Banana Hammock (20 page)

“Is that the one with the color screen?” Phin asked.

“Yeah. It’s also runs on the Android platform.”

“I love Barnes & Noble.”

“Me too. Nook users are confident and sexy and all-around better people than non-Nook users,” I said, truthfully. “They’re also so smart and hip that they get the joke when they download a $2.99 ebook which is filled with scenes stolen from other novels.”

“Nook readers are indeed lovely,” Phin agreed.

I sighed. “I can’t wait to get my hands on my Nook and download some Konrath and Kilborn ebooks.”

“Hand,” Phin said.

“Huh?”

“You said
hands
. Plural. You only have one hand now.”

“Did I say hands? Really?”

I began to laugh. So did Phin. We laughed and laughed and laughed until the psycho returned for the dramatic, heart-pounding finale.

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The ER was frantic with activity, most of it focused around the gurney where her elderly employer had stopped breathing. Nurse Jenny only turned her eyes away for a second, trying to gather herself, not ready to see Mortimer die. She forced herself to look back, to say a final, silent goodbye.

Mortimer was
standing,
on top of the gurney, restraints broken off and dangling from his ankles and wrists, his mouth wide and—

Is he hissing?

The sound came from deep in Mortimer’s throat, less like a threatened cat, more like a tea kettle coming to boil. It kept rising in pitch until it became a shrill whistle, the noise unlike anything Jenny had ever heard. Inhuman.

“Oh my God.”

Mortimer’s teeth. Something was happening to them. They were falling out—no—he was spitting them out, spitting them at the doctor and the nurses who were frantically trying to coax him off the gurney.

She started toward Mortimer. The old man abruptly stopped hissing, and Jenny could hear that prick Dr. Lanz ordering him down off the gurney.

Stiff as a plank, Mortimer fell face-first onto the floor.

Jenny rushed to him. She didn’t care anymore about hospital protocol, or Lanz having her thrown out.
Mortimer needs me.
Jenny had never seen anything like this in twenty-five years of health care.

She pushed her way through the nurses surrounding Mortimer and knelt at his prone body.

“Jenny? What the hell are you doing in my hospital?” Dr. Lanz demanded.

“This is my patient,” she said, touching Mortimer’s neck and seeking out the pulse of his carotid. To her surprise, she didn’t have to press hard. His entire neck was vibrating, his artery jolting beneath her fingers like a heavy metal drum solo.

The only thing she could compare this to was a crystal meth OD, the heartbeat raging out of control.

Jenny patted the old man’s back, checking to see if he was conscious.

“Mortimer, can you hear me? It’s Jenny. I’m right here. We’re gonna help—”

“
I’m
going to help him. Somebody get me security.”

She felt Dr. Lanz’s hands grip her shoulders, dragging her away from Mortimer just as her patient grabbed her hip.

Jenny felt instant pain, and not only from the pressure of Mortimer’s grip. Something sharp was digging into her skin through her nurse’s uniform.

That can’t be Mortimer’s hand.

It was more like a claw. A bloody, ragged claw. Jenny stared, mouth agape. Mortimer’s finger bones—the phalanges—were extending out through his fingertips, splitting the skin and coming to five sharp points.

The old man hissed again, a high-pitched keen, and when he turned his head to look at Jenny, calm, stoic Nurse Duthie said, “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

His cheeks exploded like a grenade had gone off inside his mouth, white points bursting through his lips, shearing flesh, digging rents into his face.

Oh my God. Fangs.

He’s growing fangs.

His new teeth began to elongate—an inch, two inches, bursting through his bleeding gums in rows that ended in wicked, dagger-like tips. They shredded his mouth into jagged strips, and he began to snap his jaws, chewing through the inside of his mouth, grinding off his cheeks all the way back to his earlobes, making room for his monstrous new dentata.

Then Mortimer’s lower jaw unhinged, thrusting forward and hanging open like some perversion of an angler fish. He stared at Jenny, his eyes wide, pupils dilating beyond anything human, spreading until they eclipsed the whites.

For the first time in her life, Jenny screamed a scream of abject, primordial terror.

She jerked back, trying to pull away from Mortimer’s grip, but his sharp, bony fingers had embedded themselves into the meat of her hip. She watched her skin stretch through the holes in her clothing—stretch, but not tear—and realized that the bones protruding from Mortimer’s finger tips were barbed like fish hooks.

Then he jerked his hand back, taking Jenny with it, knocking her onto her butt, her face inches from his snapping jaws.

Mortimer rolled on top of her, like a lover, blood and saliva dripping onto Jenny’s face and neck. She reached up to push him away, but even as terror-stricken as she was, Jenny couldn’t bring herself to touch him. It was like willingly sticking your hand into a box of angry rattlesnakes. Even as his jaws drew near, Jenny’s revulsion wouldn’t allow her to fight back. She stretched out her hand—her face imploring—to Dr. Lanz, who stood within reach. But he shrank away from her beckoning fingers, retreating into the safety of the nurse’s station.

This is it,
Jenny thought.
I’m going to die.

“Cool,” Crazy Knife Goon said.

I nodded. “
Draculas
is a real roller coaster ride. Soon the whole hospital is overrun, with a few remaining survivors fighting for their lives.”

“Which parts did Jeff Strand write?” Andrew Mayhem asked.

I gave CKG a knowing nod, and then we both shoved Mayhem at the creature, who tore into Mayhem’s throat like a fatty ripping open a bag of potato chips, except blood came out, not chips, and it wasn’t a fatty, it was a dracula. There was babyish squealing and some unmanly cries for help from Mayhem, who was probably a bed wetter, and then the dracula ate him all up and we all gave each other high-fives.

Also, despite the very reasonable $2.99 Nook price,
Draculas
never sold a single copy, so Strand never got any royalties.

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“I gotta go with killing Andrew Mayhem,” Crazy Knife Goon said. “While I dig his witty combination of horror and comedy, I’m a bloodthirsty bastard at heart, and really want to stick this Big Ass Knife into somebody.”

“Be my guest,” I told him.

Mayhem died screaming like a little baby.

“There’s your royalties, buddy!” I told him.

“There’s your royalties, buddy!” I told him.

“There’s your royalties, buddy!” I told him.

CKG stopped his hack and slash long enough to look at me. “You said that three times.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. I thought it was a Nook formatting error. But you actually repeated yourself.”

“Hmm. Could be déjà vu. What do you think?”

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Amos’s List of Bad Ice Cream Flavors

Squirrel

Windex

Corn

Chris Farley

Smegma

Fire Ant

Acne

KY Jelly

Polyester

Salmon

Kidney Stone

Possum

Lint

Cactus

WD40

Prostate

Fishing Hooks

Pee Pee

Corduroy

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Jokes That Didn’t Make It Into This Ebook

I broke my Nook. In retrospect it was really stupid to save my place by folding over the corner.

I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to tequila. After seventeen shots I get really sick and throw up.

It’s not fun watching a grown man cry. Unless you have a comfy chair to sit in, and maybe some snacks.

I don’t believe in ghosts, or bigfoot, or ESP, or any of that nonsense, because that’s what Galnok, my Martian friend, told me.

Don’t you hate waking up and stepping barefoot on a big pile of dog shit after a night of drinking, then remembering you don’t own a dog?

I never pulled the wings off flies or stuck firecrackers in frogs when I was a child. That didn’t happen until I was in my twenties.

The universe is expanding, which is incredible, especially in this economy.

If you took all the snakes in the world, and laid them end to end, it would probably take a lot of time.

You shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Unless you really don’t like being a parent that much. Or your baby is butt ugly.

I would like sushi more if it were breaded and fried in a square shape, then put on a bun with some American cheese. And served by a clown.

Birthday wishes are nice. But nobody gave me what I really wanted; a robot stripper filled with gummy bears and cocaine. Maybe next year…

If someone cut off my leg, I’d be mad. Hopping mad.

You have to watch out for bad cholesterol. The other day, I was eating a pizza, and some bad cholesterol stole my car.

I’m free of inherited disorders. Except for sprinting. That runs in my family.

I’m embarrassed by my bed-wetting problem. Especially because I’m awake when it happens.

The hardest thing about killing zombies is convincing the cops they were already dead when you shot them.

Some say you should love your enemy. I say, love his wife. That’ll really piss him off.

The things that come out of the mouths of babes. Like this toaster. How’d he fit that whole thing in there?

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To kill yourself because you can’t take the bad jokes anymore,
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You kill yourself, and now you’re dead.

Lots of cool people attend your funeral. In heaven, you have a ménage à troi with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. It was awesome. You should have killed yourself years ago.

The end.

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I kissed her. Then we went into the fake cornfield and made furious love.

Lulu may have been lying about almost everything, but she’d been telling the truth about her flarching problem.

After a quickie divorce in Mexico, I got half of her stuff, and lived happily ever after.

The end.

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I opened my eyes, and saw Amos was still kicking my ass. Which didn’t make sense, because Amish folks were supposed to have that
Thou Shalt Not Kick Ass
commandment.

But then, a lot about this case didn’t make sense. Rather than try to understand it, I chose instead to ignore it all and concentrate on not getting beaten to death. To accomplish this, I had to use one of Chuck Norris’s patented self-defense moves—curling up in a ball with my hands protecting my face.

Unfortunately, Amos knew the counter-move—kicking me over and over really hard. As my life drained away, I couldn’t help but wonder where I would be if I had made different choices.

Then I remembered it wasn’t my choices that brought me this fate. It was your damn choices.

You suck.

The end.

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Bub was crouching before Andy, his black wings billowing out behind him like a rubber parachute.

Andy’s mouth went dry. The demon was the most amazing and horrifying thing he’d ever seen.

Hoofs big as washtubs.

Massively muscled black legs, with knees that bent backwards like the hindquarters of a goat.

Claws the size of manhole covers, ending in talons that looked capable of disemboweling an elephant.

Bub approached the Plexiglas and cocked his head to the side, as if contemplating the new arrival. It was a bear’s head, with black ram horns, and rows of jagged triangular teeth.

Shark’s teeth.

His snout was flat and piggish, and he snorted, fogging up the glass. His elliptical eyes—black bifurcated pupils set into corneas the color of bloody urine—locked on Andy with an intensity that only intelligent beings could manage.

He was so close, Andy could count the coarse red hairs on the demon’s broad chest. The animal smell swirled up the linguist’s nostrils, mixed with odors of offal and fecal matter.

Bub raised a claw and placed it on the Plexiglas.

“Hach wi’ hew,” Bub said.

Andy yelled again, crab-walking backwards and bumping into the sheep. The sheep bleated in alarm.

Bub, as if commanded, backed away from the window. His giant, rubbery wings folded over once, twice, and then tucked neatly away behind his massive back. He walked over to a large tree and squatted there, waiting.

Sun led the sheep past the Plexiglas and to a doorway on the other side of the room. They entered, and a minute later a small hatch opened inside the habitat, off to Bub’s left.

Andy mentally screamed at Sun,
“Don’t open that door!”
even though the opening was far too narrow for Bub to fit through.

Bub watched as the sheep walked into his domain. The door closed behind it.

The sheep shook off its blindfold and looked around its new environment. Upon seeing Bub it let forth a very human-sounding scream.

In an instant, less than an instant, Bub had sprung from his spot by the tree and sailed through the air almost twenty feet, his wings fully outstretched. He snatched up the sheep in his claws, an obscene imitation of a bat grabbing a moth.