mouth.”

Augie looked at him askance. “What? What’s the big deal? It’s all part of the fun. Look at them. They’re totally into it. We might be offending them by not joining in. Did you ever think about that?”

Brice wanted to grab his brother by the neck. “Spitting in girls’ mouths? It’s a disgrace! It’s the worst exploitation I’ve ever seen. You’re degrading them in the worst way possible!”

“Who are you, Anderson Fuckin’ Cooper?” Augie said, wincing at Brice’s objection. “Shit, in New York, they got kiddie porn rings, human trafficking, and gangs running around beating people half to death just so they can film it on their cell phones and put it on the internet. This is nothing. “

Brice was boggled. He glanced at Clark in Dora’s line. “Not you too, Clark! You’re a Manhattan physician! You’re gonna spit in that woman’s mouth just for kicks?”

Clark shrugged with a grin. “Why not? Everyone else is. It’ll give us something to tell the guys next time we go for drinks at Harry’s Bar. It’s perfectly safe…for those of us in line, at least.” Then he cleared his throat.

“For God’s sake, Clark!” Brice wailed. “Don’t!”

Augie dropped his spit-wad right into Carly jacked-open mouth. She swallowed it immediately. “Fuck yeah! That’s some fine phlegmin’, city boy.”

Tex put his hand on Brice’s shoulder. “Step away, son. You’se holdin’ up the show.”

“Yeah, cutie,” Dora said to him. “If ya ain’t gonna spit, git!”

Tex clapped, egging Clark on. “Come on, City! Give Dora here one’a them big New York-style chest oysters!”

Clark bent over, waited for Dora to reposition herself, then—
plop!

—made a considerable deposit into the old woman’s mouth.

“Thirty-three!”

“Mmmmm-ummmmm.” Dora licked her chops. “Not bad at all for some city fuckers! That was better’n boxed wine.”

Brice had stepped aside, and simply stared further at the appalling spectacle. To heighten his despair, he saw Augie and Clark had gotten back in line. They were grinning at each other like they were waiting their turn in one of those ridiculous gang bang videos. They high-fived across lines.

The counting went on.

“Forty-eight!”

“Forty-nine!” Several men seemed to have bad chest colds, and were gleeful at the extra-large portions of phlegm they were able to supply to the party. Brice was amazed they didn’t need respirators with all the gunk they had blocking up their respiratory tracts. Tex went on counting, and in between would accent the more notable contributions, such as, “Let ’er rip, Croaker! Give her some’a that down-home lung-pudding!” and next, to a man who looked like Robert Plant in 1970, “Here come Jimmy-Job! Ain’t no one hacks up the custard like him!” He was followed by an old timer in a porkpie hat with watery eyes and a hunched back, who cocked his head to the left and honked like a goose as he summoned more throat sludge for the deluge. “That’s it, Ollie, drop ‘at dime right in her craw, old boy.”

And on and on through the cast of disgusting, despicable, and shameless characters, immune to Brice’s sharp glares of disapproval (and grimaces of revulsion).

After several more counts, a fat wizen-faced man trudged up; harnessed under his arm was an oxygen bottle, and he wore a nose-piece connected to a tube. Tex addressed Brice directly: “Gander this, son. This here’s Milton Waller. He never miss a hock party. Usually he gotta come in his wheelchair but I guess he’s feeling pretty chipper today. See, Milton worked the coal mines at Bethel for years, and got the black lung awful bad.” Then he shouted, “Get ready for a gritty one, Carly Ann!” and then to the old man, “Come on, Milt! Drag up a pretty one fer the lady!”

Brice looked away one second too late, to see a thick black rope of phlegm dangle first from the man’s lips, then fall smack-dab into Carly’s mouth. At this she winced, hesitated for several moments, holding it in her mouth, then squeezed her eyes shut and—
gulp

—swallowed it all.

Brice watched in more numb despair as Augie and Clark came round for another cycle, high-fiving again after they’d done the deed. Next, Brice noticed a woman in line, a trampy blonde in the universal attire of cut-offs and halter. She spat a large one into Carly’s mouth and said, “How’s that taste, bitch!” Carly swallowed, then her face became enraged: “Hey, that warn’t hock!”

“You’re right, ya twat,” said the blond, and chuckled. “That’s yer boyfriend’s cum, who I just blowed. It’s what’cha git for fuckin’ my husband!” and then she smacked Carly on the side of the head.

“I’m killin’ ya, so help me!” Carly shrieked. “I’m gonna so fuckin’ kill you!”

Again, she was about to get up, but Tex reminded her, “Uh-uh, Carly. You git up, you forfeit. T’would be a shame to’ve swallered all that spit fer nothin’, now wouldn’t it?” “FUCK! Your ass is good as dead when I can get up from this, you gutterslut!” Carly yelled. She jacked her head back with a vengeance. “Bring it on! Can’t you guys spit no faster? I never seen such a bunch’a spitless fairies in all my life!”

Carly would’ve been wiser not to make this last exclamation, for all it did was incite those in her line to clear their throats harder and with more conviction. Several men, too, instead of expectorating, put a thumb over one nostril and blew pure mucus from the other, right into poor Carly’s mouth. After swallowing several, she snapped to Tex, “Hey, that ain’t fair! It’ gotta be hock!”

“Quit-cher whinin’, girl,” Tex scolded her. “Hock, snot, ‘tis all the same. I’se surprised you’re takin’ this opportunity fer granted. Not every gal git the chance ta make easy money like this. If’n ya don’t like it—” Tex shrugged—”then yer free ta throw in the towel’n let Dora take the winnin’s.”

“Yeah, quit, ya little baby-blower!” Dora hacked a laugh. “Quit like ya quit ever thing in yer piss-poor, booger-eatin’, cracker-tramp life!”

“You done rode half the dick in Backtown, you mangy-ass bitch, so don’t you act like yer some kinda saint!”

Dora cackled. “I just fucked them ones what knew better’n to throw it in that pus-seepin’, piss-flapped cunt’a yours!”

Carly Ann’s face reddened. “When I’se done whippin’ up on that other whore, I might just see about flattenin’ yer ugly mug!”

“Well, I’d be scairt to death if I thought you’d stop jackin’ yer jaw long enough to finish up here, but it don’t look like I’m in any danger there!”

Carly Ann opened her mouth to say something, but realized she’d be playing into Dora’s hand if she did. Instead, she leaned her head back, shouted, “Come on!” and jacked her mouth back open, for yet another eruption of sputum.

And on the count went:

“Sixty-six!”

Kurrrr-HOCK!

“Sixty-seven!”

Kurrrr-HOCK!

“Sixty-eight!”

Kurrrr-HOCK!

Brice trudged to where Augie and Clark remained in line. “I’m out. This is beyond deplorable.”

“Where’s your sense of charity, Brice?” Augie said, straight-faced.

“Charity?”

“Yeah. We’re giving these poor, under-privileged women a chance to win some money in tough economic times,” and then Augie and Clark burst out laughing.

“You slobs ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” Brice said, disgusted.

“Yeah, we ought to be,” Augie said.

“But we’re not!” Clark finished. Then came more hyena-like laughter.

Brice threw Augie the keys. “I’m walking back to the motel. Meanwhile, you two model citizens have fun.”

The laughter followed Brice as he stalked off. “We’re only addressing our primal, limbic selves, Brice!” Clark shouted. Then Augie: “Don’t worry! We’ll let you know who wins!”

Brice turned to give them both the finger but never finished the gesture when his eyes caught the hacking, gasping Milton Waller dredging up another mouthful of gritty black phlegm and—

“Seventy!”

—dropping it right onto Dora’s tongue.

“Best one I swallered all night!” the old woman railed. “Nice’n meaty! Kind’a smoky flavored too!”

Brice half-jogged out of the heinous backyard. It took awhile to recover from his outrage and disgust; he scarcely saw the people milling about him, had to stop several times to get his bearings and make sure he was heading in the right direction. Closer to the end of the main drag, he passed a loud trailer, evidently housing a poker game, and heard, or thought he heard a guffawing redneck voice say, “Well, good gawd dang, Farler! If you don’t lose a hand soon, why, we’se just might have ta throw a header on ya!”

More laughter followed this as Brice peered at the rickety abode. Did he just say… but then he shrugged it off. He didn’t care; he just wanted to be out of here.

Finally he made his way out of the official perimeter of Backtown. Thank God. The winding road out seemed well-lit by the moon, and he knew it shouldn’t take long to walk back to the motel but before he could embark…

Damn, I gotta piss like a racehorse.

Why he should be so discriminating he couldn’t tell—I can piss anywhere. This entire TOWN is a toilet—but his Harvard Yard culture at least insisted he not do it right in the road. He took a few crunching steps into the woods and found a suitable tree.

What’s that? he wondered, squinting into the moon-drenched woods.

“That” was nothing more than a teetering, ancient wooden shack. Tin shingles arranged haphazardly seemed to cover the sagging roof; the structure’s few windows had long since been divorced of their glass. Brice stared, as if fascinated, but why he should feel that way was a mystery. He stepped closer, ignoring a throbbing bladder. It must’ve been some trick of the moonlight, but the shack’s warped, unpainted oak boards seemed to exude the faintest gray luminescence. What am I doing? he asked himself with some alarm.

Next, he was about to walk into the shack.

The front, if it could be called that, was closed, comprised of more rickety oak boards. Mounted in the door’s center stile was an oval of tarnished bronze depicting a half-formed face. Just two eyes, no mouth, no other features. It seemed morose, even foreboding.

But that was silly. It was just a door knocker.

A morbid muse seeped into him: I knock on the door…and someone answers…

More silliness. It’s just an old piece-of-shit shack that’s been rotting in the woods for years, he knew. Entering, though, might be another story altogether, and his metropolitan sensibilities threw up some red flags: untold dangers could lie in wait. Crack addicts, meth-heads, psychotic hillbilly bums, yet Brice paid no conscious mind to any mode of common sense. Why don’t I just take a piss and get out of here? Again, though, his actions were a mystery. It felt less like curiosity than an irresistible compulsion.

He pushed open the teetering door and entered.

The tiny LED penlight on his keys filled the shack’s interior with preternatural illumination. Suddenly he wondered if he was hallucinating. Had someone back at the trailer park slipped LSD or something into his drink? But, no, he hadn’t had anything to drink.

What the hell is it? Marsh gas?

But this was just woods, wasn’t it? Not wetlands.

The rotten-wood stench—and other less definable odors—flared his nostrils. As his light swept up and down, his eyes found every corner rounded by cobwebs thick as cheesecloth. Old dead wasp nests, large as footballs, clung to the walls; it was a decent bet, too, that they weren’t all dead. The wood floor creaked for several full seconds at a single step forward. On one bare-plank wall hung a vermiculated scrap of something like paper. He leaned close with the light: yes, it was paper, part of which had adhered to the wall by mold, but he could just read 1994 Penthouse Pet of the Year. Gina Something, her name was, and all that 20 years of hanging on the wall had left of her was a vague ghostlike image pocked with white splotches. The impressive implants were only just visible, and the overflowing head of hair seemed tinged red. Only her eyes remained in any clarity: dark pinpoints. But a hitch caught in Brice’s chest when he moved the light just above those piercing eyes.

No way…

In the center of her forehead, obviously drawn with ball-point pen, was a crude circular sketch filled in with black squiggles. The artist had clearly been suggesting a hole in the pinup’s forehead.

My God…

Brice turned away quickly, then shined the tiny yet powerful beam of light down at a waist-high oblong object: a table. Eight feet long, sturdy, and not a quarter-inch of play when he pushed an edge. It was built to last.

But what was it built for?

The table took up most of the space in this main front room. Why not a couch? he wondered. Why put a big-ass table like this in the middle of the main room?

Then Brice looked closer at the table in the crisp white light…

One end appeared to be corroded by something long ago. If someone, for instance, were lying down on the table (but why ever would they do that?), the edge where the head rested was queerly darkened and slightly indented, as if eroded by acid or something.

Why would I think it was blood?

Brice continued to be assailed by notions he couldn’t fathom. Yes, the place was foreboding, and, yes, it stank, but why should he be drowned by such an unrelenting and blade-sharp intimation of horror?

It’s just a fuckin’ old shack, his thoughts tried to steady themselves. And there’s no reason in the world to think that the stuff on the end of that table is old blood…

But level-headedness did not prevail. Brice grimaced as he propelled himself out of the shack and back into the woods. He stopped instantly as if he’d struck an invisible wall when he saw a figure standing right in front of him.

“Fuck!” he bellowed, surprised words could get past the heart lodged in his throat.

“Aw, dang, man, it’s you,” a strangely familiar voice issued. “Didn’t mean ta scare the bejesus out’a ya—”

Brice leaned against a tree, his chest tight as a gunpowder keg about to explode. Then he relaxed. “Well, you sure as hell did.” The figure was the guy he’d talked to earlier. Stewy? No, Stoody.

The scrawny long-haired man scuffed his feet. “Yeah, these woods is pretty scary at night, but they’se a good short-cut back to town.”

“Good, that’s where I’m heading.”

“I take it you’n yer friends found your way to Backtown?”

“Yeah, and now I’m finding my way out. My pals are still there, whooping it up. But me? The Hock Party was all I could take.”

Stoody chuckled. “Yeah, boys’ll be boys I guess. That Dora’s tough to beat, be it words or spit. Anyway, I was just leavin’ myself when I walk down here and find you. I could’a sworn I heard someone in the shack but then I couldn’t imagine anyone bein’ in there, no, sir, not this shack.”

Brice squinted through a shaft of moonlight throwing a bar over Stoody’s face. “By the way you said that, it sounds like this is no ordinary shack?”

Another chuckle. “Naw, no, it ain’t. ’Tis haunted, plenty of folks say, and I can believe it, even though I never seen nothin’ here myself. But, yeah, there’s some stories ’bout it, all right.”

Brice was riveted. “What stories?”

“Well, see, fifteen years back, er, I guess more like twenty…” but a sudden recollection severed the rest of his recital. “Oh, before I forget, here’s that ten-spot ya loaned me. Told ya I’d pay ya back!”

Brice never expected to see the money, nor Stoody, ever again. It was with some dejection that Brice took the ten-dollar bill from the man. I don’t care about the money, I want to hear about—

Stoody went on, “Yeah, I had me one beer at Sallee’s, then took the change ta Marley’s and won me fifty in craps.”

“Congratulations,” Brice said. “You’ve got better luck than me. But you were saying a minute ago—”

Stoody seemed to retrieve the memory. “Aw, yeah, the shack.”

“The haunted shack,” Brice said. “Why’s it thought to be haunted? Does it have anything to do with this header business?”

Stoody’s perpetually lackadaisical demeanor stiffened. He looked very surprised in the crisp moonlight. “Matter’a fact, it does. What made ya guess that?”

Brice didn’t bother retelling his observations: the tattoo, the comment from the gambling trailer, the Penthouse poster, etc. “Let’s just say I had a bad feeling.”

Stoody leaned against a tree and crossed his arms. He seemed amused by Brice’s interest in the macabre subject. “Well, since ya asked, that shack once belonged to a crackly old fella named Jake Martin. I weren’t but ten ’er so when all this went down, but I gotta say the old guy was always nice ta me. Poor ole fucker—he was a shoemaker but he had some disease that make it so they had to cut his feet off or he’d die.”

Brice stared at the twisted observation. Shit. A shoemaker…with no feet…

“Anyways, what it git down to was this: ole Jake and his grand kid, Travis Tuckton. Their lives were shit, piss-poor crackers, and I guess one day they both got ta thinkin’ on that and it muss ’em up in the head bigtime. Just about every damn family in the county done the Martins and the Tucktons wrong, and I mean goin’ way back fer decades or more. Stealin’ from ’em, lyin’ to ’em, cheatin’ ’em. Hell, they even got a big parcel’a land ripped off from ’em.”

“Yeah?” Brice urged. “And?”

Stoody shrugged. “And one day they both of ’em just said fuck it and decided ta git some payback.”

“Headers,” Brice intoned.

“Mm-hmm. And this were bigtime payback they got goin’. Jake Martin’n Travis Tuckton pulled dozens’a headers right here in this here shack—er, probably more like hundreds.”

Dozens? Hundreds? Brice couldn’t even conceive of what he was listening to. This is madness. I should be in Manhattan, watching my 72-inch screen in my million-dollar condo. Instead, I’m here, listening to some washout tell me about how if you slight the wrong redneck, they’ll fuck you in the head…

Yes. Madness.

“Somethin’ wrong, man?” Stoody asked.

Brice had been staring off in a daze. Then he broke from that. “Yeah, yeah there is. Earlier, you said that for a hundred dollars you’d…”

Stoody smiled, subdued. “Yeah, I said I could prove ta you that headers was real…”

Brice snapped a $100 bill in front of Stoody’s face. “Let’s go, Stoody.”

Stoody took the bill and gave Brice a narrowed look. “Man, you got some burnin’ curiosity ’bout all this, don’t ya?”

“Yeah.”

“Now, I’ll take your money, and I’ll show ya what ya wanna see, just ’member what they say about curiosity.”

“I’m not superstitious, and I hate cats.” Brice was losing patience. He stuffed another $100 bill into Stoody’s shirt pocket. “We got a deal, so let’s get on with it. I haven’t got all night.”

Stoody detached himself from the tree. ’S’right, friend. Foller me…”

Much of the fog of Brice’s disillusion kept close as he tramped behind his unlikely tour guide. The trek took them directly through dense, primeval woods. He shrugged off the chilling notion that someone in the shack was watching after him. Who could be watching? Ghosts? “What happened to the two guys? Travis and Jake What’s His Name?”

“Died, both of ’em. Cop killed ’em right in that shack we just left; he caught ’em red-handed, humpin’ the holy hell out’a Thibald Caudill’s head. You’d think that’d be the end of it but…” Stoody kept tramping with ease over the brambles. For Brice, however, it was not so easy. Stumps nearly tripped him and vines caught his shoes every few steps. In a ludicrous moment of abstraction, he considered that the woods themselves were warning him not to go on…

“But?” Brice urged. “But what?”

“But ever now’n then they’ll be another one here, another one there. Mostly low-lifes, bums’n what not. Druggers. So someone up’n snatch ’em, then—” Stoody shrugged carelessly. “Then they fuck ’em in their heads. Ain’t no better way ta send a message.”

The humidity only flustered Brice more. “So what exactly is this we’re walking to now.”

“Proof, friend. That’s what ya said ya wanted. Only reason I saw it myself is ’cos I was cuttin’ through the woods from town.”

“You saw a header?”

“Well, no, but I saw the Larkins Brothers buryin’ one.”

“Burying one…what?”

“A splittail they pulled a header on. Her boyfriend, too, but all they done ta him is pig-drag all his skin off.”

Brice winced. “They skinned him?”

“Well, yeah, they do gnarly shit like that all the time, skinnin’, raw-ballin’, tractor jobs, but only ta scum bags they catch sellin’ dope’n kiddie diddlers and such.”

Raw ballin’? Tractor jobs? It’s another fucking world down here.

Brice mused over Stoody’s history lesson. “The Larkins Brothers,” he muttered to himself.

Stoody stopped and whirled around, to point a warning finger. This was the first time Brice had seen the man serious, and by his gesture and tone, he was very serious.

“But don’t you be askin’ no one ’bout headers, and don’t say nothin’ ’bout the Larkins Brothers. You do that? You can bet’cher balls we’ll both wind up in the ground. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear. So…they kill drug dealers? That’s fine with me if you wanna know the truth. But what about the police?”

Stoody chuckled. “We don’t need no police to handle our goings-on, man. Better ta take care’a our own. Larkins Brothers is all the police we need, and one thing they won’t put up with is drugs. They catch anyone buyin’ it or anyone sellin’ it? They’se never seen again. State cops come through ever now’n again but they don’t wanna mess with folks from here. They leave us be. They shore as shit don’t wanna be pryin’ inta stuff here. Ain’t worth it. They all on the take anyway.”

Brice was trying to reckon all of this. “Okay. So. To punish drug dealers, they fuck their brains?”

“Yeah,” Stoody said matter-of-factly.

Well, if the prospect of having some backwoods psychopath ejaculate into your skull doesn’t make you say no to drugs, nothing will.

Crickets seemed to trill in greater numbers as they marched on, and the sounds of their footfalls crunched louder. The macabre journey and even more macabre conversation completely effaced Brice of his geographical bearings. Just when he began to think he might be getting baited to some remote spot a mugging awaited…

Stoody stopped. “Here it is, friend.”

They stood in a clearing, and in the moonlight, Brice noticed a sickly ground fog; he also noticed a very faint stench.

Stoody kicked some leaves off the ground at a particular spot. He peered down inquisitively, then lowered to his knees. A wave of his hand gestured for Brice to do the same.

When Brice knelt beside him. “You mean…we’re going to…”

“Dig, brother. If’n ya wanna see it.” A long pause was accompanied by one of Stoody’s lackadaisical smiles. “You shore ya do? Ain’t nothin’ ta be ashamed of if ya change your mind.”

Of course I’m not going to dig up somebody’s fucking grave just to find out if somebody stuck a dick in their head, Brice thought. That’s crazy. So what if they did? This isn’t CSI: Luntville. I’m going to huff it back to the “Due Drop In” and forget all about headers. Besides, if there really are bodies, the people who put them here won’t think twice about adding to the grave if they find us snooping around.

It was the sanest course of action to throw in the towel. This had gone too far as it was. In his mind he formulated his apology to Stoody for wasting his time dragging them out here…

But what he did was reach down and begin to dig. It was dangerous and twisted and disturbing, but he had to know. He had to see for himself that all the graffiti and carvings and tattoos were for real. He’d always be able to talk himself out of believing in this lunacy otherwise.

Soon both men were scooping out handfuls of leafy earth. All the while, that ever-so-faint stench haunted Brice.

“See,” Stoody said amid the task. “This place ain’t so much a forest as it is a graveyard. Hate ta think how many druggers is planted here, and I reckon most of ’em was killed by gettin’ headers, ’specially them’s that was gals. Only fittin’, I say. Them low-down pieces’a shit sell that crap ta kids on purpose, so’s ta get ’em hooked. Then they’se got ’em turnin’ tricks ’fer the drugs while the dealers take the cash.” Stoody looked over to Brice. “Can you ’magine that, man? Have a little daughter of your own then some motherfuckin’ drug dealer gets her fired up on the dope, and next thing ya know, he’s sellin’ her ta diaper snipers and she ain’t even high school age yet. Enough ta make decent folks sick. Evil business, drugs is.”

Brice was clammy with sweat and irritable, and Stoody’s societal disquisition only made him more irritable. After several minutes of digging, he stopped to wipe his brow. “You sure this is the right place? I don’t think there’s anything under here.”

“Yeah?” Stoody said. “See that?”

See what? Brice squinted down. He took one more swipe out of the hole and immediately felt something…not right. Something cold and clammy,

He flashed his tiny LED light, and froze.

“Nothin’ under here, huh?” Stoody joked.

There was something under there, all right: a face, a moon-white face beneath a sheen of dirt.

“Oh, fuck,” Brice said.

“It’s the chick, the blondie I was tellin’ ya about.” Stoody hunkered down, wedging his hands under the corpse’s bare shoulders. “Come on, man,” he whispered, grinning to Brice. “Help me pull her out…”

CHAPTER SIX

The front door of the trailer banged open and the two sizeable rednecks, quite literally, threw Augie and Clark out onto the rickety porch. They both landed flat on their backs.

“And stay out!” one yelled.

The second, a bald man with Elvis sideburns, glared and pointed a finger. “Don’t make us tell ya again less’n ya wanna go back to the city with yer pretty-boy faces uglied up but good!”

The door slammed shut. Augie and Clark pulled themselves to their feet, dazed but seemingly feeling little pain. Augie laughed, “Hell, Clark. I consider it an honor to get kicked out of a trailer-park poker game by the Honky Tonk Man!”

Clark was not as festive in his opinion. “What did you expect? You called everybody in the room, and I quote, ‘a bunch of inbred thieving Gomer Pyle rednecks!’”

Augie chuckled. “Did I really say that?”

“Yes, you did!”

“Well, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke…and they were cheating us. That game was about as straight as Liberace.”

They shuffled down the main drag, disheveled locals frowning at them.

“It looks to me like we’ve worn out our welcome,” Clark said. “Let’s just go back to the motel.”

“Yeah, I’ve had my fill of fuckin’ Backtown for one night.”

They made their way back to the parking lot, which was even fuller than before. It took Augie several tries but eventually he unlocked the SUV, then he and Clark got in.

“Fuck, I’m drunk,” Augie said. He raised a finger. “But that’s a good thing.”

“You want me to drive?” Clark asked, just as tipsy. “The last thing we need is to get pulled over down here.”

Augie started the vehicle. “We ain’t getting pulled over, and even if we did, I think my friend Ben Franklin and his nine brothers would convince the cop not to arrest us.” At that moment, Augie backed the SUV into the back fender of a parked pickup.

“Good job, Augie!”

“Relax. Nobody saw.” Augie drove out of the parking lot. “Besides, that truck’s a piece of shit; the owner’ll never know the difference.”

After some deliberating, Augie turned right, back onto Tick Neck Road, hoping he’d turned the right way. Soon, the SUV was cruising down the quiet road, headlamps shooting lances of intense white light in front of them. There were no street lights out here. This was bona fide country back here with nothing else to illuminate it but the star light, which was about as dim as the yokels they’d left behind.

“Yeah, to hell with Backtown,” Clark said. “Never seen so many goobers in my life.”

“Fuck ’em. I’ve always hated rednecks and now I hate ’em even more. I hope they blow their faces off trying to mount a gun rack. Shit! Speaking of mounting, we never did find the whorehouse!”

“Big deal. I’m probably too drunk to get it up anyway.”

“Nonsense!” Augie insisted. “We’re still strapping young lads. I don’t know about you but one-hundred-percent shitfaced or stone-cold sober, I can bang beaver all night and wake up ready to lay down some more pipe. “

“Well, you better forget it ’cos we’re not going back there. But at least we got to see a real live—what did he call it? Hock Party?”

“Yeah, man!” Augie lit up. “That was a trip! How about Carly Ann? Talk about a shitty day in Hicksville! She swallows what must’ve been a gallon of spit only to lose the contest by one loogie, then she gets her ass beat by the blond who blew her boyfriend, and to top it all off, Dora sticks her finger down her throat and throws up her entire bellyful right into the poor girl’s face! I thought about giving her a hundred bucks, but…fuck it, you know? Win or go home. They’ll never believe it at the yacht club.”

“Sure they will,” Clark said. “I recorded it on my iPhone.”

“Good man!” Augie high-fived him. “You need to send me that bitch right this second.”

Clark blinked several times as if to reset the blurry sight of his phone. He tapped the screen several times and after a moment, Augie’s phone vibrated in his pocket in succession.

“I had to break it up into a few videos,” Clark explained. “Shit. My phone’s about dead.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll use my phone if we stumble on another Hock Party.”

“We going back to the motel?”

“Yeah, but I still need another piece of ass, and I mean now. Let’s get Brice and go back to Sallee’s. I ain’t leaving this shit pit town till I knock the bottom out of some more white trash pussy.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

But in a moment, Augie and Clark were squinting ahead through the windshield.

Clark put on his glasses. “Is that someone walking?”

“Sure is.”

“It’s not Brice, is it?”

Augie grinned. “Not unless Brice grew a brick shit-house ass and killer tits since we last saw him.”

Clark squinted ahead. “You’re right! It’s a chick!”

Augie slowed the vehicle down just as the pedestrian looked over her shoulder.

“Oh, shit, it’s that retarded girl,” Clark said.

Augie winked. “Babba’s her name, right? Let’s have some fun,” and then he pulled up alongside the girl and stopped. The power window lowered. “Hey, Babba. Need a ride?”

Babba looked back crosseyed, drooling, and vigorously nodded her head yes.

Clark reached back and opened the back door. “Hop in.”

Babba’s large haltered breasts swayed as she climbed in, paused a moment, then closed the door. “Gyuh, gyuh, gyuhank you!”

Augie slipped Clark a sly grin. “Noooooo problem, Babba. “

««—»»

Brice could not conceive of what he was doing, yet he did it anyway. Any inner-monitor he might have possessed to remind him about right and wrong had evidently been turned off. What he was doing was this:

He gripped the dead girl’s right wrist while Stoody gripped the left, and he pulled.

The effort disgorged the corpse from its grave. Most of the dirt fell off, but what didn’t, Stoody now busily swiped away with his hand. In the moonlight, her nude body was the color of a peeled banana. Stoody flicked more dirt out of her eyes, to find them glassy and wide open, while her mouth remained closed, the blue lips pressed together. Nipples larger than silver dollars were bluish as well, a bruise-like hue, the papillae strangely erect and large as pinkie ends. Death and burial had left the faintest traceries of vein-networks beneath her skin and even on her face.

Brice’s penlight didn’t linger on the physique of the corpse but instead darted to the top of the woman’s skull. He gagged, gulped hard, and could only say, “You weren’t bullshitting…”

Stoody made a self-confident laugh. “Told ya.” His brows raised, almost as if he were admiring the woman’s dead body. “Couldn’t see real good when they was plantin’ her—didn’t realize she was such a looker,” and then he hefted up her shoulders, tipping her head up. “Lookie, look here with yer light.” He was making it easier for Brice to see.

Brice focused the penlight down…

Stoody pulled the tresses of lank blond hair back farther, to elucidate the three-inch circular hole cut into the top of her cranium. Stoody’s finger pointed, and Brice nauseously recognized the circle of white-pink brains.

“They’se use a hole-saw ta cut the head open,” Stoody explained, and now he actually touched the brains with the tip of his finger. “You see that there, don’t’cha?”

What he referred to was what appeared to be a slit cut into the brain.

“For shit’s sake,” Brice whispered.

“See, after they cut the circle’a bone out’a the skull, they stick a knife in there so’s ta make a slit to stick their peckers in.”

I can’t believe what I’m seeing, Brice thought. He seemed to hear a distant rushing sound and felt as though he were looking down at the details of this atrocity from a monumental height.

And Stoody’s words seemed to echo. “It’s pure and simple, really. After they’se open the head’n cut the slit…they fuck the girl’s brain.”

The echo reverberated in Brice’s consciousness:

—they fuck the girl’s brain—

…fuck the girl’s brain—

…fuck the girl’s brain…

“’Tis only fittin’ and proper,” Stoody added.

“What?” Brice said.

“The only folks who get headers is folks that deserve it. Rapists, druggers, fellas who mess with kids. Larkins Brothers is doin’ the world a favor when they get rid’a such trash. And I don’t see no reason why they shouldn’t have a little fun fer their effort.”

Brice could’ve been a mannequin staring down. “Fucking someone’s brain is fun?”

“Well, shore,” Stoody replied matter-of-factly. “A header’s the best nut a fella could ever have. Don’t rightly know why, just ‘tis. You pump some lowlife’s noggin’ and you’ll feel like you got naught but sawdust in yer balls afterwards. It drains a man plumb dry. There’s just somethin’ ’bout a brain that makes it good ta fuck.”

Now Brice could only stare at Stoody, appalled. “So…you’ve done it yourself? You’ve done…a header?”

Stoody sat back against a tree, wiping his hands off. He lit a cigarette. “Shore’s hail did, friend. One time couple years ago, this homeless dude come through town. Couple folks said they seen him peekin’ in the element’ry school winders and beatin’ off, or doin’ the same while’s watchin’ the kids on the playground, but then he run away. Couple days after he grabbed li’l Jenny Karner when she were walkin’ home from school. Jenny weren’t but, like, ten at the time. Tried ta diddle her in the woods but thank God she got away. Well, word got ‘round, and it was Helton Tuckton who caught the bastard walkin’ down the old train tracks. Helton snatched him’n took him back ta his shack and, well, he throwed a header. Lot of us got invited. Must’a been two dozen fellas humped that head. But ya know what?”

“What?” Brice droned.

Stoody grinned for effect. “Never again did that homeless dude mess with no kids,” and then he laughed.

Brice was almost too disoriented to think. He looked down at the shapely corpse again, then turned away, staring into the woods.

“And I’ll tell ya somethin’, too,” Stoody went on as if reciting a fable. “’Twas the best feelin’ I ever had in my whole blammed life. Never had me no nut like that before or after.”

“This is crazy,” Brice muttered, more to himself. “This is madness…”

“Oh, I can understand why a city fella such as yerself might be out’a sorts about such goin’s-on. City ways is different from backwoods ways since yawl believe in reherbilertation. We don’t bother with police or courts or trials’n whatnot. When someone commit a crime that’s real bad? The only proper punishment is a header.” Stoody laughed again, this time a little loud. “Bet if your big city judges sentenced drug dealers and rapist scum to a header instead of prison, there wouldn’t be no crime at all in the city.”

Brice, trying to quell the nauseous feeling in his gut, turned very abruptly. He’d heard a rustling sound, and after that he was staring…

««—»»

Mewling, stifled shrieks, and muffled sobs circled round the inside of the SUV. Augie was back up front in the driver’s seat, catching his breath and rebuckling his Gucci belt. When he took a quick look in back he saw Babba’s face reddened in terror, hair in disarray, eyes teary and bugging. It was Clark’s hand that sealed her mouth closed. Her top was pulled up over her weighty breasts, her cutoff short dangled off one ankle. And here was the fact of the matter: Babba was being frenetically and primitively raped by Clark in the back seat. Augie had had his turn first, and that had taken most of the zing out of her. Any remaining zing was fast ebbing away beneath Clark’s rapid pelvic thrusts, which sounded like someone slapping a raw steak.

“Come on, man,” Augie complained. “We’ll be in the next fiscal quarter by the time you’re done…”

More pounding, then, and Babba went lax, giving up all resistance, yet her eyes remained locked open, her lower lip trembled; Clark could feel the odd resonant shuddering of her body under his. He leaned up, arching his back, bucking harder to achieve orgasm. His gold dolphin chain jiggled and glimmered in the moonlight. Finally his thrusts stopped, and he sat up in the seat, disgruntled. He pulled his shirt back on and refastened his pants.

Then he peered at Babba.

“Shit…”

Augie grinned. “What’s wrong, stud? Couldn’t get John Thomas to give up the goods?”

Clark patted Babba’s cheek, and then concern narrowed his eyes. “I think she’s in shock, man. This was a stupid move.”

“Forget it,” Augie said. “Put some money in her pocket and push her out. These hayseeds get raped all the time, they’re used to it. To them it’s not even rape, it’s just part of life for them. Hell, their father’s break them in when they’re little kids.”

“How the fuck do you know!” Clark yelled. He was now feeling Babba’s pulse with some severity, then feeling her forehead.

“She’s all right,” Augie dismissed.

“I’m serious! She’s going into shock, and her body temp’s going down!”

“Well then do some doctor shit, make her better, and get her out of the fucking car! We gotta split before someone comes by!”

Clark’s silence now was ominous. “Holy… Turn on the dome light,” he said in a dreadful whisper.

Augie frowned and did so.

“Oh my God…”

“What’s wrong now?” Augie griped, itching to get a move on.

In the now well-lit backseat, Babba’s face was paling, clammy, and still. Clark raised his hands in horror to find them covered in blood.

More blood was all over the back seat.

“Holy fuck, Augie! She must’ve been a virgin!”

“Bullshit!” was Augie’s response. “She’s just on the rag!”

Clark’s face was intense. “Not with this much blood! We ruptured her hymen, man! She’s bleeding like a tap!”

Augie didn’t believe it until he looked into the back. Then he unbuckled his pants, looked down, and his eyes bulged. “Fuck! I got a shitload of blood all over my crotch!”

“Me too!”

“Just get her out of the car before she bleeds all over everything!” Augie pulled his t-shirt back on, then jumped out of the SUV. Outside, he opened the back door, grabbed the girl’s limp wrists, and pulled—
thunk!

She landed flat on her back, her breasts shuddering, nude save for the cutoff shorts still ringed about one ankle. Augie looked at her face but could only do so for a moment. Her mouth stretched open, and her eyes looked lidless. Was she still breathing? Augie doubted it but didn’t have the courage to find out. “Wipe up as much as you can with her top! We gotta beat feet!

The small halter was sodden in moments; Augie wiped up more blood with some rags he found in back. Then the rags, the halter top, and two bloody flipflops were tossed into the woods. Augie got back behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Shit, man! What are we doing?” Clark exclaimed. “We can’t just leave her here!”

“The hell we can’t.”

“She could bleed to death!”

“Open your eyes, doctor. She’s deader than dogshit already.”

Clark craned his head out the window. “Looks like you’re right, but I better check her vitals just to make sure,” and he started to open the door.

Augie floored the SUV, and he jerked out of the clearing, hit the road, and sped away, squealing rubber.

“Are you fuckin’ crazy!” Clark yelled. “We don’t know that she’s dead, and if she’s not she’ll give our descriptions to the cops!”

Augie started to calm down, both hands on the wheel, looking out at the road ahead. “You’re not thinking, man. She was bleeding like a stuck pig, and even if she’s not dead, she can’t tell anyone shit.”

“Why not!”

“What do you mean why not? She can’t talk and she’s retarded as fuck. I’m starting to wonder if she’s the only one.”

The reminder simmered Clark down. “Mental retardates can’t testify in court.”

“That’s right. If it’s our word against hers, we’ll win, ’cos she doesn’t have any words. Just that fucked up gibberish.”

Augie, now, actually smiled. He leaned over briefly to the passenger foot-well, plucked something up with index and forefinger. “Annnnnnnd? No DNA, either.” What dangled from his fingers was a used condom. “Smart boys always use rubbers.”

Clark’s eyes shot open. He gulped.

“Where’s yours?” Augie snapped. “You didn’t throw it out of the truck when we dumped her, did you? Fuck! If you did, we gotta go back and get it, you fuckin’ numbskull!”

Clark remained perfectly still, mouth agape, face frozen. “I don’t remember… Where did I…” Then he shoved his hand down his pants. “How do you like that? It’s still on my dick!”

They both laughed and laughed and laughed, as the SUV drove away as if nothing had ever happened.

««—»»

“Come on, man!” Brice yelled. “Are you out of your mind? You’re feeling up a dead girl!” and this was quite true. Brice’s consciousness only seemed to register intermittently, and his gaze seemed warped as he continued to look down.

Stoody was indeed fondling the dead blond woman’s breasts. He grinned up in the moonlight. “I don’t hear her complainin’.” He cupped his hand to his ear. “Do you? Still warm, too, and she ain’t started ta stink yet. Don’t see no worms, no maggots, no nuthin’.” Then he began to pull the corpus out of its grave.

“What are you doing?”

Stoody chuckled, as always, lackadaisically. “What’choo think? College boy like you? Dang!”

Once completely unearthed, the dead body seemed nearly luminous from the reaction of cool moonlight on the bloodless white skin.

“And, see?” Stoody remarked further, pointing into the hole. “That there’s her beau after the skin-job.”

Brice looked as if into a spiraling abyss. The reward for his effort was not immediately recognizable but after several moments of horrific contemplation, his brain pieced it together. It was a man without skin, yes, that had been entrenched under the blonde; without skin, that is, except for the face, which sheer, incogitable horror had turned into an inhuman rictus. Between the dead man’s sinewy legs was a queer lump the size of a lopsided basketball, perhaps, surrounded by uneven folds or flaps. Eventually, Brice figured it to be the entirety of the drug-dealer epidermis.

Stoody pulled the woman’s left knee back, to spread her legs in a lewd splay. He brought his hand to her sex and fiddled around. “Yeah, just as I thought. Pussy’s dry as dirt, no point ‘n double dippin’.” The grin flashed upward. “But I’ll bet a pot’a gold to a bucket’a dog shit, I can find me some juice,” and with this, he stuck his finger into the hole in the top of her skull. “Yep. Still wet, no worms yet.”

Stoody kneed around to the most efficacious position, and unbuckled his pants.

“No-no-no, please,” Brice gasped. “Tell me you’re not going to fuck a dead girl!”

Stoody winked. “Sorry, brother, but I can’t tell no lies. My mama brung me up better’n that. See, I am gonna fuck a dead girl…in the head. Most times they’se dead ’for the header anyhow. I’m just pickin’ one up off the floor a bit later than normal.”

He rested back on his knees and pulled the girl closer by her armpits until the top of her head was in his lap.

“You can’t be serious,” Brice croaked, and it was at this moment he witnessed the most obscene occurrence of his life:

He saw a man’s erection sink into a dead woman’s head.

“Does it look like I ain’t serious?” Stoody cracked, and then laughed. “Ooh, boy! Fits like a glove, it does!”

And then he began to thrust.

Brice felt stricken to a pillar of salt as he looked down helplessly. The sound of the act was nearly as obscene as the act itself…

PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

Stoody’s buttocks pumped as blond woman’s arms and legs lay extended and still.

PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

“Chance of a lifetime, brother,” Stoody said over his shoulder. “You can have her after me…”

Brice broke from his paralysis, teetering on his feet. He stumbled off into the woods, his footsteps thrashing.

“Ya don’t know what’cher missin’, man!” Stoody yelled amid the task at hand. “A header is the best feelin’ in the world!”

PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

Brice clapped his hands over his ears and broke into a wild run. Masses of thoughts tried to assail him but he managed to blot them out. He was simply running, running away from the atrocity, and if he had to he could continue like this, his mind a blank, and not stop running till he was back to Manhattan. He vomited as he ran, but merely turned his head to keep from getting any of it on him, somehow managing not to run into a tree in the process. He had no idea what direction he was taking, no gauge whatsoever of his position in relation to the motel, the town, anything, but next thing he knew, he’d stumbled out of the trees onto a moon-lit road, and—

CHAPTER SEVEN

Twin white lights blinded him, tires shrieked insanely. Brice heard a car horn blaring and men yelling, but it never occurred to him that he was about to be run down by a car.

Or almost run down.

He stood still in the headlights, eyes wide in shock. The front of the grill was inches from his knees. He could see the logo on the hood: BMW.

Before his senses returned he was being grabbed, then shoved toward the vehicle. “You fuckin’ crazy ass!” It was Augie’s voice. “We almost killed ya!” and then he was being pushed into the front passenger seat. Seconds later, Augie was behind the wheel and driving off.

“Are you drunk?” Clark asked from the back seat. “We almost ran you over in your own car! What were you doing jumping out in the road like that?”

“I…” Brice attempted. “I don’t know.”

“I thought you were going back to the motel.”

“I was but…shit.”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Augie yelled.

Brice had to take deep breaths into order to structure his thoughts. “You guys won’t believe what I just saw—”

Clark leaned forward from the back seat. “Yeah? Well you won’t believe what we just did.”

For a crazy moment, Brice just knew they were going to say they’d done a header. “What do you mean?” He was blinking away confusion. “And why were you sitting back there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Augie said. “We’ve leaving town. Now.”

Brice squinted. “But I thought…Hey, you guys are acting really weird. What gives?”

“We fucked up, that’s what gives. Clark, give him the short version.”

Clark sighed in a way that could only be described as dismal. “Jesus, Brice. When we left Backtown, we picked up a hitchhiker—you know, that girl…”

“What girl?” Brice snapped.

“The retarded girl with the big tits,” Augie answered.

“Yeah? So?”

“And, well, shit,” Clark faltered, “we put some moves on her, you know? And she seemed all right with it at first.”

“You put moves on her?” Brice’s face went dark with suspicion. “Wait, what do you mean she seemed all right with it at first?”

“Just listen, man!” Augie exploded. “We started doing her!”

“Doing her?” The atrocities he had witnessed tonight had not erased his memory of Babba’s twisted face, and he could not reconcile the thought of “doing her” with that.

Augie picked up the thread. “Yeah! Banging her! I went first, then Clark, and next thing we know she’s screaming…”

Brice went still, looked slowly at Augie, then slowly at Clark. “You assholes aren’t about to tell me you raped a retarded girl, are you?”

“I wouldn’t call it rape,” Augie replied very quickly.

“You said she was screaming!” Brice bellowed.

“Yeah,” Clark said, “but at first she didn’t seem to object. I offered her twenty bucks to show her boobs, so she did.”

“Sounds like consent to me,” Augie added.

Brice looked cockeyed at both of them. “You idiots! To a judge, it’s impossible for someone mentally incompetent to give sexual consent! At the very least you’re guilty of second degree rape, not to mention a shitload of other felonies!”

Augie grimaced. “Okay, fine! We did it, and there’s no taking it back! We should just leave town. The way I see it, we’re safe—”

“Safe?” Brice continued to yell. “Where do you get that?”

“She can’t tell anyone ’cos she can’t talk, and even if she could, it’s her word against ours, and she’s fuckin’ retarded!”

Brice wrung his hands in disgust. “Holy shit, I thought I’d heard everything tonight, but now you guys go and rape a retarded girl!”

Clark edged his face closer out of the back. “That’s, uh, that’s not the worst part, Brice…”

Brice glared. “How can it get any worse?”

Augie and Clark fell silent.

“Come on! Spit it out!” Brice shouted.

Clark sighed. “Evidently, she’d never had sex before. There was…a lot of bleeding…”

“Well, where the hell is she? You took her to a hospital, right?”

“No, man,” Augie said. “We had no choice. We left her in the woods and split.”

Brice nearly gagged on the information. “You gotta be shitting me!”

“She bled all over the back seat but we got it cleaned up pretty good,” Clark said.

Brice’s face fell into his hand. “Oh, no, no, no…”

“Look, it’s over and done with,” Augie snapped. “There’s nothing we can do now. If we’d had any idea it would go down like that, we never would have done it. We would have at least, you know, gone back door or something, but that’s neither here nor there. I say we pack our bags and go back to New York tonight.”

“Use your head, Augie! We just told the old lady at the motel we’d be staying a week! If we suddenly disappear, how would that look?”

“He’s right, Augie,” came Clark’s grim remark. “It’ll make us look guilty as hell.”

“What’s this us shit?” Brice exploded. “You guys did it!”

“Yeah, but you’re with us, Brice,” Augie remained. “And you know about it. You’re the fuckin’ lawyer. Isn’t there some statute or something about failing to report knowledge of a crime?”

“Yeah, it’s called misprision of a felony, and I ought to go to the cops right now!”

“For shit’s sake. I’m your brother and Clark’s our best friend,” Augie sounded confident. “You’re not a rat.”

Brice wanted to grab Augie by the throat. “No, I’m not, but this is still fucked up and I didn’t do anything to make it that way!”

Augie kept his cool. “We’re in this together, buddy bro. And the three of us are probably smarter than anyone in this shit-pit white-trash county. If we use our heads, we walk clean out of this. Shit, man, you saw her. I bet if you turn her in a circle three times, she’ll forget the whole fuckin’ thing. “

“You got it all figured out, don’t you?” Brice fumed. “And what if the girl dies? Did you ever think of that? Then it’s murder!”

“I don’t think she’ll die, Brice,” Clark said. “The bleeding had begun to abate.”

Augie nodded. “And if the bitch does die, she’ll be doing us a favor. We left her way back in the woods. If she croaks, animals’ll eat her.”

Brice just stared.

“And we never should’ve come to this cracker hell hole in the first place,” Augie added.

“It was your fuckin’ idea!” Brice bellowed. “You and your fuckin’ Dick Gurgler!”

“Everybody just calm down!” Clark snapped.

A stasis settled; only the sound of the vehicle’s tires over asphalt could be heard. Brice chewed a knuckle, thinking, thinking. Stoody outlined what an intolerant community this was for criminals, but there wasn’t a reason to suspect Augie and Clark, was there? The guilty reaction would be to flee. Eventually, he said, very calmly. “All right, we’re gonna play it cool. We’ll go back to the motel, get cleaned up, then we’ll go back to Sallee’s. We have to act normal. We’re just three guys from New York on a bender checking out a new town. We’re on vacation, so we have to look like we’re on vacation.”

“It makes sense,” Clark said, but he was still shaking.

“Augie,” Brice said. “You hearing this.”

“Yeah. That’s what we’ll do.”

“Let’s just hope nobody thinks a couple of rich city morons like you would try to molest some mentally disabled girl.”

Augie looked like he had something to say about that, but Brice backed him off with a hard glare. “I can’t believe this,” he muttered to himself. He couldn’t seem to go anywhere tonight without receiving a tremendous shock.

Not too long after, they’d parked the SUV in the motel lot. The town all around them felt oddly still and quiet; the same notion followed them into the motel. Augie, upon Brice’s instruction, started talking about baseball when they crossed the front lobby. “Fuckin’ Yankees! How can those bums get swept by fourth place Tampa Bay at home? Fuckin’ payroll’s two hundred and twenty mil!”

It sounded convincing. The shabby night clerk at the desk smiled, nodded, and went back to her Fifty Shades of whatever.

Brice’s eyes bugged once they were safely back in their room. Augie and Clark both had smudges of blood on their hands and shorts.

“Jesus Christ! You guys got blood on you. Go take showers, change your clothes. We’ll have to get rid of them later. It’s a damn good thing the lobby was dark. And I hope to God you guys used rubbers ’cos if you didn’t, you left DNA evidence.”

“We used rubbers, Brice,” Augie said. “Don’t shit a brick.”

Brice rubbed his face. “I still can’t believe you guys could do something like this.”

“Neither can we,” Clark said. He looked ashamed, but Brice wondered if that was from taking advantage of the girl or if it was pretty much all from the blood scare.

“Just get in the shower and get those clothes changed. I’m going to the convenience store for some cigarettes.”

Augie gave him a funky look. “You quit smoking years ago.”

“Yeah, and I just restarted.”

Certain areas of the carpet crunched when Brice headed down the hall. Otherwise not a sound could be heard. It was as if the motel had been abandoned, but the same abandonment lingered when he got outside. No town traffic, no people about, total silence on the street. His mind stayed blank when he went into the 7-Eleven clone at the end of the block; he was in and out with his purchase without even being aware. He leaned against the brick wall by an old pay phone, staring out. When he smoked his first cigarette in years, he didn’t taste it.

Christ, what’s next?

Sallee’s was right across the street, all flashing and blinking in neon. Finally the eerie silence broke as a group of rednecks piled out of a clunker car and noisily barged into the strip joint. Then the street fell dead-silent again.

Brice almost shrieked when his cell phone rang.

The caller ID said, “VAN”; John Van Dreelen, an office associate. He thought of sending to voice mail, but decided he could use a distraction before his heart burst in his chest. “Hey, Van. How’re things in the Big Apple?”

“Same old, same old. And how are things down in Timbuktu?”

“Fabulous,” Brice replied, close to gagging. “You all finish the Levanthorpe deposition?”

“It’s out the door and everything else is running smooth,” but then a pause drifted over the line.

“Why the foreboding pause?” Brice asked. “Something wrong at the office?”

“Well, sort of, I guess. It’s the damnedest thing…I worked late tonight so I decided to have a few drinks at the bar at Le Bernadin. A minute later someone takes the stool next to me: Glen Starns. Can you believe it?”

Brice smirked. “Bryson’s CFO. He’s the guy—”

“Right, the stiff prick who terminated the Bryson account. He barely remembered me, but shit, I had a couple in me by then, so I just flat out asked him. I said, ‘Hey, how come you guys pulled the account from us and gave it to Hathoway’s firm?’”

Brice’s eyes widened. He’d never been given a good reason. “What did he say?”

“He said they did a background on you and found a Form 1852.”

“What!” The exclamation exploded through the street. “That’s bullshit!”

“He said you had four ethics charges pending by NAA and the state attorney’s office—”

“That’s ridiculous! I don’t have anything pending! I never had!”

“That’s what I told him, but he didn’t believe me.”

Brice ground his teeth. “I’ll bet it was that rat fuck Hathoway, piped them a bogus form.”

“Probably, but how do we prove it? Funny thing is Starns said the account numbers matched former clients of ours. That’s confidential shit. No way in hell Hathoway could get our numbers.”

Brice had the phone pressed to his ear so hard it hurt. “He got ’em somehow ’cos I swear to God I’ve never had a Form 1852 filed on me. I’m a lawyer, I lie all the time, but I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve been knifed by that goddamn Hathoway more times than Julius fucking Caesar.” Brice had to close his eyes and take some deep breaths. “Look, Van, I can’t get out of here for a while, so just sit tight, all right? And look into this for me.”

“Will do, boss. Later.”

Brice put the phone away, spewing cigarette smoke. He could make nothing out of what he’d just heard. A competitor had filed an erroneous complaint against him? The Manhattan rumor mill was labyrinthine. People make up bullshit about other people all the time, just to see it if sticks, he realized. But this was serious. If Hathoway manufactured this smear-job, I’m gonna sue him till he can’t see straight. He’ll think a stone quarry landed on his head. We’ll see how Marcie likes him after he’s disbarred.

But this new conundrum, severe as it was, seemed like tiddlywinks compared to the matter at hand.

My brother and Clark just raped a retarded hillbilly girl! Brice wanted to punch the brick wall. The hits just keep on comin’!”

Across the street, Augie and Clark came out of the motel, Augie bearing a big grin. At least he’s a decent actor, Brice thought. Their blood-spotted clothes had been replaced.

Augie waved. “Come on, Brice! Let’s throw a few back!” He headed straight for Sallee’s. Clark came up to Brice in front of the convenience store, and whispered, “We scrubbed our old clothes out and put ’em in plastic bags—we’ll get rid of them tomorrow.”

“Good.”

“Augie’s going to the bar now. I’ll be right there—I gotta get a pack of cigarettes.”

Brice winced. “I thought you quit years ago.”

“I just restarted.”

A bell clanged when Clark entered the store. Brice sighed and stubbed out his cigarette in the change slot of a receiverless pay phone. He headed across the street to Sallee’s.

But had he looked a little closer at the phone, he would’ve seen a knife-scratched graffito on the side-board: a male stick-figure inserting its penis into the head of a female stick-figure.

And when Brice had departed, two shadows moved across the sidewalk and were eventually revealed as a pair of massive grinning men with identical faces.

Tucker and Clyde Larkins. Guffawing as was common with them, they bellied into the store…

««—»»

Walking from the near dead-silence into the cacophony of the strip joint made Brice feel swallowed by some abyssal beast. Just as their first visit, strobe lights flashed manically, heavy three-chord rock music pounded, nude strippers twirled machinelike on brass poles. In the single minute it took him to sit with Augie at a rear booth, Brice’s skull become an adobe for a monumental tension headache.

Augie looked at him forlornly, a rare expression. “Look, man. I’m sorry.”

“Great,” Brice replied, smirking.

“I don’t know what got into us. We got carried away, we fucked up. Sometimes…I lose control.”

Brice subdued himself against the excruciating fact. “Don’t talk about it. We act like it never happened.”

Augie nodded solemnly, then looked up, noticing something, and smiled. “Here comes your future ex-wife…”

Sarah May wended around some tables and sat down with them. She looked undeniably distressed.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, Sarah May,” came Brice’s bright response, but then he noticed that she had obviously been crying. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

The shapely waitress wiped her eyes and sniffled. “Oh, Brice, I just got the worst news…Someone up’n raped my cousin Babba tonight…”

Augie’s face petrified, Brice tensed up. “My God, Sarah May. I’m so sorry to hear that…”

“Yeah, that’s really terrible,” Augie added.

“And that ain’t even the worst part,” Sarah May went on, diddling with a napkin. “See, she were retarded, thirty years old but only had the sense of someone five. Way it looks is someone snatched her and did it back in the woods, then just left the poor girl there. She managed ta crawl back to Tick Neck Road. It was her brother Loger who found her as he were drivin’ by…”

Brice’s eyes popped a little at Loger. He touched her hand. “I hope she’s going to be all right.”

She began to sob outright. “See, she were bleedin’ real bad on account’a she were a virgin. Loger was drivin’n her to the hospital fast as he could, but just a few minutes later…she died. Bled to death.”

Sarah May broke down in tears, crying outright. “We’re so, so sorry…” Brice attempted, but inside he was roaring with rage. He uselessly put his arm around her.

Augie gulped. “Yeah, you have our deepest condolences…”

Brice could think of nothing to say. What could he say? All he could drum up was, “If there’s anything we can do…”

Sarah May had jaggedly recomposed herself. “I ’ppreciate your concern but, naw, ain’t nothin’ no one can do now.”

“I hope they caught the scum bag who did it,” Augie ventured.

“Probably never will,” she said, sniffling. “Probably just some creeker or meth-head passin’ through. Babba was conscious some of the time ‘fore she died but she couldn’t tell no one who did it ’cos she never learnt how ta talk…”

“Damn,” Brice said, but was thinking Damn YOU, Augie!

“My manager let me off early tonight,” she continued, “but I need a stiff drink before I go break the news to my grandma—”

“I’ll buy you one right now.”

“Naw, not here,” she said. “Lemme get my things, then we’ll go across the street to the Crossroads where there ain’t all this racket.”

“Sure thing,” Brice said, and then Sarah May departed in utter despair.

Augie and Brice exchanged terrified glances.

“I—” Augie began.

Brice could barely repress his rage. He snapped, “Don’t say anything.”

Loud, uncomfortable moments ticked by, filled with a silence that Augie would normally have filled with his off-color observations. He knew better than to push levity now. After a couple of minutes, he finally looked at his watch, disconcerted. “Where the hell is Clark?”

“Yeah, it shouldn’t take him this long to get cigarettes. I’ll call him—”

Augie shook his head. “Don’t bother. His cell battery’s dead.” He slipped out his iPhone and poked at the screen. Brice wondered why he needed the phone if they wouldn’t be able to reach Clark, but then he heard canned chortling and an unpleasant sound like something caught in a garbage disposal.

“What the hell are you watching?”

Augie didn’t look up. “Just checking the Hock Party video. They’re never going to believe this back home! Oh, Dora won by the way.”

Brice winced. It wasn’t a garbage disposal; it was somebody hawking up another phlegm oyster for the girls. Maybe Augie himself. “Jesus, please tell me you’re kidding!”

“What’s wrong? Just good clean fun. Clark could barely hold the phone steady.”

“Why the hell would you all record…” Brice trailed off. A wave of acid rolled in his guts as an obvious conclusion occurred to him. “Please tell me you idiots didn’t…didn’t film anything else tonight.”

Augie finally looked up from the phone. “Huh? Oh, you mean…no, of course not! Never even crossed our minds.” He held up a hand in a scout’s honor gesture. “Hand to God, bro. Besides, these fucking bumpkins wouldn’t know an MP4 from an IED.”

This was probably true. Brice hadn’t seen the perpetual blue glow around town of people hypnotized by their phones while real life happened all around them. New York sometimes looked like everyone glowing in the aftermath of a nuclear strike.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Augie dared quietly. “Clark said she was all right, and the guy’s a doctor!”

“Shut up, Augie!” Brice snapped. It was all he could do to keep his voice down.

I’ll hit him if I look at him another second.

He let his eyes do a sweep of the club, trying to calm down and breathe. A natural redhead hung upside down from one of the poles onstage, clinging with both hands. The bar was nestled between her D cup breasts. They slumped to either side. Men whooped and cheered as she spread her legs wide apart into a near full split. At an adjacent table, a raven-haired dancer pulled aside her G-string to the slobbering delight of a guy wearing an honest-to-God engineer hat. Across from him, his friend’s face was buried in the backside of a blonde grabbing her ankles.

“Clench it good and tight, darlin’!” Brice wasn’t sure which of the men said this.

Augie and Clark could have had any of these women in here, and they wouldn’t all be trapped in this nightmare. But no, they had to have Backtown. Augie needed his down and dirty.

Christ. The next few days would be the longest of his life. He still wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell them about what Stoody showed him. They’d probably insist on getting the hell out of there then. Or maybe not. Augie would probably want to see for himself, might even want to film the body. Or worse.

Come on, buddy bro, it doesn’t get much down and dirtier than this! And best of all, we can’t kill this one!

Stoody sure swore by it. T’was the best feelin’ I ever had in my whole blammed life.

More of that sickening episode threatened to replay in his head. He couldn’t help but notice the fair skin of the redhead on stage, almost as pallid as the girl Stoody showed him.

Ya don’t know what’cher missin’, man!

PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

Every thrust like the pounding of Brice’s pulse, cannon-like in his head. He shook it vigorously to try to clear away the awful memory.

The door opened up front. Brice expected Clark to step through at last and swivel his head around to find them, but it was some dude with a ridiculous beard that could have nested a bald eagle.

“He could still be at the store,” Augie offered, without conviction. “You know these yokels prattle on forever if you let them. Or maybe he went across the street to that other bar by mistake.”

“No, we specifically told him to meet us here. He wouldn’t confuse it with a place full of naked women, would he?”

They shared an uneasy glance.

Augie leaned over the table, his fingers talon-like around his iPhone. “Brice, I’m not liking this!”

“Calm down. He drank a lot tonight, right? He probably went back to the motel and passed out.”

Augie’s voice registered as a fierce whisper, barely audible over the merriment of the nearest table. “Yeah, but what if he didn’t?”

Brice grit his teeth. “Calm down!”

They couldn’t do something stupid now and behave in a manner that seemed suspicious. The gentlemen closest to them probably had no earthly idea Brice and Augie existed as their attention was absorbed by the strippers (“Make it wink, honey!” enthused one of the men, still mesmerized by the posterior so adroitly displayed by the blonde dancer), but they needed to keep their act together.

The panic in Augie’s eyes faded a little and he settled back into his seat. His phone continued to play the video of the Hock Party. Brice recognized Dora’s voice, tinny through the speaker but plenty loud enough: Cain’t you spit no better ‘n that, you damn pussy? You couldn’t drown a gnat with that pitiful loogie! Then another hawking, like a car engine that didn’t want to turn over.

“Will you shut that thing off?” Brice urged. “You’ve got beautiful women all around and you’re watching nasty trailer trash swallow spit!”

Augie tapped the screen and put it away, a little morosely. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop, checked the door again, and sighed. “Where the hell is he?” he muttered.

««—»»

Clark could have been forgiven for thinking he had a concussion, because he woke up seeing quadruple. The grins on them varied slightly, but four of the five faces hovering above him were otherwise identical. He looked from one to the next, brow furrowed, probably expecting them to coalesce into one figure. They remained separate. Each was a demented sculpture of delight and anticipation, a Mount Rushmore of the head humping elite.

The fifth face was unlike the others in both its appearance, as well as, its complete lack of mirth. Clark’s eyes narrowed against the harsh fluorescent light of the room, then widened in recognition of the mayor, Eamon. He tried to say something, but a gag rendered the words about as comprehensible as a dental chair confession.

Clark was roped to four corners of a table. He strained against the bonds, but they showed no sign of give and the table barely shuddered with the effort. The Larkins Brothers flanked each side, with Tucker and Clyde to the left and Gut and Horace to the right. They had the eager look of young boys who’ve stumbled on a stockpile of nudie mags.

Eamon towered above Clark at the head of the table. He leaned his face over Clark’s, both men upside down from the other’s perspective. “What we’se gonna do now, son, is called a raw-ballin’.”

Tucker pounded the table. “Cain’t just kill ya lickety-split!”

“Naw, that’d be too easy, too fast,” Gut agreed.

At the announcement of “kill ya,” Clark thrashed like a death row inmate receiving his final volts. His head whipped violently from side to side, and a word with a passing resemblance to “help” hummed repeatedly behind the gag.

Clyde poked him in the chest. “Fer what you done? You need ta feel some high ‘n mighty pain first.”

Horace held up a metallic object. He pushed his thumb into it and with a snikt!, a triangular blade peeked from the end like a jagged tooth. Clark’s eyes popped wide open at the sight of the box-cutter. He bucked against the table, chewing on his gag.

“Git them pants down,” Eamon ordered.

Gut and Clyde reached for the buckle and fly. Clark squirmed, but they had his trousers and boxers dragged to his ankles in seconds.

“Will you lookit that,” Gut said. “He ain’t got him no hair on his ball sac!”

They all marveled over Clark’s smooth, hairless genitalia, which looked desperate to hide under the glare of the fluorescent lights. His penis drew back like someone inside him was turning a crank.

“You mean he’s all growed up and ain’t never been through pub-erty?” Tucker asked.

“Naw, I bet he’s one of them fellers ‘at shaves it all off,” Horace pontificated. “Buncha them boys from the cities do it now. I guess they’se worried about lice and such.”

Gut shook his head. “Ya ask me, it’s bad enough fer girls to do that to their selfs.”

“It shore is,” Tucker concurred. “When you peel off their paynties and it sounds like yer tearin’ Velcro, a man knows he’s in for some good eatin’!”

They all nodded their agreement to this sage wisdom.

Horace pointed. “Lookit him! We barely touched him and he’s already cryin’!”

Sure enough, Clark’s eyes were shiny as tears rolled down the sides of his face. His muffled blubbering continued.

“Well, now you boys see how sensitive it makes a man to not have no hair on his works,” Tucker said solemnly.

“It’s downright embarrassin’, is what it is,” Gut summarized. “We should at least give him a reason for carryin’ on like that.”

Horace leaned over Clark’s supine form and took hold of the scrotal pouch. He yanked it up to expose its underside, mashing it down against the root of the penis. Clark flinched when he held the box-cutter to the skin.

“This part ain’t gonna hurt all that much,” Eamon assured, even as he paced around the table for a better view of the testicles and blade. “What we do, see, is first we cut a slit in yer ball-bag.”

Horace’s hand jerked and the box-cutter sliced a divot as long as his pinkie finger into the tender skin of Clark’s scrotum, revealing what looked like the yolk of an alien egg. It was a palette of primary reds and yellows, a network of glistening meat. Blood sluiced from the incision to either side to his thighs, trickling into a small pool on the table. Clark yelped through the gag, fists pumping once again at his restraints like he was trying to pound an invisible wall.

“Then we pop yer nuts out through the slit, so’s they’se hangin’ raw,” Eamon continued.

Gut and Horace both did the honors, each taking hold of one of the newly created flaps in the scrotum and manipulating the testicles through the divide in the pouch with a great deal of squelching as tissue rubbed against tissue. Dual sacs the color of bubblegum protruded through the opening, each embedded with the hieroglyphics of stretched veins. A stalk of bruised-looking flesh tethered Clark’s exposed balls back to the pocket like a bungee cord. He mewled miserably.

Eamon and the Larkins surveyed the handiwork a moment, enjoying a rare view unimpeded by any pubic growth. The extruded testicles shifted slightly as if nudged by their appraisal, the overhead light reflected in the slick surfaces.

“Good job, fellas,” Eamon said. “Tucker?”

Tucker nodded and took his leave from the room. There was a good deal of noise through the open doorway, but none of them were particularly concerned about any of their goings-on being overheard. Tucker disappeared through a door to the left and then returned a moment later. He now carried a metal pot, which he brought to the table. There was steam rising from it, trailing back into nothingness. The pot continued bubbling after he set it down, a dark, thick substance like oil.

Gut pushed the door shut to block off the background noise. The best part was coming and they wanted to be able to hear it.

“Now, what we got in this here pot is a quart’a molasses,” Eamon informed Clark. “It’s been bubblin’ down fer a while so’s its good and hot. See, when ya cook it down some it gets nice’n thick, and it holds its heat a lot longer than boilin’ water.”

Tucker took the grip and tilted it slightly. A dollop slipped from the pan to strike the table just inches from Clark.

“Now this part, son,” Eamon continued, “is gonna hurt.”

“Hold still,” Tucker admonished.

Clark did no such thing, but he didn’t have much of a perimeter for escape maneuvers. A gyration of his hips tugged at the cord depending from his divided scrotum, but barely slid his rubbery looking testicles a few inches along the table. Tucker slowly tilted the pan above Clark’s crotch.

“Just dribble it at first, Tucker,” Eamon advised. “We don’t want him passin’ right out. Just dribble it over them raw nuts.”

A trickle of syrupy fluid eased over the rim of the pan to the vulnerable tissue below. The molasses crackled and hissed as it spattered, striking the testicles like droplets of barbecue sauce. Steam rose from the scalded flesh.

Clark bucked against the table with anguished shudders, capable of only muffled vowel sounds. By this point he was practically running in place, heels pounding the table top in agony.

“Little more now,” Eamon prompted.

Tucker obliged with a dip of the pan until there was a prominent sizzling sound above Clark’s stifled caterwauling and torture percussion. His eyes looked only inches from popping out of the sockets altogether, filmed over with the tears of his suffering.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeee-yeah!” Gut whooped, and his brothers joined in the revelry, elated by this display of genital singeing.

For his own part, Clark did not.

“The dick now, Tucker,” Eamon said. “We cain’t forget about the dick.”

“No, sir!” Tucker agreed. He led the trail of molasses from the testes and up along the tethering cord until the burning goop began to trickle upon the slumped appendage on Clyde’s belly.

This time, Clark’s convulsions were seizure-like in their intensity. The table legs thunked the floor as they bounced in his frenzy. His eyes pinballed in all directions, as though the ceiling would award him a release from agony if he could just find the hidden escape up there.

“How’s that feel, son?” Eamon asked. “That feel good? Huh?”

In several places, the penile skin bubbled, popping and sputtering. A portion of the head liquefied, running down the shaft like molten wax. It revealed an angry red algae-like tissue within.

Eamon grabbed both of Clark’s cheeks between his thumbs and forefingers. He squeezed and shook them, eliciting a sound that tickled the Larkins Brothers as downright masturbatory. “That feel as good as when you was fuckin’ my daughter ta death?”

On cue, Tucker upended the rest of the pot over Clark’s dick and balls, splashing his belly and thighs. The molasses steamed like boiled noodles poured out in a colander. The cords of Clark’s neck stood out like rubber bands as he screamed, a sound that was barely recognizable as human any more.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Brice held the door open for Sarah May as the three of them walked out of Sallee’s. His jaw tightened when he noticed Augie checking out her ass. Augie gave him a Hey, I’m only human shrug, which was pretty ironic considering all the inhuman shit he’d been up to tonight.

Sarah May wiped her eyes. They were red and irritated from her tears, but she still looked beautiful to Brice.

I was supposed to go out with her tomorrow, he thought mournfully. He assumed that was off the table now, and good thing, too. It was torture to accompany her now, knowing the identity of her cousin’s killers and having to protect them and lie to her.

I watched that sicko Stoody fuck a dead girl’s brain! How the hell was that not the worst thing to happen tonight?

Sarah May sniffed, dabbed her eyes with a tissue, and asked, “Where’s your other friend, the doctor fella?”

“That’s what we were wondering,” Augie said.

The street was quiet. They had hoped to come out and see Clark pacing outside, puffing on a cigarette, but the three of them were the only people outside at the moment. Music pulsed behind the walls of Sallee’s and a dog barked far off in the distance, but otherwise it was quiet.

“He was supposed to meet us at Sallee’s but I think he went back to the motel,” Brice said. We hope he did, anyway. “He had a lot to drink tonight.”

“Oh,” Sarah May said. She tucked the tissue away into her purse, a compact red thing that didn’t look like it could hold more than a wallet and lipstick.

“So what’s this place we’re going to?” Augie asked.

“The Crossroads, just right over there.” She pointed across the street to a tavern with its name across the top in red neon. “It’s just a quiet neighborhood bar.”

“That’s more my speed,” Brice said. “Sallee’s was getting a bit too rowdy for me.”

They walked across Main Street to the front of Crossroads. The muted noise of Sallee’s was a faint whisper now.

He suspected Augie would jump at the chance to do some more drinking. Brice hoped he would have better sense than to announce the three of them had gone to Backtown earlier tonight, but then on the heels of that he wondered if it would seem suspicious if they didn’t mention it. A bunch of people saw them, and her cousin, that Loger guy, knew they’d talked to her. Word had a way of getting around here. What would he say if Sarah May asked him about it later?

Oh, sorry, it just kind of slipped our minds to mention we chatted with your cousin—or tried to—right before she bled to death.

Invisible hands wrung Brice’s insides as if someone were using them to rope climb. They had days of this sort of second-guessing to negotiate before they could go back home and leave behind this nightmare burg of spit-drinkers and head-fuckers.

We can’t lose our cool about this, Augie had said during their wait for Sarah May. These hicks probably think extradition is something they do every Thanksgiving.

Brice begrudgingly agreed, but they should deflect suspicion altogether. They couldn’t leave for that very reason. It was why Clark’s disappearing act was so troubling. They would have trusted him implicitly before tonight, but you never knew how someone would act in a crisis.

He’s passed out back in the room, that’s all!

Brice once again held open the door for Sarah May, and Augie once again took mental snapshots of the rear view. Brice sighed as they filed into the bar. Compared to the pounding music and sweaty carnality of Sallee’s, Crossroads was a welcome change of pace. There was music, but it was as subliminal as the pockets of idle conversations emanating from the booths and tables.

Sarah May chose a table and Brice pulled out a chair for her, then sat down across from her. Augie went straight to the bar to get them some drinks.

“So this is the local watering hole,” Brice said, taking in the atmosphere.

A couple of local boys were stationed at a pool table in the corner. Balls clacked and thumped against the felt walls as one of them took a shot.

Brice nodded his approval. “It’s a welcome change, I’ll tell you that.”

One of the pool players cackled. “You scratched it, ya dumb fucklick!”

“I like this bar,” Sarah May said. “Ain’t full’a creeps and whatnot.”

Brice considered the sort of clientele she must see night after night at work. “I suppose that must get old sometimes at Sallee’s.”

“Shore it does, sometimes,” she agreed. “It ain’t ever’ day you feel like someone offerin’ you money to have their selfs a nut in yer tailpipe.”

“No, I…I would imagine not,” Brice said.

“Ya can hear yourself think in here.” She sniffled and folded her hands on the table.

Brice slid a hand over hers. “How you holding up?
“Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “Just takes a while for the reality ta sink in, that someone could do that ta such an innocent like her.”

“Sure,” Brice said, patting her hand.

“It just don’t make no sense ta me. Who could do somethin’ so awful?”

Augie appeared right on cue, clopping down three glasses in the middle of their table. He served a fake French accent with them. “Mademoiselle, monsieur? Your apéritifs are served.” He slid into the chair beside his brother.

Brice wasn’t sure where to take the conversation now, but he was spared the dilemma momentarily when Eamon suddenly appeared at their side. He’d somehow missed the mayor when they walked in.

Eamon gave Sarah May a doleful look.

He already knows? Damn, news travels fast in this town.

“Oh, Uncle Eamon,” Sarah May said. She pushed back her chair and stood up to hug him. “This is all so horrible. I just don’t know how ta deal with it.”

Brice caught Augie looking at him. Augie mouthed the word Uncle? Then fuck!

“I know, hon.” Uncle Eamon sighed wistfully. “But it’s true that God works in mysterious ways, so’s even when a innocent person dies bad, it ain’t really bad ’cos we all lives forever in the House’a the Lord.”

Sarah May began sobbing again. The hands which had been squeezing Brice’s insides moved up to clamp around his heart. He’d spent the past few weeks moping over Marcie, and here was someone going through a real tragedy.

“Aw, jiminy, Uncle Eamon,” she said, “I shore hope you’re right.”

Eamon released her from his embrace, sliding his hands down her arms until he took hold of her hands. “A’course I am, so that’s why when folks die, we don’t get all sad and feelin’ low. Babba’s in a far better place now, so’s we should honor her by celebratin’ the great lives God up’n give us.”

Sarah May nodded glumly and wiped her eyes.

The mayor seemed to finally notice Brice and Augie seated at the table. “Howdy, boys. Guess you heard we had us a tragedy tonight.”

Augie nodded. “Yes, sir, we did.”

“We’re very sorry to hear it,” Brice said. “Such a terrible thing.”

“I ’preciate yer consolin’ words, fellas, but like I were sayin’, there ain’t no call fer grief, no sir. Ain’t what Babba would want.”

Brice assumed he meant a theoretical Babba in possession of greater faculties of cognitive awareness.

“Oh, and I’se glad you’re here!” Eamon said, as if he’d just thought of it. “I just run into yer doctor pal at the convenience store.”

Brice raised a brow. “Clark?” He shared a glance with Augie, who looked hopeful.

“Yeah. Told him ’bout our poker game in back, so’s that’s where he is now. Some card player, that boy is.”

Augie laughed. “Well, we both got cleaned out in—” He realized he was about to say Backtown and held up. “—in Atlantic City the last time we gave it a go. But Clark’s here, now?”

“Yup. Come on back if you’ve a mind for some cards. Ante’s five bucks.”

“We will, Mayor,” Brice said.

“Yeah, thanks, sir,” Augie added.

Brice held out his hand from force of habit. It seemed like Eamon looked at it distastefully for a second before he extended his own for a handshake.

Nonsense. I’m being paranoid, like with Clark, and look how that turned out.

If he truly was back there then it was aggravating the way Clark no-showed on them, but maybe helpful in the long run if he’d been with the mayor. It didn’t seem like the actions of a guilty man, although this bothered Brice a little bit too for that same reason—How could he be back there playing poker like nothing happened? For that matter, why would Eamon?

Eamon turned back to Sarah May and they exchanged another hug. She appeared to have taken some consolation from her uncle’s sermon, and even managed a little smile for him before he wandered off.

Brice and Augie traded mystified looks again.

“How do you like that?” Augie asked.

“Seems kind of strange, doesn’t it? He blew us off for a card game without letting us know?”

“Must be one’a them fellas who’s got a hard hankerin’ ta gamble,” Sarah May offered.

Brice rubbed his chin. “Well, he is, but still…it’s kind of…weird.”

Augie shrugged and picked up his drink. “Not really. He happened to run into the mayor in the store, heard about the game, and came to check it out. Probably figured he’d play a few hands, then come over to meet us at Sallee’s. But you know Clark. Once he gets rolling, he doesn’t stop.” He knocked back his drink.

Brice gave him a doubtful look, but didn’t say anything. It was just a hell of a time for Clark to go AWOL. Maybe he thought it would look suspicious to turn the mayor down, but strange that he didn’t at least take a rain check until he went to Sallee’s to get his accomplice and accessory after the fucking fact.

“Well, why don’t we go in the back now?” Sarah May asked. The color she lost from the shock of tonight’s news had begun to return to her face. “You fellas can play some cards, and I can see how Loger’s doin’. That’s Babba’s brother. Poor guy’s probably all shook up.”

“Might as well,” Brice replied indifferently, but inside he was thinking, Christ, is the whole town related to that girl?

The hands went back to work squeezing his guts as he eased his chair back from the table. Loger talked to all of them in Backtown earlier. Brice had been too pissed off to discuss this with Augie back at Sallee’s, thinking they had plenty of time to hash it out before it became critical. He looked for some sign on Augie’s face that he’d realized what a bombshell Loger’s involvement was, but far as his brother was concerned, their troubles ended with the revelation of Clark’s whereabouts. He probably didn’t remember Loger at all and thought of him as Yokel #47.

Too late now. Loger can’t actually be in the back anyway, can he? What’d he do, get the news from the hospital and then tear ass over here for a card game?

Of course not. He’d misunderstood her, obviously.

Brice pointedly inserted himself between Sarah May and Augie as she led them to a hallway between the bar and the pool table, spoiling Augie’s view of her ass at least once tonight. One of the pool players nodded curtly at Brice, cue stick held at port arms. He returned the nod, and they went single file down the corridor. It amused him to see a payphone hung on the wall.

Yeah, they haven’t been swept up in the cell phone revolution down here.

They passed a door to the kitchen on the right, another door beyond that, bathrooms on the left, and then Sarah May brought them to a door at the end of the hall marked PRIVATE.

Unbeknownst to Brice, back in the main area all of the locals began to grin, and normal conversation gave way to animated whispering and muted snickering. They shushed one another so as not to spoil the surprise.

“Here we is, fellas,” Sarah May announced. She gripped the doorknob.

“Sarah May, I hope the mayor and his friends are good sports,” Augie said.

“They are, but why’d ya ask that?”

Augie laughed. “’Cos I’ll clean out every chip in the room. Feel a lucky streak coming on.”

Brice frowned. The “lucky” thing would be for Augie and Clark to lose their asses and not single themselves out any more, although something still seemed shady to him, a little bit off—

Sarah May pushed open the door and stood against it to let Brice and Augie walk past. They both paused, brows furrowing. Augie’s smile froze and evaporated.

“What’s going on?” Brice asked.

“Yeah, where’s the card game?”

There were enough people back here for a solid game of poker, but whatever they had going on, it didn’t involve a deck of cards. Three men stood with their backs to Brice and Augie and didn’t turn to acknowledge them, as if too engrossed by what they were watching before them.

Brice heard the sound then. PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

Oh, God, not again…

As one, he and Augie looked back at Sarah May. She still stood by the door, but it wasn’t her now. Not the face of the sweet, warm, and gorgeous woman they came here with, but a morbid leer of madness.

Before either of them could take a step toward the doorway, they cried out in surprise as strong hands seized their arms and chicken-winged with nonchalant ease.

“Well, hey there, city boys!” greeted the one who subdued Brice.

The one who grabbed Augie giggled. “Glad ya could drop in!”

Brice and Augie squirmed, to zero avail. Their arms were locked in place, invisible spears of pain poking into their spines.

Brice craned his head over at Augie. “I knew something was fishy!”

Augie continued to thrash. “Let me go, you big redneck fuck!”

The big redneck fuck yanked him back until his mouth was inches from Augie’s ear. “Oh, we’ll let ya go…when we’re are good and done with ya! Ain’t that right, Clyde?”

“Shore is, Horace. These boys’ll be shittin’ their big city paynties ‘fore it’s all over!”

This prompted general laughter, Sarah May included. The door creaked as she slammed it shut behind them.

“Brice, this is fucked up!” Augie grunted.

“Tell me about it.” He stopped fighting his captor. His shoulder blades felt like they were about to poke through his skin.

Throughout all of this, the line of bodies in the middle of the room continued to watch something they concealed from Brice and Augie’s sight. They still had not taken their eyes from it, not during the arrival of their visitors or the struggle to subdue them. On the other side of them, that moist refrain: PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

“Ease up on my arms, you yokel son of a bitch!” Augie snapped. “What’s that noise? And what the fuck is this?”

Brice’s answer came out as a croak. “I think I know…”

Behind him, Clyde said, “Hey, Mayor? Why don’t’cha step aside there with Gut and Tucker so’s our friends can see?”

Eamon, Gut, and Tucker at last turned to greet the new arrivals.

Shit, how many of these freaks are there? Brice wondered. Both the guys holding him and Augie and two of the watchers were identical.

Eamon looked somber, but the ones called Gut and Tucker were all smiles, toothy cheer plastered across their faces. The sight of quadruplets in the room failed to hold Augie’s attention for long as he was finally able to see what the group had blocked.

“Brice. My God. He’s…he’s…” Augie’s mouth hung open as he struggled to find the words.

Having witnessed a variation of this barely over an hour ago, Brice understood the failure of speech to adequately articulate what they were seeing. Clark was back here after all, cinched to a table with his pants down. A viscous substance coated his genital area like tar, but it could not completely obscure the stomach-churning mutilation performed on him.

His fucking balls are on the table!

What was left of them, anyway. They looked melted, connected to his scrotum with a liquefied strand like stretched caramel. Clark almost looked like he was still alive, too, with his head tilted up, shaking as if one of the guys from Scanners was about to detonate his skull, and his face a rictus of anguish. The gold chain bounced on his chest, crinkling and straightening. His eyes were still open, sightlessly staring in the direction of Brice and Augie, but far beyond them. The illusion of life was spoiled by Loger’s hands clamped to Clark’s ears to hold him up as his pelvis thrust into the top of Clark’s head in a way that could not have been possible had the cranium not been hollowed out for several inches. Noticing his new audience, he pulled back enough for them to see the blood-smeared shaft of his dick, like the arm of a baby freshly pulled from a mother’s womb. Then he sank back into the drilled cavern with a sigh of pleasure and soon found his rhythm again, a look of intense concentration on his face that bizarrely mirrored Clark’s expression of pain. And once again, that awful sound of moist acceptance within the skull: PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

“It’s called a header,” Brice said, swallowing bile. “It’s how these people get their revenge.”

Eamon nodded at this assessment, his arms folded like he was surveying manual labor. “And you boys know what we’se getting’ revenge for. Don’t even act like ya don’t.” He turned to Sarah May and added, “Good job gettin’ ’em here.”

Sarah May grinned, her face flushing with the praise. “’Twas easy, Uncle Eamon.”

She caught Brice looking at her and winked, her smile no longer seductive but sadistic. She returned her attention to Loger’s display as he pounded at Clark like a piston of flesh. Her lower lip quivered and she moaned, sliding her hands up to caress both of her breasts, tweaking her nipples between thumbs and fingers. She licked her lips.

But isn’t Loger her…her cousin? Brice thought sickly. Something about that disturbed him almost as much as the header. His throat burned from another gulp of bile.

“Oooo-EEE!” Loger shouted. “This here’s the best brain puss I ever did have me! This boy’s head feels good, it does!” With that exuberant hosanna, the thrust of his pelvis kicked into an even higher gear. PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP!

Gruesomely, Brice noticed tendrils of mushroom-colored tissue ooze through one of Clark’s nostrils, like mush cranked through a Play-Doh factory. Clear fluid dribbled from the other nostril.

“You get it, Loger!” Sarah May cheered. “Drop yer fuck in that bastard’s brain!”

“Just you hump that city boy’s head!” Gut cried. “You hump it fierce!”

“Fill that city boy’s head up with your ball sauce, Loger!” Tucker commanded.

Brice glanced at Augie, who continued to gape at this horror. His face was the color of mashed potatoes. He could only seem to remember to breathe through his mouth.

“I’se gonna have me my nut here, boys,” Loger reported, rattling Clark’s head in his hands like he was shaking a paint can. He flinched and stalled his thrusts. “Ah! There she goes! Eeeeee-YUH!”

Sarah May squealed and clapped her hands, finishing with a little cheerleader jump. “You did it, Loger! You filled that rape-o piece o’ shit’s melon to the brim, real good and proper! Our Babba’d be proud!”

“Get’cha a good nut right up in ‘nare, son. That’s the way,” Eamon said, still the only solemn one of the lot despite everyone else heaping praise on Loger like a toddler who blew out all his birthday candles.

Clark’s head thumped on the wood. Loger whistled as he stepped back from the table, his penis coated with blood and chunks of gray matter. He gasped, clearly winded from his brain-copulating exertions. He braced himself against the wall and gradually managed to hoist up his jeans and button them again.

He’s not even going to clean that off? Brice thought inanely.

Under the table on the far side, little spatters began to drip on the floor like a melting icicle. Runoff from Clark, whose head now rested against the table top like a fallen jug with no cap.

“I can’t believe it,” Augie said, with barely any inflection. He looked like he’d slink to the ground and curl up in shock if Horace wasn’t locking his arms. “Clark was always threatening to shave it all down there. I never thought he’d go through with it.”

Brice hadn’t noticed until he said that, but sure enough, there was no hair to be seen on Clark’s crotch.

“He thought it would make him look bigger, like those porno guys.” Augie shook his head. “It doesn’t look bigger at all…just weird.”

Brice was inclined to agree, though perhaps a partially dissected scrotum and boiled dick didn’t offer the fairest specimen for evaluation.

“Now, where is our manners? Yawl haven’t been properly introduced, have ya?” Eamon indicated the colorful cast of characters in the room. “This tall son of a gun is Loger, my son, and these other fellas who all look alike, why, they’se—”

“The Larkins Brothers,” Brice finished for him.

“Boy, why you’se are just a blammed fountain of knowledge, ain’t ya?”

“I heard all about the Larkins Brothers tonight, and I saw some of their handiwork. The dead blonde with the hole in her head? And the boyfriend without any skin? I saw their bodies in the woods. We dug up the grave.”

“You did what?” Augie asked. A little life had returned to him.

“Well, that’s pretty low down if’n ya ask me,” Clyde said from behind Brice, “disturbin’ someone’s grave like that.”

“You mean the grave of someone whose head you put your dick in when they were probably already dead?” Brice asked. He cried out as Clyde tweaked his arms up behind his back.

“Yeah, that’s what I done told you, city boy! You retarded in the head or somethin’?”

“Brice, why the hell didn’t you say something to us?” Augie wasn’t about to drop his line of inquiry.

He didn’t answer. Because we got tied up with that whole incident where you sexually assaulted a family member of half the people in this room didn’t seem like such a good thing to reveal. Clark’s fate all but assured they were terminally screwed (in the figurative sense, with reservations for the literal as well), but if they had a glimmer of hope, a confession would bury it.

Eamon smirked at Gut and Horace. “Now you boys are gonna have ta be more careful when you’re a-buryin’ these folks, ya hear?”

“Sorry, Mayor,” Gut mumbled. “Shee-it.”

Eamon returned his attention to Brice and Augie. “But back ta what I was sayin’, see, there’s one more person here too, who you’ve already met.” He nodded to Tucker and Gut, who walked past them to the door.

Shellshocked or not, soon as they opened the door, Augie hollered, “Help! Please help us!”

The Larkins snickered, and Brice’s stomach sank to his shoes when he realized there was chuckling outside the room too, from back in the bar. A few people yelled Help! in falsetto, mocking Augie.

Everyone is in on this. It’s like “The Lottery,” but they’re fucking brains instead of throwing rocks.

Augie struggled to rabbit for the doorway, but Horace held him with such a lack of effort, he may as well have been a child. Brice didn’t bother. There were three times as many people outside who’d be willing to stop them. They wouldn’t be able to run from this. Their only shot was to swear Clark did it himself. If he had any misgivings about the ethics of that, he only had to look over at Clark dripping jizz from a skull-hole to convince himself that friendship wasn’t everything.

Tucker and Gut emerged from the unmarked door beside the kitchen, apparently a maintenance closet. They pushed a rolling chair into the room, in which sat a body wrapped with a bloodied sheet. Brice recognized Babba immediately. Her head lolled, tongue dangling as they spun her around for her intended audience.

“This here’s Babba. My daughter.” Eamon was silent for a moment, stricken by the sight of her. He cleared his throat, perhaps remembering she was in a better place now. “Babba were as innocent as innocent could be. Come out all wrong, the poor thing. Brain all mussed up.” He glared at Augie and Brice with eyes of cold steel. “How could you rape and murder someone like that?”

“We didn’t rape or murder anyone!” Augie shouted. “You know we came here for Sallee’s. The ugliest girl in there didn’t look like a distant relative of the fucking Elephant Man, so why the hell would we choose that instead?”

But no offense, Brice thought.

“No? Well, we shore heard ya did. ’Twas Babba herself who told us.”

“Bullshit! She couldn’t have told you anything ’cos she couldn’t talk!”

Brice would have face-palmed if his hands were free. Augie seemed to know an awful lot about her for someone who allegedly didn’t hurt her. He felt compelled to interject, “We did see her in Backtown, and she didn’t talk.”

“Couldn’t talk with her mouth, no,” Eamon agreed, “but she could talk just fine with her hands.”

Loger wore a death’s head grin. “Ain’t ya never heard’a sign language? I learnt by takin’ county classes so’s ta help Babba grow up easier. ’Twas free, too!”

He pointed with his index and middle fingers at eye level and dropped them until they were at the middle of his chest, then made a motion from right to left in front of his face, as if finishing a cross in the air.

“That’s how ya say ‘yer dead meat’ signin’,” Loger informed them. He laughed, with Sarah May and the Larkins soon joining in.

“Shore as shit, son,” Eamon said. “Poor Babba was bleedin’ like a blammed spigot when Loger got her home, but ‘fore she died she told us it was two city fellas who up’n raped her. Said one of ’em had a fancy gold chain ‘round his neck.”

He fingered the chain around Clark’s neck.

Two city fellas. Brice hung onto those words. They couldn’t pawn it all off on Clark. She’d implicated two of them.

Sweat gathered at his brow. He would swear the walls had moved in, that he should be able to touch both sides if he held his arms out.

Two city fellas. Double header.

Oh, Christ.

“But what we’se faced with now I think is what they call a quandary,” Eamon continued. His gaze shifted from Brice to Augie. “’Cos Babba told us that two fellas raped her. So…which one’a you was it?”

“This is bullshit!” Augie had begun to sweat, too, Brice noticed. “You guys are psychopaths!”

“I thought you’d say as much. Sarah May?”

Sarah May finally showed a hint of her seductive smile as she sauntered over, a mean sway to her hips. She’d teased her nipples to erect points watching Loger. The soft mounds nudged against Brice as she came up to him and began running her hands up and down his chest.

“What in God’s name…?”

“God’s name?” Eamon echoed. “It weren’t in God’s name that Babba was fucked ta death by one’a you.”

“Brice, what the fuck is this?” Augie shouted.

“I think I can guess,” he replied. His voice cracked as if he’d regressed to puberty.

Sarah May turned away from him. She bent over and ground her ass against Brice’s crotch. The sway she’d demonstrated a moment ago returned, rubbing side to side. She faced him again, level with his crotch. She met his stare and slowly ran her tongue across her lips. She seized a handful of his shirt and near the beltline and slipped it out. It stretched as she stood. Once upright, she continued to tug Brice’s shirt up in a single fluid motion. Clyde relinquished his grip so Brice could raise his arms and allow her to pull it all the way off. She twirled it in a helicopter fashion and released it. Its momentum sent it sailing into the corner.

“Well, ain’t that somethin’?” Eamon said as he inspected Brice’s chest. He turned to Augie. “I was hopin’ it was you.”

“I didn’t do anything! Brice, tell him I didn’t do shit!”

Sarah May danced her way to Augie. He suddenly wasn’t the least bit excited to have such a commanding view of her ass. She winked at Brice again as she worked her backside into Augie’s groin. Horace kept Augie’s arms locked since he still seemed intent on trying to dash out the door.

“See, what Babba signed ta Loger was the second fella had a big ole shark tattooed on his chest,” Eamon revealed.

“Yeah,” Loger said. “See, she knowed what a shark is on account’a this pitcher book.” He picked up a tattered booklet from a table in the corner, displaying an illustration with the words S IS FOR SHARK.

Sarah May squealed with delight. Rather than a teasing effort to pull off Augie’s shirt, she whipped it up from his waist and pulled it over his head like a bed sheet. Augie’s head twisted side to side like he could see anything but the fabric which had made a shroud of his face.

“Now would you look at that!” she said, poking the shark on his chest. Augie flinched.

“Shore is the damn silliest lookin’ tattoo I ever seed,” Tucker opined.

“A hell of a job on her part makin’ the connection ‘tween the pitcher in this here book and that shitty lookin’ drawin’ ya got there, boss. “ Loger said.

Augie slumped in defeat, as if wounded by these dispersions. Sarah May obliged him by pulling the shirt back from his face.

Eamon had backed up to the far end of the long table. He patted Clark’s head. “I’m afraid this head’s wore out. See, me, Gut, Tucker’n Loger done had our go…but Clyde and Horace ain’t gone yet.”

“That’s right,” Clyde affirmed behind Brice. “We’se been waitin’ all patient like to put us some peckersnot in a tight coconut.”

Eamon managed a rueful smile at Augie. “Congratulations, son. You’re gonna be the fresh head.”

Behind him, Horace grinned ear to ear. “Boy? We’se gonna fuck your head like it’s a two-dollar whore!”

“We shore are, Horace! We shore are!” Clyde concurred. “Ain’t had me a city boy brain nut in a coon’s age.”

Horace slapped the back of Augie’s head. “You got you some prime rib settin’ on that neck. Yes sir, I’se got a big ole load waitin’ to pump inta yer brain.”

Eamon clapped his hands once, gunshot loud. He had reverted to his deadpan expression. “Time for the next round. Boys?”

Loger grabbed a handful of Clark’s shirt and slid him across the table until he flopped off the edge and hit the floor in a tangle of limbs. Loger’s contribution (and evidently Eamon, Gut, and Tucker’s as well) continued to ooze from the crevice in his head like Elmer’s glue.

Horace manipulated Augie into a full-nelson and muscled him over to the table. He slammed him on the table top until Loger, Gut, and Tucker joined the effort. They spun him around and hauled him up. The angle of the table went crooked as Augie fought to free himself.

“Brice! Help me! They’re going to run a train on my fucking head!”

Clyde took hold of Brice’s arms again as a warning, although Brice had no intention of coming to Augie’s aid. What could he do? They were outnumbered in this room and outside in the bar.

Over on the table, Loger fastened rope from one corner around Augie’s right hand. They had it looped around the chair leg. The brothers held onto Augie’s kicking legs and left arm until Loger completed firm enough knots to keep the right hand secured.

“I never touched her!” Augie screamed. “She lied, you stupid fucking bumpkins! SHE LIED!”

“Shore she did,” Eamon said. “She just got lucky that you had a retarded lookin’ shark on ya, is that it?”

“I didn’t touch her! Brice, tell them I didn’t touch her!”

Brice opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

It’s my brother, I’ve got to try something! he thought, but when he tried to speak again, the words weren’t there. He knew the words wouldn’t change anything, except maybe make it worse for himself for trying to cover for Augie.

Tucker worked the rope around the left hand while Loger and Horace saw to Augie’s feet. With all of his limbs effectively restrained, he whipped his head from side to side as one of the few body parts he could freely move.

His tongue was another.

“Brice! Holy shit! Help me! Goddamn it, Brice! These animals are going to fuck my head! Do something!”

Brice found something to say after all. “What do you want me to do, damn it? This whole thing is your fault!”

Augie continued to struggle against Loger and the brothers, but he’d ceased to thrash his head, fixing his eyes on Brice. They bulged in wounded disbelief. “I’m your brother, for shit’s sake! Help me!”

For better or worse (right now, definitely the fucking worst ever), Augie was his brother, and his contemptible actions did not change that fact. Nor did all the asshole rhetoric he spouted given half a chance. Nobody was any one thing, although Brice would have a hard time seeing the guys in this room as anything more than drooling, degenerate sickos even if he saw them handing out presents to little boys and girls at an orphanage. As much as Brice abhorred what his brother and Clark had done tonight, he found he couldn’t sit by passively. “Come on, Mayor! You can’t do this!”

“Oh, but we can and we will. We already done it, case you forgot.” Eamon nodded in the direction of Clark’s crumpled form. “City fellas gotta learn. When you fuck with folks like us? You git fucked back a hundred times harder.”

“You tell him, Uncle Eamon,” Sarah May said. She rubbed her hands together in anticipation of the coming festivities.

Brice bit his lip. They couldn’t change what had happened tonight and they sure as hell weren’t going to change the minds of the Larkins and Baba’s family. The only minds subject to change tonight were his and Augie’s, after they were drilled and fornicated. If they had any shot here, it seemed to be in the things their captors couldn’t possess without their help.

“I’ve got an eighty thousand dollar BWM outside, Mayor,” Brice said. “I’ll sign the title over to you right now. “

Eamon winced. “You oughtta be ashamed of yerself, son! Be American, buy American.”

Augie was now efficiently cinched and immobile. His hands shook as he strained against the bonds, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Rope burns peeked out, an angry red on his wrists. Tucker turned from the table, a demented smile on his face. He held up a hole-saw. The jagged teeth of the cylinder rather ironically reminded Brice of a shark. Tucker revved the saw. The teeth became a blur as it whirred.

“This is what we use ta open up their noggins,” Tucker explained.

The revving of the drill seemed to boost Brice’s pulse to a frantic new level. He stammered as he rummaged through his mind, searching for a bargain that would save both their lives. “Look, look, let us go and…and…I’ll give you a check for three hundred grand! It won’t bounce! And Augie can give you even more than that! I’m serious! Just let us go!”

“Yeah, man, sure!” Augie echoed from the table. “Four hundred K, no bullshit! We won’t say a fucking word to anyone, we swear to Christ!”

Eamon sighed, tsking as he shook his head. “Why is it city folks put more value on money than anythin’ else? We don’t want yer money, son. We just want our proper revenge, in the name’a my innocent daughter. You just don’t get that, do ya?”

He pointed at Tucker. This time the teeth of the hole-saw did not slow as Tucker guided it toward Augie’s head. “Hold him steady, boys! Clyde and Horace need a good straight hole to pound this fella’s skull meat.”

“I bet they’se could do it even with a hole ’bout yay big!” Gut said, holding his thumb and forefinger so close together that a gnat couldn’t squeeze through.

They all roared laughter, except Eamon and of course Clyde and Horace.

Loger and Horace both clamped their hands to either side of Augie’s head to hold him still. He made a high-pitched whining sound in his terror that was almost indivisible from the drill. It harmonized with the grating racket of the hole-saw until Augie screamed, “Briiiiiiiiiiiiice!”

The free spinning of the cylinder stalled as it connected with the top of Augie’s head, and then it found its groove and began cleaving into the cranial bone.

Brice screamed to be heard over Augie and the drill. “Don’t! Please, I’m begging you! I’ll give you my Upper West Side condo, man! It’s worth a million bucks! And we’ll throw in all that money!”

Eamon snorted. “Here’s what we think’a yer blammed condo, son.”

Augie bucked on the table like a steer felled on the floor of the abattoir with a sledge hammer. His back arched off the table, but Loger and Horace had the head locked in place. Augie’s scream cut off as the grinding sound of carved bone gave way to something softer and far less resistant. It reminded Brice of sexual intercourse, the wet sounds of engorged flesh sliding across slick membranes. His brother’s mouth gaped open in a silent scream which slackened as his body went limp against the table. The bovine terror in his eyes lost its focus, became something horribly passive.

Brice screamed, feeling places inside him tear apart.

Tucker withdrew the saw and set it aside. The ambient sound of the room seemed deafening in the absence of the grinding. Augie’s nerves continued to fire, his fists and heels rapidly pounding the table with a ferocity vacant in his face. He could have been a frog hooked up to a car battery.

Eamon pointed to Gut. “Make the slit.”

Gut produced a knife from the table where Loger grabbed Babba’s picture book and Tucker set down the saw. He worked the blade into the head and twisted, molding the desired shape like somebody carving a jagged grin into a jack-o-lantern. Blood and spinal fluid spattered in the growing puddle of bodily emissions under the table.

Brice’s stomach turned, pulled in every direction. He stared open-mouthed, eyes burning. The most awful thing was seeing Augie’s chest heaving through all of this, still alive. His body shivered on the table, his face expressionless and unchanging like a photograph. Pale and bloodless, essentially lobotomized. Even if by some miracle he survived tonight, Augie as Brice had known him was gone forever. The blade worked through the circumference of bone. Tucker gritted his teeth as he worked, his muscles bulging. The repulsive sound of reshaping bone screeched in Brice’s ears.

“Okay, city boy, here’s the deal,” Eamon said. “We’se gonna let you go.”

That last little bit was probably the only thing that could have reached Brice through the fog of his terror. His mouth snapped shut and he managed to tear himself away from Augie to direct his attention to the mayor.

“But there’s one condition,” Eamon continued.

“What…what is it?” Brice asked, his voice strained into something he wouldn’t have recognized if someone played it back for him. He did not feel in control of his own body.

Eamon’s deadpan expression never changed as he pointed over to Augie on the table. He said nothing.

“What do you…?” Brice trailed off, bewildered, thinking the trauma of the evening must have impaired his ability to comprehend something patently obvious to everyone else. He could only think of one explanation, and surely that couldn’t be it, that was insane-

Clyde chuckled behind him and began to steer Brice to the table. He instinctively planted a foot to stop the progress, but Clyde pushed him along effortlessly as if Brice was hoisted up by wires and not touching the ground at all. He hauled him past Clark and inexorably toward the newly created ingress in his brother’s head.

“You can’t…you can’t be serious,” Brice heard himself say. To his own ears, his voice sounded like it came from another room; another dimension.

Sarah May followed around the table, a lascivious grin on her face as she fumbled with his belt buckle. The zipper came next, and gravity did the rest. “Come on, baby. You’ll like it.”

“Yeah,” Gut assured. “Feels better’n any pussy you ever got yer dog in.”
“That’s right, son,” Eamon said. “We’ll let’cha go…but you gotta fuck yer brother in the head first.” For the first time, he managed an easy smile.

Brice gulped. On the table, Augie continued to shiver. His lower lip trembled. Perhaps it was a trick of the upside down angle, but his eyes seemed to look right back at Brice’s, imploring him. His mouth opened, shut, opened again, as though trying to form words.

“This is insane!” he cried.

“Naw.” Eamon shook his head. “Rapin’ a retarded gal is insane, son.”

“But I didn’t do it! I wasn’t there!”

“Yeah, but you knew about it. Way I see it? We’re bein’ mighty generous, givin’ you a pass on that. So get to it. We ain’t never seen no fella fuck his own brother’s head. I like that idea.”

Brice had to wake up from this. He’d feel like the world’s luckiest man to open his eyes in his own bed now, or even on the Petri dish of the Due Drop In fold-out. Failing that, something had to stop it from happening, some sort of universal failsafe against such reason-defying aberrancy. It struck him that at a given moment, someone could usually find solace in the idea that there were millions of people going through the same thing somewhere in the world at that exact moment. There was no such comfort for Brice now unless Stoody was still on a header marathon out in the woods, and he probably hadn’t found his brother anywhere in that grave.

The world swam out of focus and threatened to fade altogether. If Clyde hadn’t twisted at his arms right at that moment, he might have followed the chance of unconsciousness to its sweet oblivion. The sudden pain jerked him back to the horror show, where words from one of the Larkins filled his head as though someone twisted a volume knob.

“—you’ll all but give up the splittail after ya’ve dipped yer wick in one of these,” Horace informed him, flicking Augie on the side of the head. A blink was the extent of his reaction.

“But if’n ya refuse…” Loger let the threat hang there.

“It’ll be yer head gets humped tomorrow,” Tucker finished.

Clyde clapped Brice on the shoulder. “That’s right, city bitch. We’ll have a blammed block party with you!”

Oh God, this isn’t real, Brice thought. If he hadn’t already puked in the woods after running out on Stoody, they’d need a mop for more than spinal fluid, semen, and blood back here.

“I couldn’t…” Brice protested. “I couldn’t possibly…”

“Now, you’d be surprised what the human body’ll do ta stay alive,” Eamon lectured. “Hell, look at your brother there, boy. I’d say he cain’t remember his own name or even what planet he’s on, but he’s hangin’ on anyway.”

Augie’s head peered at him with its partially excavated third eye, the clumps of hair around it sticky with blood. It made him think of JFK autopsy pictures.

“An’ if you don’t want to take his place,” Eamon continued, “you’ll saddle on up and hump ya some family head hole. I’m sure Sarah May’d be happy to help ya rise to the occasion.”

Sarah May leaned over again and tugged down Brice’s boxers. “That’s right, hon. Just let me give ya a helpin’ hand.”

He would swear he was dead from the waist down, but the skin of his scrotum prickled and his shirt jutted out at the bottom inside of thirty seconds.

“There ya go, sweetie! That shore didn’t take long!”

“And we’se also gonna record the moment for prosterity,” Tucker informed. Brice shifted his gaze to find another eye upon him—that of the lens of the Galaxy Samsung held out in Tucker’s hand. “Case’n you get any ideas ’bout blabbin’ anything you seen tonight and maybe leavin’ out yer own percipitation.”

“We’ll send’ye a copy,” Gut offered.

Everyone had a good laugh over that, minus Eamon, who merely grunted, “Lights, cam’ra, action.”

The room spun and the floor canted. It seemed to guide him toward the head of the table, though actually Clyde still had him chicken winged and had wrestled him there. His erection pointed the way, bobbing.

“That’s it, baby,” Sarah May said. She took hold of him, resuming her role of fluffer before Brice’s vitality could flag. “Just slide it riiiiiiiiight in.”

She had lifted up his shirt for better gripping, and he watched in disbelief as his member closed the distance, throbbing in Sarah May’s hot fingers, as majestic as a space docking sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“I shore do envy you, Brice,” she said, her breath quicker now. “What I wouldn’t give ta do what yer about to.”

Yeah, that’s me, just a lucky guy all around.

All he could do was watch as his dick vanished inch by inch within the makeshift orifice in the top of Augie’s skull. Tucker had hollowed out a perfectly symmetrical orifice with the assistance of his hole-saw and knife. Augie’s entire body tensed, and he emitted a sharp gasp. His eyes blinked rapidly several times. He slackened as his head accepted the entirety of Brice’s girth. Brice expected some kind of obstruction, a poke of jagged bone into his member, but the only thing that stopped his advance was the push of his pelvis against his brother’s hair. Brice pulled back as if he feared the hole was some kind of interstice that could suck him in, and Clyde powered him forward for his first true—if assisted—thrust. His mouth popped open in comical surprise, like a boy astonished his bike had stayed upright without the training wheels. Sarah May lowered her hand to cup his balls.

“Hump it,” Eamon commanded.

“Fuck ‘at boy’s head hard!” Gut encouraged.

“Eeeeeeeeee-YA!” Loger whooped.

There was a glory hole sensibility to the entrance with the hard opening encased in smooth rounded bone, but deeper in, the organ itself welcomed him with its slick and rubbery surface. It was alien but, he had to admit, not entirely unpleasant. At least not until he noticed that Augie’s right foot kicked every time he sank all the way to the hilt.

“I said hump it, boy!” Eamon shouted.

“Hump ‘at head like a head never been humped!” Gut improvised.

Tucker clapped his hands one time. “Just you blow a king-sized nut right up in yer brother’s noggin!”

“Fuck that head!” Sarah May said in Brice’s ear. She bounced her palm under his balls like she was jingling coins. “Fuck it! Fuck it!”

It was overwhelming for Brice to stand here now and think My cock is pushing into my brother’s brain right this minute. He wanted this to end; needed it to before he lost his mind completely. He suspected it might be too late for that already. Augie’s foot kicked again. Brice closed his eyes. He could still hear it, but it wasn’t as bad as seeing it. He drove his pelvis forward without Clyde’s influence, immersing himself as deep as he could into Augie’s skull. Again. Again. He pounded into the drilled crevice, eyes shutting out the horror, trying to think only of Marcie, of Sarah May’s hands massaging him, shutting out the glee club of hayseeds doing their damnedest to remind him exactly of what it was he was doing and the phone immortalizing this nadir of his life.

“Rock that skull, son, split it in twain!”

“You’se plumb fuckin’ that head like a right pro, buh!”

“Yeah, city boy! Hose your brother down! It’s goan be the nut of your blammed life!”

Brice rocked his hips back and forth, a jackrabbit rhythm. The strokes began to feel undeniably, disturbingly good, although a voice in the recesses of mind whispered its assurance that he was merely acting, and not falling under the spell of this godforsaken debauchery. His scrotum tightened up as the waves of pleasure began to evacuate. He became aware of that telltale sound of proper header rhythm now in his ears: PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! PAP! It seemed to mercifully drown out the rest of the world, to narrow his existence to only performance and sensation. Circumstance was a meaningless, unknowable concept.

“Now that, boys—that!—is what’cha call a header!” Eamon proclaimed from another world, something which barely registered even subliminally.

The crevice accepted Brice with the tight fit of a glove, seemed to ignite every nerve ending along the course of his shaft. He felt himself swelling up for that final intense release, like the head would explode around his inflated organ, and then mercifully, triumphantly, he detonated his orgasm like atomic fission. Gallons seemed to unload from the soft coals lovingly cupped in Sarah May’s hand, as if they’d gone a lifetime without release.

He did not know if his accompanying scream expressed the apex of his horror or the highest form of pleasure he had ever known.

««—»»

Brice drove. The sunless sky seemed fitting for his departure from Luntville, bled dry of color like the face of someone who had gone into shock. He initially had to keep his attention on the task at hand as he drove out of town. A paranoid part of him thought Eamon’s guarantee was a charade, something to get his hopes up before someone dragged him back to town to finish what they started. (Maybe false hope made for a better header.) He kept his eyes glued to the rearview as much as the road ahead, and he tensed up taut as piano wire the few times that another car shared the road with him. Most of the streets were two lanes, and it was understandable for someone to linger behind him, not wanting to pass, but he was convinced it was someone who meant to stop him. One time it was an elderly couple in a car that had probably drag raced a Model T about a hundred years ago, but Brice didn’t relax until it turned off on a dirt road. He continued to watch for it in the rearview until another car came along, and then the paranoia cycle repeated all over again.

Eventually he made his way to more populated areas and busier roads, which felt eons from Luntville even if they were merely a matter of miles. The scenic beauty that had transfixed him on the way a lifetime ago failed to register now. Once he got back to civilization, his exhausted mind receded and seemed to float away from the demands of driving. It was a showcase of the perseverance of muscle memory as barely any conscious thought went into it after that point. He maintained total silence in the car. No satellite radio, just the hum of the tires on asphalt and the rising whine of the motor when he accelerated. It triggered a sound byte of the hole-saw and the whole thing would play out again in his mind. He caught rain halfway home and the SWISH-SWISH-SWISH of the wiper blades became PAP! PAP! PAP! His head became a vacuum of thought. No commentary, remorse, terror, grief…just a loop of that night at Crossroads or the white noise of pressure in his ears as he drove along the interstate past far saner towns and cities.

He took only his own belongings from the Due Drop In. The official story was he left Clark and Augie at Crossroads and they never came back to the room, which was of course the truth, minus the part where he’d claim they were still alive instead of oozing sperm and gray matter from saw wounds burrowed into their skulls. Anything could have happened to them. Drug-dealing scum from out of town tried to ply their trade in Luntville sometimes. Clark and Augie might have run afoul of them. They may have had a misadventure in Backtown. No one would be surprised when the case dead-ended in some Podunk town where state police couldn’t find their asses with both hands and GPS. Eamon assured him what Stoody had said was true, that the affiliates of law enforcement preferred to keep their distance and wouldn’t dig too deep. No one back home would question the obvious toll it had taken on Brice. There were several more gray hairs on his scalp than he’d had a week ago, with deeper lines etched in his face like chisel work on a sculpture. He had the thousand-yard stare, as if he’d spent a year in a war zone.

After a couple of hours on the highway, he at last picked up the interstate. It wasn’t long before he had to stop to fuel up the BMW. He nearly ran out of gas before a dashboard light flickered a warning, and somehow his body knew what to do with the information without disturbing the morbid reverie playing through his mind. Muscle memory took him through this process as well with the swipe of his credit card and the selection of premium. It finally jolted him somewhere in the maze of his mind when he guided the nozzle into the tank. It was like a needle skipping over a record, an instant bump in the flashbacks to Brice in mid-header. He found himself achingly hard, tears stinging his eyes.

There was an old lady on the other side of the pump island, seventy years old if she were a day, with glasses so thick they could have been ashtrays. They magnified her eyes, which got even bigger when she happened to look down at the tent pole Brice had sprung in his pants. She gasped, fell back against her door, and fumbled at the latch, watching him over her shoulder with that laughable expression of fear. She finally managed to open it, and poured herself into the driver’s seat with an admirable display of spryness for someone of her disposition. He heard a muted mechanized click from within. She had locked the door.

Brice gave her a disarming wave and turned his erection back toward the Beamer. The thoughts came unbidden.

Can osteoporosis weaken the skull just like the rest of the bones? Bet it wouldn’t be a biggie at all to dig into your melon, granny. Better hope you’re not missing any of your calcium supplements, because I’ve got the perfect match for your groove if we open some daylight on your lid.

He shook his head to dislodge these corrupt thoughts. Of course he didn’t really mean that. Lingering shock, that was all. Who could blame him, after what he went through? The guys who survived the Donner Party probably sized people up after their whole unfortunate cannibal affair, thinking what great traveling companions the meatier ones would make in the event of starvation. Or those rugby players in the Andes. It was a natural response, probably healthy in a fashion.

The erection hadn’t gone away by the time he filled up the tank. The old lady continued to watch him from the safety of her car. In the natural picture frame of her window, he could only see her head. He moaned desperately.

What would her huge eyes do behind those Coke bottle glasses with a cock in the old cabeza? Would they spin around real fast like a slot machine and come up cherries and bananas? What do you say we find out, grandma?

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” Brice said. He clumsily hooked the gas nozzle back to the pump, dripping a trail across the concrete, and clambered into his car. Granny watched him go with suspicious fright. The silly goose probably thought he wanted to get in her girdle.

She’d probably drop dead on the spot if she knew what I was thinking.

He sped away from the lot, cutting off someone and hitting the merge ramp to the interstate at warp speed.

I’ll be myself when I get back home. I better be… I can’t say a word about this to anyone, much less some therapist. A head shrinker… Man, what a waste of a good head that would be—

He had the merciful interruption of his phone signaling a voice mail. He evidently received a call while he’d been pumping gas. He picked it up from the passenger seat and clicked to play the message. Must have been a pretty long one since he’d had time to get back on the interstate before he knew he missed a call. He put it on speakerphone, glad for the distraction.

“You have 1 new message,” the automated voice informed him

A moment later, it began. “Brice? Damn it, where are you? This is Van Dreelen.”

For awhile, Brice had successfully forgotten about his other life—Van Dreelen and the shadiness he’d mentioned in their last conversation, Hathoway, Levanthorpe, the Form 1852, all of it.

Van Dreelen’s message continued. “I looked into that shit we were talking about last night. Man, you’re not gonna believe it. This morning I talked to Kline over at Bryson. I asked him for the point of origin of that supposed Form 1852 against you, told him we’d take him to court if need be. So he gave me the email: a research firm called MBD Limited. I had our guys look into to it, and it turned out to be a bogus pyramid company with a totally false background. So then I checked the domain name owner: Marcie Baxter, your ex.”

For a moment there was just the crackle of the connection, Van Dreelen perhaps in a cab, searching for words. Brice gaped. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

Van Dreelen resumed. “Nope. Marcie must’ve gotten into your computer to swipe our old account numbers and then tacked them onto the phony Form 1852. She orchestrated the whole scam to make Bryson pull the account from you and hand it to Hathoway. That’s some cold shit, buddy.”

Brice felt like his face had caught fire. His hands shook around the steering wheel. His teeth were clenched hard enough to shatter.

The betrayal ruined his life. It was why he’d been dragged on this trip in the first place and come home without a brother and a friend.

“Call me when you get this message, man. I need to know what you want to do about this…”

EPILOGUE

Marcie shouldered open the door to the penthouse and then leaned back to shut it. She set her shopping bags on the floor and went down the line of deadbolts, locking out the rest of the world. She slipped out of her Walter Steiger pumps, a leopard print design which ran about seven hundred dollars. Slumming a little bit, but the weather called for rain. It was funny to see all the skanks strutting around the city in cheap knock-offs with matching fake handbags. Those plastic bitches wouldn’t get within ten feet of this building before the doorman sent them packing, just like all the disgusting bums with their liquor bottles in brown bags. Both of those groups would probably suck a dick for some kind of gratuity. It was shameful and gauche.

The penthouse provided her a striking view of the city. The west wall was one large window opening onto the beautiful skyline with skyscrapers and the river beyond. It made her feel like she lived in a city in the clouds. She was insulated from the sirens and pretenders and poverty below. The worst of it once she stepped through the entrance was the doormen raping her with their eyeballs as she walked to the elevator, but it was simple enough to ignore them. She was probably the highlight of their day before they returned to shitty studio apartments with sobbing brats and nagging wives who always had a headache.

The expected rain never showed up and now there was a fuchsia sky from the brushstrokes of the setting sun in the magic hour. She didn’t have this view a year ago, unthinkable as that now seemed. Those had been the days with Brice in his condo, a neat and unambitious dwelling which was the ideal place for such a neat and unambitious man. She didn’t have to endure such mediocrity now, and she had herself to thank for that. She had upgraded her life in every way.

“Derrick?” Marcie called. “I’m home. Wait till you see the ermine stole I picked up at Caswell’s.”

A thought occurred to her and she smiled cunningly. She undid the buttons of her black blouse and slipped out of it, then unhooked the black lace bra beneath. There was a slight sag, which was natural enough given her voluptuous measurements, but nothing they didn’t have the money to fix. For now, she knew she looked damned good. She’d thought Brice was going to cry the first time he’d seen her naked.

Lastly she stepped out of her white skirt, which the doorman had ogled in particular for a hint of her underwear. He had searched in vain. She never wore it if she could help it.

She reached into her Caswell’s bag and withdrew the lush stole, a total steal at five hundred dollars. It had been fifteen percent off, though the dope behind the counter hadn’t given her the discount. Marcie shrugged and handed over the platinum card. She couldn’t care less. If you needed it to be on sale to buy it, you didn’t deserve to own it.

“I’m trying it on for you right now!”

She draped the fur around her bare shoulders. She could have drawn it across her breasts to cover herself up, but the most she did was hold part of it up to her face to revel in its softness.

She walked across the plush carpet, which caressed her toes as she made her way to the bedroom. She paused in a warm patch where the sun had lingered in the late afternoon. Her finely manicured toes curled through the carpet. She was due for a salon visit next week. The ruby red toenails could use some touching up.

“Here I come, honey!” Marcie glided through the last stretch of floor. She threw open the door and swept into the bedroom, thrilled as always by its exorbitant furnishing. There was the Michael Amini bed, the eighty-five inch flat screen TV, the AICO chest and dresser—

Marcie’s smile drained, replaced by an expression of horror. Derrick lay atop the dresser in a cashmere bathrobe she had bought him for his birthday last month. His head hung off the side, nearly upside down. She could see his eyes, unblinking, staring at something far beyond the ceiling. There was an angry gouge in the crown of his head where something had been used to hollow out the wound. She followed a trickle of blood from the hole to the carpet where it pattered like rain drops on an umbrella. It joined a growing blot of crimson and white fragments of bone debris. Clear fluid also issued from the crevice, a long strand which stretched nearly all the way to the floor like drool.

Marcie backed up from the hideous sight of Derrick’s agape skull. The bottom of her mouth quivered. She tried to say something, but could only manage inarticulate sounds. Her backward progress stopped as she ran into something that shouldn’t have been there, and then a hand clamped over her mouth, sealing in her startled cry. She whirled away instinctively from the intruder.

She couldn’t have been more shocked when she saw who it was.

Brice?

He was naked from the waist down and the first thing she noticed was his erection; his penis was smeared red. Her reeling mind struggled for some kind of explanation as she continued to back up, not wanting to take her eyes from him. She kept a hand stretched out behind her, knowing the dresser was close, and then felt the sickening sensation of her first and middle fingers sliding into something wet and sticky—the hole in Derrick’s head. She yanked them back, a shudder riding up her shoulders. Her fingers were now coated in blood, and Marcie’s jaw dropped at the revelation of Brice’s bloody erection.

Brice advanced, his face split by an insane grin. He hoisted something up to his head, which in numb shock she recognized as a drill.

The world spun around and she found her beautiful plush carpet rising up to meet her. Brice loomed impossibly tall above her. Darkness fell across her vision like a drape as he knelt down to her on the ground. Only a gleam of spiraled steel managed to penetrate the blackness as she plunged into oblivion.

Marcie tried to scream, but the only sound in the world now was the savage grinding as Brice revved the drill.

— | — | —

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Edward Lee is the author of almost fifty novels and numerous short stories and novellas (or is it novellae? Hmm.) Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while Header was released on DVD in 2009; also, he has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, and Haunter of the Threshold. One of Lee’s creative ambitions is to one day write an effective M.R. James pastiche.

Ryan Harding is the author of Genital Grinder and the co-author of the upcoming novel Reincarnage, as well as a contributor to the multi-author collaboration Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road, all from Deadite Press. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies Excitable Boys and In Laymon's Terms, the chapbooks Partners in Chyme (with Edward Lee), A Darker Dawning and A Darker Dawning 2: Reign in Black, and the magazines Splatterpunk and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction.

Table of Contents

- Header 3
- PROLOGUE
- Midpoint