A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous (15 page)

There was no touchin’ her and that made me ache inside. After a while of this I got to where when I saw her my heart didn’t flutter and I stopped gettin’ sad at what I had done. And you see, I’m a man and a man has his needs and if she wasn’t gonna give it to me, well then I just as soon take it from her. She put up a holy fight the first few times, scratchin’ at me like she was a cat cornered by a big ol’ dog. A few knocks to her head took the fight out of her and I would take care of myself and be done with her for a while.

If Mae would have had some place to go, I think she’d have left me and that would have been that and none of this other stuff would’ve happened. But her Ma and Pa had nothin’ to do with her after she went up and married me. They said I was no good for her. Turns out, they was probably right.

The two of us went about our lives, sharin’ a roof and a bed, but not much more than that. I cooked my own meals and tended to the farmin’ and animals. She wandered about in the woods, I reckon becomin’ one with nature or tryin’ to find herself like them city girls do when they don’t know nothin’ else.

It was a Tuesday when she started to vomit again. It had been a little under a year since the first time she got all sick with them flu like symptoms. I knew it wasn’t no bug in her stomach causin’ them heavin’s. She had that look women get when their bodies are a changin’ with a child inside of ‘em.

That anger, it’s a mighty mean thing and it hopped on my back and steered me toward her while she made her way into the woods to do whatever it was she did. I came up on her, rope in hand and slapped the back of her head with an open hand. She tipped forward, landing in the tangle of some bushes. Before she could get herself out I pulled her free and roped her hands together, tyin’ her to a tall oak. She screamed and yelped like a wounded dog. A few slaps to the side of her head ended that nonsense.

I pulled her breeches off and tossed them aside. She struggled and her eyes said everything. She was scared of what I was going to do. I looked around the woods until I found a fallen branch, thick and sturdy enough. I didn’t mind with her screams when I shoved the tip of that thing straight between her legs and inside her. I moved it around, shovin’ it a good foot up inside her. I pulled it out and stuck it back in, roughin’ up her hole and insides and puttin’ an end to her baby havin’ abilities.

When I was done, bark and blood caked the inside of her legs. Mae sagged against the tree, her arms still tied tight around it. I grabbed her face, squeezed her cheeks tight. “We ain’t havin’ no damn kids. Yah hear me?”

I cut the rope and she fell to the ground. Mae closed her legs up and curled into a ball, her arms around her knees. And she cried. The anger flared up again, but I ain’t had it in me to kill her. I could have just drug her down to the pond and ended it right there, but I didn’t. I walked off, crashin’ through the woods like an angry grizzly bear.

Mae didn’t come home that night. Or the next. I went out to the woods, found the rope and the branch I had used on her. The ground was damp where she had bled onto it. But, there was no Mae in sight. I hadn’t seen her in, I reckon six weeks.

I
had
seen shadows move in the night, heard her howling at the moon like a rabid wolf or coyote. I went out looking for her several times, but never could find her. I could hear her all right, but it was like she was a ghost hauntin’ the woods and tryin’ to scare me away. That wasn’t gonna happen.

This mornin’ I got up and headed out, shotgun in hand. I wasn’t huntin’ no food. Not this time. I spent the better part of the day rootin’ around in the woods. There were some small tracks, like a woman’s, and then I found what looked like a small grass hut—mostly twigs, branches, and leaves, just large enough for someone to sleep in, but not much else. The shirt and breeches Mae had been wearin’ the last time I saw her was in there, layin’ in a heap in one corner.

There was a smell, like somethin’ had died. I followed it to the clothes. They wasn’t in a heap after all. They was folded over on top of somethin’. When I pulled the shirt free, somethin’ brown and skeletal fell out. It was small enough to fit in my hand. I looked a bit closer and that’s when I backed on out of there, my heart in my throat and the feelin’ like the devil was right behind me.

Well, I was half right. The devil, he wasn’t behind me, but Mae was and I don’t know when she got my shovel, but I caught sight of it right before it connected with my face.

I woke to the night. Crickets and frogs talked to one another like they always did. My head hurt like I had spent the night drinkin’ Cousin Billy’s moonshine up in the mountains. My shoulders ached and when I tried to move my arms, I couldn’t. Mae had tied them over my head, the rope around a tree, much like I had done her. I was spread out, my legs opened and all my clothes missin’. I tried pullin’ free, but you know, Mae, she’s a country girl and she knows how to tie them knots so nothin’ can get away.

She come through the trees all quiet-like. I caught a glimpse of her in the moon that broke between the trees. She was as naked as the day she was born. Scratches and bruises covered her body and she was dirty like she ain’t never had a bath in her life. She held somethin’ in her hands—a tiny somethin’.

“Cyrus,” she whispered, drawin’ out my name like a school girl teasin’ another one. “Today’s Mother’s Day.”

“Mae, you let me go now and it won’t be all that bad, yah hear me?” She stood in the moonlight, her eyes on her hands and when she looked up I saw all the crazy on her face.

“Did yah hear
me
?” she asked and took a step forward. She knelt down beside me. The stench of shit and filth got all over me and I felt my stomach jerk. “I said it’s Mother’s Day.”

“I heard yah, Mae, but that don’t mean nothing—you ain’t nobody’s mother.”

She laughed, a haunting sound that fills my ears even now. “But, Cyrus, I am a momma. And you are a poppa. You just ain’t never met your son.” She set that thing on my chest, its dead body dry like a leaf and stinkin’ of water and rot. “We’re gonna celebrate, Cyrus. Our first Mother’s Day together.” She giggled, this time the craziness surfacing from her throat.

That brings me to where I am right now, all tied up, a dead unformed child on my chest. Mae, she walked away a few minutes ago, back through those trees toward Ma and Pa’s house. She’s comin’ back. I can hear her howlin’ at the moon. She’s gettin’ closer and closer and she’s wantin’ to celebrate. And, yah know, we’re out here in the country and nobody’s gonna hear me scream…

EVERY DAY IS A HOLIDAY

by Steve Lowe

J
unior slipped up behind the bastard in silence, but that didn’t matter. The guy wouldn’t have heard him anyway, with his face buried in the rear of his whore. The bastard slurped and grunted and the whore moaned, a sound more akin to the sad lowing of a cow in a pen than one of ecstasy. Their musk filled the hovel, crudely scratched out of a limestone wall of the underground city, and caused Junior’s stomach to buck.

He stood for a moment behind them and watched, absently hefting the reassuring weight of the Polack in his hands. The bastard pushed so far up the whore’s bony backside his eyebrows disappeared into the gray flesh of her buttocks. Positioned on her hands and knees facing a blank wall, her back and her head sagging, she coughed and spat on the filthy ground before continuing her moaning.

Junior lined up his target on the gyrating back of the bastard’s filthy bald head. He practiced a couple half swings with the Polack, aiming the filed-down point at the base of the bastard’s skull.

The Polack had once been a Pulaski, a tool used in a time lost to history by smokejumpers to fight wildfires, but Junior had made some modifications to it. He shortened the wood handle by a foot for easier range of motion in tight quarters, and wrapped it with leather strapping for a better grip. With a wood-chopping axe head on one side, a normal Pulaski had a broad, flat opposite end that was useful for trenching the ground when cutting fire lines, but Junior had set the edges to a grindstone, shaping it into a murderous point. Plenty of bastards had screamed for mercy beneath its killing strike, but not this one. His life ended the moment the Polack pierced his brain stem.

The point entered the soft spot just below the skull at the top of the spinal column. The force drove his head further into the whore until the point struck the inside of his jawbone and stopped. The whore let out a sharp cry from the sudden pressure and turned to look at Junior through strands of mottled hair.

Junior pulled the Polack back, bringing the dead bastard with it, still affixed. Blood spurted from his mouth where the Polack had pushed through the back of his throat, severing his tongue, which remained in the whore’s backside, twitching and squirting red down her thighs. She screamed and clenched, and the tongue disappeared inside of her. She scrambled away on her hands and knees to the far corner of the room and huddled into a ball, shrieking and squirming against the foreign object inside of her.

Junior put his foot to the back of the bastard’s head and pulled the Polack free. He wiped it clean on the bastard’s pants then reached behind his back for his canteen. After a long swig of warm water, he screwed the cap back on and tossed it at the hysterical whore.

“Shut up, Marie,” he said. She immediately did so, her eyes wide with shock that he knew her name. “Take that and go clean yourself.”

JUNIOR STOOD WITH HIS back to her as she tended to her mess. When he turned back, she was wrapped in a torn, stained afghan. Junior recognized it as one that had once been draped over the back of their couch at home. She gave the bastard’s body on the floor a wide berth and sat on the stack of cardboard boxes that made up her bed, knees tucked up against her chest, arms wrapped tight around them. After a long moment of rocking and staring at nothing, she seemed to return to reality and looked up at him.

“Junior?”

He scanned her face, shrouded by shadow and twisted strands of hair. “Yeah, sis. It’s me.”

She looked back and forth from him to the bastard on the floor to the doorway, the only exit from the dank hole she called home.

“Why are you here?” she said.

“Why you think? I come for you.”

“No you didn’t.”

Junior leaned the Polack against an earthen wall and squatted on his haunches. “I did. For you and for information.”

“What information?”

“Like where Big Karl is.”

She didn’t answer at first, just watched him with huge round eyes that glittered in the low light. “What do you mean to do?”

Junior laid a hand on the Polack. “Just what you think. I mean to kill that son of a bitch with this.”

“You’ll never get close enough to him.”

“Watch me.”

She began to rock again. “Saying you do that. Then what?”

“Then nothing. I ain’t thought that far ahead.”

“His people won’t let you live, even if you do carry out the deed.”

“That don’t matter to me. All that matters is the deed be done.”

More silence. Both of them lost in their thoughts.

Finally, Marie said, “What is today?”

“I make it to be Friday, seventeenth of June.”

“No, I mean what holiday?”

“I believe that’s Metallurgist’s Day.” One of the new holidays invented after the so-called Great Awakening. Just another farce of a holiday. There was one for every day on the calendar now.

“Oh.” She fiddled and looked down at her hands. “So tomorrow is Appreciation Day, right?”

Appreciation Day, to show their deep and unending appreciation for being “liberated by the benevolent freedom fighters of the Hallmark Society.” Nothing but a bunch of psycho pseudo-anarchists parading around; essentially what every other day was. The holiday really didn’t matter, except for one. Junior spat on the ground in disgust. “Yeah.”

“And that means this Sunday is…” She watched him, waiting.

“Yep,” he said. “Father’s Day.”

Marie sat straight up, the tangles of hair falling away from her lined face. “I know where Big Karl is.”

SLEEP CAME IN FITS and starts to Junior that night. Tomorrow, Marie would lead him to their father. Junior had not seen Big Karl since the day of the Great Awakening, just over a year ago.

Junior was returning home from his shift at the printing press, a grueling 16-hour workday with no breaks. He shared a dank two-bedroom apartment with Marie and his mother and father. Big Karl no longer had a respectable vocation. Once a firefighter, he now came and went days at a time, and at all hours. He had grown secretive and strange, near incoherent much of the time. And violent. Mother’s face bore evidence of that, as did Marie’s.

A blow to the jaw dazed Junior as he stepped into the apartment, a heavy blast from something thick and metal that embedded bits of broken molars into his cheek and tongue. When he opened his eyes, the world was on its side. Marie and mother both sat on the floor, cowering and bleeding. They cried, but Junior heard nothing save the ringing in his ears.

“This is it!” Big Karl crossed in front of him, shouting, waving an axe around. He dropped to a knee and cocked his head sideways to look into Junior’s eyes. “Are you ready, boy?”

He spun the axe in his hands, waiting for an answer. “You ain’t ready,” he said. “You ain’t prepared to do your part. You never were with me.”

Junior coughed and spit out broken teeth. Somewhere nearby, an explosion rocked the apartment building and pieces of ceiling board dropped to the floor in dusty plumes.

“Hear that?” Big Karl threw back his head and whooped loudly. His eyes flared with insanity. “This is finally IT! The day is here!”

Junior’s father turned and kicked Marie in the chest with a heavy work boot, sending the slight girl hard into the wall. She slumped to her left and did not move. Big Karl turned to Junior’s mother and screamed at her with inhuman rage. She stared up at him in shock, a vacant look on her face. She never flinched, even as Big Karl raised the axe above his head and brought it down on her with all the force he could muster. The blade split the top of her skull with a meaty thock, pushing her head down between her shoulder blades. The sharp snap of her neck bounced off the walls of the close apartment like a thunderclap and the weight of the axe pulled her forward until the handle hit the floor. Her head wobbled on her shoulders like her neck was filled with gelatin and she slumped sideways until it came to rest against Marie’s leg.