Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (27 page)

Jeannie pulls a stick from the fire to serve as a torch. “Maybe someone needs help.”

Another muddled mess of words spew forth like pus from an infected wound. “Why you have to be a raging bitch about it and take a big ripe steaming shit on my publications well I wish you would stick an AIDS-infected squirrel up your ass and then my whole roster can take turns taking big ripe steaming shits in your open coffin.”

“Someone needs help, all right,” Mark mutters.

They edge sideways around the tent until the light from the makeshift torch falls upon a pudgy, misshapen figure hunched in the bushes. Hate-filled beady little eyes squint against the glare. Long greasy tangles of hair fall in lank clumps to the collar of a grimy shirt sporting the logo of some metal band.

“Think it
is
a hobo,” Cody says. “Hey! Who’re you?”

“Do you have sleeeeeeeeping bags?” the weirdo asks, oozing his slimy snail-trail gaze over them, licking his scabby lips. Here, unmistakably, is the source of the stench. “Tight, snug sleeping bags? Tucked in real tight and zipped shut real good so you can’t move?”

All three of them take instinctive steps back. Their faces twist with revulsion.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Cody asks. “Dude! Sick!”

“I think he must be mentally defective,” says Jeannie.

“Call me a retard you slutwhore I bet you are some fucking plagiarist wank, another cunt trying to sabotage –”

She brandishes the torch at him. “
What
did you call me?”

He recoils, whining. “Just because I suggested they give rim jobs to their dead relatives and suck dog-dicks, they go and try to make me a laughingstock; well, I have a crude sense of humor and am outspoken about my beliefs which the homo agenda wants me to shut up!”

“Get the fuck out of here, you creep! Before we call the ranger or kick your ass ourselves!” Mark moves a meaningful stride forward, fists clenched.

The weirdo squeals. An acrid stink of piss overpowers everything else. With a shrill, gurgling cry that is either a titter or a yelp, he makes a break for it. His clumsy, stumpy-legged excuse for a run tramples the undergrowth. Leaves don’t quite wilt at his passage, but it wouldn’t have been surprising.

Then he’s gone. Cody, Jeannie and Mark shudder in unison. They look at each other as the smell dissipates and the normal scents of the forest once again fill the air.

“Who’s for moving camp over closer to the crowds?” Cody raises his hand. “Like, immediately?”

Jeannie’s and Mark’s shoot up as well.

“That,” says Jeannie, “or pack up and leave altogether. I don’t know about you guys, but I never want to spend the night in a sleeping bag again.”

*     *     *

Lloyd, A.J.’s partner at the
Gazette
as well as in other ways, bursts into the Visitor and Education Center, wild-eyed and wild-haired, panting for breath, his rumpled clothes askew in a sexy kind of way.

“Me and A.J. … we were at … at the lake … we saw … he went to grab his camera … we saw … we saw …”

“What?” asks Poppy. “What did you see?”

“An unseen horror!”

“But you just said you
saw
it,” she says.

He falters, blinking. Pretty, like most of A.J.’s boyfriends, but not the sharpest crayon in the box. “Unknown, then. An unknown horror.”

Ranger Kane pinches the bridge of his nose and strives for patience. “So, what did it
look
like, this unknown horror?”

“It was indescribable!”

“Indescribable?”

“Like something out of a horror story!”

“Indescribable,” Kane repeats dryly.

“Yeah, like from a story Stephen King, or Richard Matheson. Or an episode of
The Twi
–”

He leans across the counter to swat Lloyd upside the head. “Knock it off. You’re a reporter, a writer. It’s your
job
to describe things.”

“Oh,” Lloyd says, considering this. “Yeah … I guess you’re right.”

Before he can describe whatever it was they’d seen, however, Poppy peers out the window. “What’s going on down by the mini-mart? Who’s yelling?”

“We’re too late!” cries Lloyd, dashing for the door again. “Ranger, you’ve got weapons? Guns and stuff? Hurry!”

He’s gone without waiting for an answer. Poppy and Kane exchange a glance, then follow, Kane pausing only long enough to unlock a tall metal cabinet and grab a dart rifle to supplement the bear spray and taser on his belt.

Curious tourists and locals have already gathered by the time they get close to the disturbance. Among them are Angelina from the library, Ramsey and his boys looking over from the kayak rental place, a group of little Chalkliners on a park outing supervised by a teacher, the Black Skull Death Vines band members who’ve been having a cookout on the beach before their evening’s gig, Ray from GAME OVER, others.

“I think,” Kane says, “that Uncle Sticky’s been trying to convince Mel to carry his crappy excuses for books.”

Mel, in her smock, has chased the stumbling, disheveled figure most of the way to the lake shore. A trail of shoddy-looking paperbacks and stapled manuscripts leave a trail leading back to the mini-mart, creased pages fluttering limply in the breeze.

“–and stay the hell out of my store from now on, loser!” Mel finishes, hurling the last tattered sheaf of pages at him. It flaps through the air and smacks onto the rocks. Though it’s about fifteen feet short, he ducks, flinches, retreats to the water’s edge and cowers there, bleating that weird gibbering giggle of his.

“Loser? Who are you calling loser, skank?” He points at February Ashton-Smith. “Ask her! Her father took my books as a donation! Losers don’t get books in museums! He said I was like a hybrid of a bunch of really famous scary writers so nyah!”

“Excuse me?” February raises her eyebrows. “Are you kidding? Your books aren’t in the museum. Never have been.”

“That’s because he decided to keep them for himself instead of put them on display where all the rest of these rape-babies could pirate them, then piss on the ashes of my career like some fucking faggot terrorists who shoot up schools and give their kids X-Boxes!”

“What?” say five or six bewildered tourists.

“What does that even mean?” Poppy asks Kane.

Kane shrugs.

“Whatever my father told you,” February says, “it was to humor you, to be polite, and get you to go away.”

“That’s a fucking lie! You say that when he liked them enough to –”

“He threw them out. He told me it was like trying to read someone doing a bad impression of a wanna-be Lovecraft ripoff. He said calling it fan-fiction would be an insult to fan-fiction.”

“The fuck you know, bitchdyke cunt! Why don’t you go dump a load of cum in your dead mother with your shemale cock!”

“He said bad words!” gasps a Chalkliner in a Spider-Man shirt.

“Just ignore him,” the teacher says.

“But he’s being mean to the nice lady!”

“Hush. It’s none of your business.”

“Like to see any of you write creative nonfiction true stories from your own nightmares of darkness!” Uncle Sticky rants on. “I get publicity, I put copies right in the hands of people in the goth metal scene to promote my books and they say I’m hardcore, they do devil horns at me when I meet them outside concerts!”

“Which they also throw away as soon as you’re gone, like anybody with an ounce of brains in their head,” says A.J., who’s just arrived with camera in hand, only to find more of a spectacle than whatever he and Lloyd had expected.

“They do not do not do not!” Uncle Sticky jumps up and down, stamping his feet and shaking his dirty little fists. To either side of his ridiculously pubic patch of mangy facial hair, stubbly jowls wobble. “So shut the fuck up and let me have my readership! I have fans! I have supporters!”

“Anybody who tells you that,” says Angelina, “is either trying to be nice and let you down easy, or hoping to get rid of you without you making a scene.”

“Face it,” says one of Ramsey’s boys. “You can’t write worth a damn.”

“I was good enough to be in
PsychoWeenie Magazine
ten years ago, you fucking cuntfucks, how can you say I can’t write? I sent a story to
Stiff Sock
too only they couldn’t use it because it was too transgressive with cannibalism and other really extreme subjects too dark and gross for them to touch!”

“The only thing around here too gross to touch is
you
, princess,” the Black Skull Death Vines drummer says, to a general round of agreement.

Uncle Sticky juts his chin. Or, tries to. It might have worked better if he actually 
had
one. “Nuh-unh!”

“Yeah-huh!” chorus several of the Chalkliners.

“Right, that’s enough,” says the teacher. “Come on, children. Since you can’t be polite, we’re leaving. I don’t want to hear any more. We’ll forget all about it and pretend none of this ever happened.” And, with that, they’re marched off, their protests of unfairness and injustice falling on deaf ears.

Uncle Sticky, meanwhile, is all warmed up and raring to go.

“You just hate me for being the outspoken Christian conservative who won’t write to the God-abominations or publish gay erotica pandering to a homo knob jockeys who want to read about men rubbing their big hard cocks together and being on their knees getting spit-roasted by sweaty slapping man-meat and swallowing gallons of each others’ creamy loads while getting ass-pounded up the ass with giant cocks pounding in their asses yeah pumping their asses full of hot thick spunkjuice!”

Everyone only stares.

A.J. nudges Lloyd and murmurs, “This is him
not
liking gay porn?”

“For someone who claims that, he sure knows a lot about it.”

He rounds on them. “Shut the fuck up you cockgobblers, I’d like to see your balls on video! I mean, see you have the balls to expose yourself on video, why don’t you do that with your real name A.J. not hiding behind faceless initials like some faggot with your trash piece of shit tabloid-purpose newspaper! Why can’t you show your dick I mean why do you have to be a dick and not give it to me?”

“Someone’s got a crush,” Lloyd lilts in a singsong.

“Ohhh-mygawd.” A.J. holds up both hands with palms out. “Eew.”

“Go molest a goat wrapped in a flaming rainbow pride flag! I am not gay, I like the ladies, natural-born ladies not fake tranny fag hags, so quit making me out to be some cum-gulper and sabotaging me getting a girlfriend!”

“Yeah, the women are lining up for the chance,” says the Black Skull Death Vines lead singer. “Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?” She turns aside and mimes poking a finger down her throat.

“Raging cunt, I wish someone should rape you and get you pregnant –”

Kane heaves a sigh. “Yeah, okay, we’ve had enough of this.” In a single smooth motion, he unshoulders the dart rifle and fires.

“Hurk!” Uncle Sticky staggers back, heels splashing into the shallows. Clutching at his leg where the needle of the ballistic syringe has pierced his filth-encrusted jeans, he sputters, “Cocksucker! You … fuck you … fucking fucker …”

He totters another few steps, sways, reels, and takes the full-on Nestea plunge. An oilslick of grime, grease and scum forms, spreading around him as he lolls like a bloated, floating corpse. His eyelids twitch. Foamy drool dribbles from the corner of his mouth.

When the applause and cheering die down, a somber thoughtfulness descends over the assembled crowd.

“I suppose we ought to dredge him out before he drowns,” February says.

“Or pollutes the lake,” says A.J. “He’s leaving a bathtub ring already.”

“Glurrrr …” mumbles Uncle Sticky, struggling toward semi-sentience.

Then the surface of the water surges up in a sudden bulge beneath him, as Lloyd’s indescribable unknown horror rises from the depths.

It’s just like a scene from a movie, like that scene in
Aliens
where the alien queen impales that guy and rips him in half. Just like that, only more graphic and surreal with extreme horror!

Uncle Sticky screeches, blowing bubbles of blood and curds of spit, gaping goggle-eyed at the barbed point sticking through the metal band logo on his grubby shirt. His limbs thrash in a wild, useless flailing. What comes next isn’t a
ripping
in half so much as a
cutting
, a
chopping
… as an enormous claw with serrated edges comes up, seizes the flabby torso, and closes with a single hard snap of powerful tendons.

KLAK!

His lower portion, legs kicking in spasmodic reflex, plop down amid a shower of bilious bodily fluids. The monstrous scorpionoid tail flexes, waving Uncle Sticky’s upper half in a triumphant flourish. Unraveling gut-loops swing in slippery sausage ropes from the ragged bisection. A knobbly length of spine sticks out.