New Title 1

HEADER 2

Text © 2011 Edward Lee

Cover art © 2011 David G. Barnett

This digital edition March 2011 © Necro Publications

Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design

http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

a Necro Publication

5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

http://www.necropublications.com

Also available as in a trade, limited edition and deluxe edition hardcover from Camelot Books & Gifts, Inc.

http://www.camelotbooks.com

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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 Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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For Brian Keene.

Lemme know when you

need more crabs!

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First and foremost, I must thank Dave Barnett for publishing HEADER so long ago; next I must thank Glenn Danzig and Verotik Inc. for the very cool comic version and solid pay. Likewise, I’m quite grateful to Michael Kennedy and Mike Anthony of Mpyreal Entertainment for having the sheer audacity to make HEADER into such a wonderful movie; and also to Jerry Chandler and Don May of Synapse Films for releasing it; and to Thomas Deja, Tony Timpone, and Mike Gingold at Fangoria. And I must thank actors extraordinaire Jake Suffian and Eliot Kotek and everyone else in the movie, cast and crew, because you are all dynamite! Thank you!

Further thanks must be paid to my terrific friends at Wild Willy’s in Largo, Florida, the coolest bar in the world: Nick, Rhonda, Johnny, Bob Monday, Sheri, Roz, Stacy, Mitch, Randi, English Richard, James, Royce, Doug, and the rest. To Wendy Brewer and Bob Strauss for indefatigable proofing. Thanks to Tony and Kim at Camelot, and also to the following fans and readers: Paul Legerski; Sandy Griffin and Tony Brock; Jonah Martin, Rob Johns, Jordan Krall, splatterhead4ever, harleymack , Amy M Pimental, mrliteral, Horror Freek, Lilith666, Bateman, Lazy Old Fart, vantro, TravisD, JameyWebb, reelsplatter, boysnightout, Nephren-ka, carthoss, Amano Jyaku, Insalubrious, VT Horrorfan, bgeorge, Tod Clark, John Copeland, dathar, bateman, godawful, Ken Arneson, Bob & Jamie Taylor, Killa Klep, darvis, antitheism, S. Howard, S. Eliot-O’Leary, FrederickHamilton, niogeoverlord, horrormike, vladcain, Kerri, IrekB, Onemorejustincase, jesus was a robot, oh, and I mustn’t forget Dr. A.N. for delightful medical info.

As a side note: I apologize humbly to the town of Pulaski—of which I obviously know precious little—for inaccuracies and various bombast. I had to use your town in this fictional realm only to corroborate details relative to HEADER 1. Please forgive me!

E.L.

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Chapter 1

SOMEWHERE NEAR THE VIRGINIA/WEST VIRGINIA LINE

LATE-DECEMBER, 2010

It was—oh, but delimitation seems called for regarding the unwritten theorem that unless one is, say, Charles Dickens, the writer must
never
begin a novel with the words
It was,
due to the shiftlessness of the simple-past form of the verb
to be.
Poet extraordinaire Ezra Pound, for instance, asserted that the verb
to be
(and all its indicatives: is, was, were, etc.) was indeed the most important verb in the English language but also the
weakest.
Exceptions to all rules, however, must be minded; and on that desultory note—considerate Reader—we shall begin again…

It was thirteen days after the 9-year-old hillboy, Crory Tuckton, son of Dumar and Mary Beth Tuckton (the maiden name of the latter being Martin, niece of the late
Jake
Martin), and grandson of 57-year-old Helton Tuckton, had
disappeared.

To reiterate: the boy
disappeared.

Without a trace.

Hence, nearly the last fortnight, the Tuckton household (or more accurately
shack
hold, for they domiciled in Helton’s sprawling, dilapidated oak-plank and cedar- and tin-roofed shack) had lived its life beneath a caul of tense, imponderable despair. No one dared speculate aloud what had become of the boy, though in somber privacy, Helton himself supposed that young Crory, whilst venturing to Hog Neck Lake to trap crawdads as he did every morn, had gotten hit by a copperhead. The idea that he had been
abducted
had never occurred to any of them.

Nevertheless, though in his simple yet strident backwoods wisdom, Helton Tuckton rarely bowed to such whimsy as superstition, nor was he given in particular to the neurotic compulsion known as triskaidekaphobia (i.e. the fear of the number 13). On this day, however, the
thirteenth
day, he paused to scratch his massive gray-blond beard and postulate,
Blammed if it ain’t been thirteen days since Dumar’s tike disser-peered. Shore as hail hope that don’t bring no bad luck…

It would.

Crory’s mother, the aforementioned Mary Beth Tuckton, in the throes of liquor-amplified sorrow, had hanged herself
six
days after the little shaver’s disappearance, which is mentioned here only as an interesting formality: 13 being the
unlucky
number, and 6 being the
imperfect
number.

Regardless…

The cool December air turned Helton’s breath to mist, and dense thicket it was that he lumbered his large frame through. He checked his ‘shine stash fairly regularly for, see, one phobia he
did
suffer from was the fear of
thieves,
and thieves were rife in these parts. Said stash he produced himself, and stored exclusively for family consumption; he never sold his moonshine, in other words. But it was no big secret that a stash might indeed exist, and that existence was a constant topic of idle discourse among the region’s more commerce-minded producers of illegal corn liquor, Hall Sladder and “Snot” McKully being the most ostensible. Helton was halfway to his stash that day when, in the distance, his ear detected a familiar sound—

sheeeeeeeeeeeesh…SWACK!

—which would be the sound of his 20-year-old nephew, Micky-Mack Martin, hunting squirrels with his sling. Micky-Mack possessed a finely honed talent for the proper use of this device; in fact, it had been Helton who’d taught him the art.

“Hey there, Micky-Mack,” greeted Helton when he emerged from the brush. “You catch us a fat-ass squirrel fer supper I’se hope?” but then Helton stopped mid-step when he noticed the lean, blond-headed young man standing with his jeans all the way down, his right hand pumping back and forth with pointed precision.

“Boy? What’choo doin’ jerkin’ off in the woods?”

Micky-Mack grinned over his shoulder. “Got me a hankerin’ to cream on this splittail, Unc Helton. Don’t know why, just…
do.
”

Helton approached the ludicrous scene, first raising a proud brow upon noting that Micky-Mack’s genital endowment was quite formidable and in keeping with the Tuckton/Martin tradition—well, that and
then
some. But this “splittail” he had a “hankerin’ to cream on” lay perfectly still amid the leaves. A skinny thing, lank black hair, sucked in face, tiny tits laying on a chest denuded of its trashy halter, tiny cut-off shorts skimmed away. The chill air puckered the nipples, and her mouth hung open as if she were unconscious. Yet even more ludicrous was the fact that Micky-Mack stood a full six feet away from the girl.

“Boy, I know full well you can shoot a jizzer farther than most fellas but—shee-it!—you’re standin’ six feet away! Ain’t no man can belt a load
six fuckin’ feet!
”

Micky-Mack maintained the over-the-shoulder grin. “Watch me, Unc Helton,” and after a few more shucks of the hand, out flew not one, not two, but
seven
 lines of semen
six fuckin’ feet,
all of which landed neatly around the girl’s chest and face, and several of which went
directly into her mouth.

Micky-Mack nodded in a self-approving way. His penis remained more-than-momentarily hard—ah, the benedictions of youth!—and when he flexed it once, a remnant squiggle of sperm flipped fascinatingly into the air, somersaulting like a piece of flicked spaghetti. Then he re-hoisted his jeans. “Tolt ya, Unc Helton.”

“Damn, boy,” commented Helton, the spectacle leaving him for a lack of more concise verbiage. “Ain’t thunk it possible for a single fella to shoot that much cum out his bone that far.”