Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (12 page)

I cried out a warning. Salisbury’s grip tightened on his gun. Eliza hit the brakes and we were pitched forwards in our seats. Lester’s shrouded head slammed down upon the kitchenette table. The camper slewed to a shuddering halt at the foot of a ramshackle wooden truss bridge.

I let out my breath and sat Lester upright. His head was cocked at a quizzical angle—I think he’d broken his neck when he head-butted the table—he looked like he was wondering what we were going to do next. Eliza asked me if he was okay. I thought,
Apart from being dead
. I told her: “He’s fine.”

Salisbury considered the challenge before us and growled, “Damn it all to hell …”

“Nothing else for it,” I said. “We’ll have to find another way across.”

But if I’d thought something so simple as a suicidal bridge crossing might give Salisbury pause, I had underestimated his obsession.

“No time,” he said. “I won’t lose him, not now I’m so
close
.”

He herded us from the camper with the gun at our backs.

The ravine cleaved the woods in two like an axe wound. Craggy rock walls plunged thirty-feet down onto whitewater rapids. Jagged rocks studded the river like the spine of a wallowing stegosaur. The bridge looked like something an insane hobbyist had built using matchsticks; a fallen Jenga tower of rotten timber trussed together with rusted steel cables and fraying snakes of rope. Bloodstains spattered the bridge path. The creature’s fart-inan-elevator stink still lingered in the air.

But for the first time, I felt a glimmer of hope; I knew where we were. The Bigelow Skunk Ape had long been rumored to haunt Strickland Bridge—and other local death traps parents sought to frighten their children away from. If Eliza and me could somehow give Salisbury the slip, I was confident we could follow the river and blunder our way back to town. Of course, that was easier said than done with a maniac holding an elephant gun to our backs.

Salisbury nudged Eliza towards the bridge.

“Guide us across, missy,” he said. “You’re driving, Levine.”

“Are you nuts?” I said, rhetorically. “No way that bridge is gonna hold us.”

Salisbury shoved the gun in my face and said, “If you prefer, I could jettison some weight—a bouncer and a stripper’s worth, say—and make the crossing myself.”

“I’ll be fine, Mr. Levine,” Eliza assured me. She was eyeing the bridge speculatively. “Just don’t forget to buckle up.”

I started saying, “Road safety’s the least of my concerns right now—”

Then she winked at me; a sly wink that scared me as much as Salisbury’s gun. God help me, Eliza had a plan. At least, she
thought
she did. Because unless I’d misinterpreted that wink, and her advice that I buckle up, it was a plan straight out of the Lester Swash playbook. She had to be dumber than Lester and crazier than Salisbury if she thought it would achieve anything other than killing us all.

But before I could try and reason with her, she’d already turned and stepped cautiously onto the bridge. Inching across the path, her arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, she tested each rotten beam with her foot before entrusting her weight to it.

Salisbury frog-marched me back to the camper. I slumped down behind the wheel, not quite believing what I was about to do. Salisbury sat beside me and jammed the gun barrels under my armpit. I fastened my seat belt and keyed the ignition and the engine growled to life. I glanced at Salisbury. He wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He seemed to hold them in the same disdain as Quint the shark fisherman held for life jackets.

Salisbury offered me this sage advice, “Nice and easy now, Levine.”

“You think?”

I swiped the sweat off my palms on my jeans, shifted the Minnie Winnie into gear, and then I teased my foot down on the gas pedal, clutching the wheel in a white-knuckle grip as the camper crawled onto the bridge.

The entire structure shuddered violently. Rotten wood groaned and sagged under the Minnie Winnie’s weight, or just crumbled to sawdust beneath the slow-rolling tires. The cables and ropes squealed like an orchestra of tautly stringed instruments. Eliza guided us forwards like a traffic cop, steering me left and right and halting my snail’s pace-crawl with urgent hand signals and animated facial expressions. And somehow, by some miracle, the bridge was holding.

“You see, Levine?” Salisbury cackled. “God loves a skunk aper!”

Then we reached the middle of the bridge—Eliza winked at me—there was a thunderclap of rotten wood, and the camper gave a violent downwards lurch like a submarine performing an emergency dive. The camper’s nose chewed through the bridge path like a giant ravenous termite. The rear-end seesawed off the ground, tires spinning in space, as the Minnie Winnie tore through the underside of the bridge in a blizzard of sawdust. For a moment, we hung suspended in a tangled net of ropes and cables, like an insect trapped in a spider’s web. Then one by one they snapped with a musical twang—and then suddenly we were freefalling … A kamikaze camper plummeting thirty-feet down towards the river and the rocks.

The camper cratered onto the rocks, the hood crumpling like a tin can, the windshield shattering on impact. A hailstorm of broken glass tore through the cab, studding my arms as I raised them to shield my eyes. The impact pitched me forwards in my seat. My seat belt bit sharply into my chest, snatching the air from my lungs. My neck whiplashed, my forehead thumping the steering wheel.

Not wearing his seat belt, Salisbury thudded against the dash like a crash test dummy. The gun was wrenched away from my armpit.

Then the camper rocked forwards and crashed onto its roof and the world turned topsy-turvy. Lester’s shrouded corpse was hurled about the camper like a scarecrow in a hurricane. The bait buckets spilled like cans of paint, decorating the camper like a demented Jackson Pollack.

Pinned to my seat by my belt, I dangled upside-down, watching helplessly as Salisbury peeled himself from the upturned roof. How the hell he’d survived the crash, I didn’t know; maybe he was right, God really
did
love a skunk aper.

Then I saw with horror he was still clutching the elephant gun.

“Goddamn you, Levine …”

Racked with pain, furious he was losing his quarry, Salisbury raised the barrels towards me—and then a high-pressure spray of water tore through the camper and punched out the rear window and he was blasted outside like a Wet N’ Wild ride. So too was Lester; I saw him in his sleeping bag, being swept away downriver like a sea burial.

The camper was flooding fast, bait buckets bobbing in the water like putrid fishing lures. I sucked a deep breath before the fast-rising water enveloped my head. Then I fumbled to unfasten my—
My seatbelt was jammed!
I couldn’t release the lock. Panicking, I thrashed and flailed against my restraints like a condemned con riding Old Sparky, screaming bubbles in the icy water. A startled fish swam past me. For a moment we locked eyes, before it darted away. Then I saw Salisbury’s slouch hat floating by. I snatched the hat, tore one of the cougar’s fangs from the hatband, and used its sharp edge to saw frantically through the belt strapped across my chest. My lungs burned for air, gray clouded the edge of my vision … and then the fraying strap broke away from my chest and I floated free from my seat. With a last effort, I propelled myself through the broken windshield, kicking upwards, clawing towards the sunlight, exploding to the surface and sucking in great gulps of air.

The upturned camper sank amid a seething froth of bubbles, until only the tires were visible. Flotsam popped to the surface around me. Clinging to a rock to avoid being swept away downriver, I searched for Salisbury but couldn’t see him anywhere. Drowned, I hoped. Peering up at the bridge, I was amazed to see it was still standing. A gaping hole in the midsection had collapsed where the Minnie Winnie had torn right through it. The foot-ends jutted like gangplanks on either embankment. I couldn’t see Eliza above me.

Paddling to shore, I dragged myself hand-over-hand onto the bank, slithering through the mud like some strange creature in the process of evolution. I slumped in exhaustion against the sheer rock wall, trying to catch my breath. It was hard to believe I’d survived. Staring at the wreckage of the sunken camper was like an out-of-body experience. I felt dog-tired all of a sudden. All I wanted was to curl up on the bank and take a long nap. My head lolled, my eyelids drooped. Then I heard a scratching sound above me.

Raising my head, I saw a length of rope snaking down the rock face, until it coiled in the mud beside me. “Eliza …” I said. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“Didn’t you see me wink ‘Jump’?” Eliza called from above.

Then she said, “Tie the rope around your waist, Mr. Levine!”

She was flattering me if she thought she could pull my ass up. Even at my fighting weight, I’d fought at light heavy—and that was many beers ago. But I tied the rope around my waist and told Eliza to anchor the other end around a tree that would take my weight in the likely event that I slipped and fell. I was searching the rock face for handholds to begin scaling the cliff—when the rope snapped taut and I was hoisted off my feet and began being winched up the wall.

The girl had freakish strength.

It was only when I reached the top of the cliff that I realized she’d had help. Rough hands dragged me onto the precipice and rolled me onto my back. Then a familiar smiling face loomed over me—and I wondered if maybe I’d died in the camper wreck after all, died and gone straight to hell.

The last time I’d seen him, he’d been on his hands and knees, scrabbling for his rotten teeth on the floor of The Henhouse. Now he was sporting a pair of Gary Busey-big dentures that didn’t quite fit his mouth. “Oh, I prayed to God I’d run into you again,” Smiley said. Before I could react, he booted me in the guts. As I hacked for breath, he grabbed hold of my shirt, dragged me to my feet, and jammed the barrel of an AK-47 under my jaw. “Remember me, motherfucker?”

“I never forget a pretty smile.”

Clearly sensitive about his new teeth, he tried to close his lips around his whopping dentures, and couldn’t quite manage it. “Laugh it up while you still can, asshole. Cuz I aim to return the favor with a fucking claw hammer.”

I glanced at Eliza. Another Damn Dirty Ape—Blubberguts—had his beefy arms wrapped around her. He was kneading her breasts like he was trying to coax music from them, but the only sounds it produced were Eliza’s moans of disgust.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Levine. They just came out of nowhere. I couldn’t stop ‘em.”

“You okay?”

She nodded sadly.

Smiley patted me on the shoulder. “She’s fine, Palooka.”

Blubberguts haw-haw-hawed as he honked her breasts. “She’s
real
fine.”

As Eliza squirmed in Blubberguts’s grip, my eyes darted to the sawed-off shotgun with the pistol grip the big man wore in a leather bucket holster on his thigh.

I bunched my fists by my sides. “If you hurt her,” I said, “so help me, I’ll—”

Smiley ground the barrel of the AK-47 into the underside of my jaw. “You’ll do
what
exactly?” Sneering, he said, “Trust me, Palooka—pretty soon you’re gonna be too busy wishing you was dead to even
think
about playing hero.” He glanced at the broken bridge; peered down over the cliff edge at the camper submerged in the river below. “Now what the fuck are y’all doing out here?”

I was wondering the same thing about them. I’d thought the skunk ape had devoured and excreted the bikers. But I figured what the hell and just went ahead and told him. “Hunting skunk ape.”

Blubberguts haw-haw-hawed. “Hunting skunk ape, he says.”

Smiley gave a snort of amusement. “Find any?”

“Just the Damn Dirty kind.”

Smiley snatched a knife from a hip sheath and cut the rope from around my waist. Gripping my shoulder, he spun me around, and jammed the barrel of the AK against my spine. “Get walking.” He encouraged me with a kick in the ass.

As I staggered forwards, I said to Eliza, “It’s gonna be okay.”

Smiley said, “He’s lying to you, princess.”

They marched us into the woods, Smiley with the barrel of the Widow-maker glued to my spine, Eliza saddled over Blubberguts’s shoulders. Conversation was limited to “Keep walking, asshole,” punctuated with a shove or a kick in the ass and a haw-haw-haw from Blubberguts. I glanced once again at Blubberguts’s sawed-off, but wasn’t convinced I could snatch it from his thigh holster before Smiley gunned me down, so I just kept walking, trying to stay out of range of those kicks in the ass.

* * *

After hiking for some time, we broke through the brush and emerged into an overgrown farmyard. A derelict farmhouse and a scattering of tumbledown outbuildings loomed before us. The rusted hulks of junk farming equipment lurked in the tall grass and weeds. I remembered the place from a recent conversation with Eliza. This was Herb Planter’s old farm—where the fugitive Melvin Stott had come to sate his mongoloid lust on Herb’s hogs. The place had fallen to rot and ruin since then. The only people who came here now were local kids: Drinking beer, smoking weed, honing their graffiti skills, and boosting the teenage pregnancy stats. A fleet of five motorcycles leaned on kickstands outside the porch. A sidecar was fitted to the bike on the end. I couldn’t see the rest of the bikers anywhere; the other Damn Dirty Apes must have been inside the house.

A sharp chemical smell choked the air. “Mmm-hmm …” I said. “Just like momma used to make.” Things were starting to make sense. The Damn Dirty Apes were cooking crystal meth out here. They must have heard the Minnie Winnie wreck. Smiley and Blubberguts had been sent to scout the commotion.

Smiley gave me a shove towards the house. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and attempted to whistle, but with his dentures, could only achieve a sloppy sputtering sound. He glared at me, daring me to crack wise.

“We got company!” he hollered at the house.

The Damn Dirty Apes emerged from the house. Shitface and Baby Doll were wearing gas masks, and the same MC vests they’d worn that night at The Henhouse. Chains—rusted neck chains, Old Dixie do-rag, and a six-shooter holstered gunfighter-style on his hip—was last to appear. He peeled the gasmask from his face and let it hang around his neck like a fetish collar.