Inferno Park (27 page)

In the windows on the upper floor, silhouettes of shapely women passed back and forth behind the pink curtains. On the lower floor, more lighted pink curtains with lacy trim hung in the entrance, at the center of the hotel’s front porch. Batwing doors hung in front of the curtain, and a heart was carved at the spot where the doors met, one half carved into each door so that the heart would split apart when they opened.

“Look at that.” Finn walked slowly toward the building’s soft pink lights. “I know that wasn’t there before.”

“Who cares? We gotta get going,” Derek said, hefting the box of stolen treasure.

The pink curtains parted. A woman with her hair done up in an elaborate heap of curls stepped through the curvy batwing doors, smiling right at Finn with her dark red lips. She could have been one of the hot moms he liked to admire at the ice cream parlor. She wore a long calico dress with puffy sleeves and a neckline so deep that he could see the fringe of her scarlet bra. Gold jewelry glittered at her ears, neck, wrists, and fingers.

“Uh, hi,” Finn said, approaching her. She strolled up the railing of the wooden walkway in front of the wooden hotel, waving a folding paper fan at herself.

While she gazed down at him, two girls emerged from the batwing doors and sauntered up on either side of her. They were younger, closer to Finn’s own age, in red and black dresses cut high in the front to reveal fishnet stockings and tall, high-heeled boots. Their hair was also done in elaborate curls and braids and decorated with tall feathers. Their faces were heavily painted, and they regarded Finn with distant, appraising looks.

One of them, the red-haired girl on his left, resembled Kylie Winchester, an older girl who’d once lived in his neighborhood. Finn had fantasized about her before she’d vanished on the day of the sinkhole, though he’d done the same about every girl on his street, and a few of their moms, too. And one or two of their grandmas, when he was reaching for some new fantasy material.

“Let’s get out of here!” Derek grabbed his arm, but Finn shook him off and walked closer to the porch railing.

“Come on up, sweetie,” said the lady in the calico dress. “If you want a good time.”

“I do.” Finn climbed straight up over the railing, not even bothering to walk a few feet to use the steps. The three women moved in around him, and he smelled their rich, sweet perfumes, tangy and tempting in the air.

“We want to have a good time, too,” the one in calico said, touching his cheek with her silky gloved hand.

“But you must pay a price,” said the girl who looked like Kylie Winchester.

“You got it,” Finn whispered, intoxicated by the sight and smell of them as their fingertips stroked his face and arms. He brought out a handful of gold coins from his pocket. “Take what you want.”

“What the fuck are you doing up there, Finn?” Derek shouted from the ground. “Get away from them!”

“One minute,” Finn mumbled. He wished he could slap Derek away like an annoying fly.

“Is that all?” The girl who looked like Kylie frowned with her deep red lips. “I hoped it would last a little longer.”

“Don’t forget to save some for me,” said the other girl, taking Finn’s arm. She caressed his bicep. “Oh! He’s so strong.”

“And so big.” The lady in calico laid her hands on his hips and pressed herself against him, gazing up at him with a hungry look in her hazel eyes. She licked her lips as she took his entire handful of gold coins. She gave the two younger girls one coin each and pocketed the rest. “We’ll have a lot of fun with this boy,” she said in a husky voice, and the other two giggled.

“This is really messed up, Finn!” Derek called from below. “We should go! Right now!”

“We want you to come inside,” whispered the girl who looked like Kylie. She stood up on the toes of her leather boots and kissed his cheek. He could feel the lipstick stamp she left behind. The other younger girl kissed his other cheek, and then the lady in calico kissed him full on the mouth, her hands caressing their way down his chest and stomach.

Finn was so horny he could barely breathe.

“Follow me,” the calico lady whispered. She stepped through the batwing doors, then slipped away through the pink curtain.

Finn followed, a burlesque girl on each arm, all the blood in his brain slipping away and flowing southward. He knew what it would be like inside the Old West brothel—deep Oriental rugs, silk furniture, candles, soft music, strong whiskey, maybe opium pipes and hookas. Upstairs, the feather beds would be enormous and full of warm, welcoming girls. He could see it all in his mind.

His heart hammered in anticipation.

Distantly, he heard Derek calling after him, but Derek was an idiot. Derek was obsessed with money for the sake of money, not realizing that the whole point of having money was to get laid.

Finn passed through the curtain.

The facade of the hotel turned out to be a false front. Behind it lay three feet of dusty space ending at a bare plywood wall.

Finn looked up at the second story. Female mannequins rolled back and forth behind the pink-curtained windows on automated loops, riding little train contraptions on circular tracks. The tracks sat on scaffolding behind the hotel facade. Little spotlights mounted behind the mannequins created the alluring shadows he’d seen on the window curtains.

“I kind of expected it to be different back here...” Finn lowered his gaze back down to the three women.

The older woman no longer wore the calico dress. Dark mud smeared her hair thin and flat against her head. Her entire body looked pale, more than a little decayed, and dripping with more dark mud, like she had just crawled out of her own grave.

In place of the calico dress and high-heeled boots, she wore a mud-soaked summer blouse and high-waisted mom jeans, all of it ripped and pasted to her body. A mud-drenched orange fanny pack sagged on her hip, and her eyes were concealed in the shadow of an orange plastic sun visor smeared with grime—two red-flag signs of a tourist.

One of the younger girls was now just a mud-soaked teenager in an airbrushed Conch City shirt and denim shorts.

The other girl, he realized, really
was
his hot neighbor Kylie Winchester who had died in the sinkhole. Her skin was pale, her entire body muddy, and the left half of her face bashed in as if by some blunt object, but he recognized her. Her eyes glowed, pale and drained of color, inside the decayed wreckage of her face.

All three of them looked like the risen dead, and the two younger girls had grown icy cold in his arms. He tried to pull back from them, but they clutched him tighter, encircling him with their stiff, dead arms, their nails digging into his waist like bird claws. Finn tried to break away, but the two girls were as stiff as iron, trapping him in their embrace.

The tourist mom removed her visor as she approached him. Her eyes were also colorless, so pale they seemed to glow, even when the spotlights overhead snuffed out and left them in darkness.

“You said we could take what we wanted as payment,” she whispered, her voice hoarse, as though her throat were full of water and sand. “‘Take what you want,’ you said.”

The cold dead girls giggled, clutching him tighter from both sides. Finn shuddered, his heart beating triple-time, his entire body shivering with fear, but he couldn’t break free.

“What is this?” Finn whispered.

The dead tourist mom raised her face toward his, the smell of rotten flesh wafting from her rotten lips, and he remembered how she’d kissed him less than a minute ago. She lay an icy gray hand on his chest, and it was so cold Finn thought it might stop his heart.

“Feeding time,” she whispered.

Then she bit into his chest, her teeth cracking his breastbone, as if she planned to chew right through to his heart.

The other girls sank their teeth into his belly and into the back of his neck.

Finn couldn’t break away from their deadly hug, so he screamed for Derek to come help him until his hot dead neighbor Kylie bit open his windpipe and sucked all the air from his lungs.

Then they really tore into him.

Chapter Seventeen

Heath stuffed himself on the midway, but he felt he had no choice. The food was delicious, packed with grease, salt, and sugar. He ate multiple slices of pizza, three or four corn dogs slathered in ketchup and mustard, a deep-fried funnel cake with powdered sugar and blackberry jam. He’d chugged at least six beers. He’d done all of this in less than five minutes.

His belly full, he’d strolled down the midway, taking in the endless array of bright neon signs, blinking light bulbs, and painted animals and clowns.

He walked right to the Whack-A-Frog, half-smiling to himself. He remembered wanting to play it years ago, when he was six or seven, and his dad insisting it was a waste of money. His dad had found most things Heath wanted, and some of the things he actually needed, to be a waste of money.

Heath looked over the booth, lit by its array of alternately pulsing lights. Big stuffed animals dangled from ceiling wires above. The frogs crouched in the holes in the painted pond, waiting to spring out. He hefted the cartoony oversized mallet, connected by a thick cable to the game console.

He dug into his pocket, came out with a pair of quarters, and fed them into the machine.

All the lights flared to full brightness at once, and the game played a few croaking-frog and cricket sound effects.

Then the first frog jutted out of its hole, and the booth’s speakers began to blare the oldies song “At the Hop.” Heath swung the mallet, but not before the frog ducked back into the hole. He had never been fast on his feet, but he was strong as an ox, and in both these things took after his father.

When the second frog jutted out, he slammed the mallet into its grinning green face and felt a pleasant crack at the impact. The lights of the machine flashed red for a moment, and a bell rang.

Heath kept swinging, pounding the third frog, missing the fourth, and bashing the fifth with a vengeance.

When his mallet bashed into the fifth frog, he felt a satisfying crunch like cracking bone. Dark red fluid spurted from the frog’s head, spattering the blue and green booth around it. He guessed it was some kind of mechanical oil or other lubricant, but it almost looked like blood, and Heath smiled at the sight of it.

He bashed the sixth frog, feeling its face crack, and a gusher of the dark red fluid splashed his arm. The frog retracted into its hole with obvious damage to its green head, the eye and nose area cracked and sunken.

Heath smashed one frog after another, feeling them break under his mallet, while “At the Hop” played at deafening volume. Soon Heath and the booth were dripping red, and the frogs popped out already damaged and cracked, but he kept swinging, filled with destructive glee.

When he was eight years old, his father had taken him deer hunting, which involves waking up before dawn and sitting in a tree stand hung with camouflage. His father had drunk Wild Turkey—not a waste of money, apparently—and when thoroughly plastered, had given Heath the rifle to hold.

Heath had held it while his father continued drinking himself into a stupor. A deer had stepped out into the little clearing in the woods below, a buck with an impressive rack of antlers, and Heath had gone ahead and shot it. He’d never killed anything larger than an insect before that.

It hadn’t been a perfectly clean shot—he’d hit the big deer in the lung, and it thrashed around for a minute, hacking up blood, and dashed into the woods.

Heath had scrambled down from the stand and chased after it. He found the deer several yards away, toppled over on its side, struggling and gasping to breathe while it drowned in its own blood. It took several minutes to die.

He’d roused his dad, and they’d tied to the deer to the truck and gone to his dad’s friend’s place to hang it upside down on a wooden rack. Heath remembered his dad slicing the deer from crotch to throat and the steaming, ropy entrails spilling out into a big metal tub below.

“Killing a thing is power,” his dad had muttered in his slurred voice. “But eating a thing you killed, that’s real power.”

Heath had thought that over while his family ate roasts and ground venison from his kill over the following weeks.

His dad had taken off a month or two after that, rarely to be seen again. Apparently he’d decided that supporting Heath’s mom and brother and sisters was a waste of money, too. Times got hard after that, and Heath often thought about his dad’s last lesson, and what it really meant, if anything.

When the game ended, most of the frogs still jutted out of their holes, too demolished to sink back inside. Springs and ruptured plastic tubes hung out of their fractured bodies like broken bones and leaking intestines. A sheet of blood-red fluid coated the entire face of the game, with little trickles running off and dripping softly into the sawdust at his feet. The oily red fluid soaked Heath’s face and shirt.

Heath looked around with a grin, eager to show Derek and Finn how he’d completely destroyed the game, but he didn’t see anyone at all, just the hypnotic colored lights pulsing along the midway, and more lights from the high rides beyond, especially in the direction of Space City.

He vaguely remembered the two girls walking by—not giving Heath a second look, he was sure—and then he seemed to remember glimpsing Derek and Finn from the corner of his eye, heading into the dark ruins of Fools’ Gold. Jared and Becca weren’t anywhere in sight, either, but those two didn’t seem to like him very much anyway. They had only tolerated Heath because Derek brought him around.

A creaking, humming sound came from above, near the ceiling of the booth. Heath looked up. One rack of stuffed animals was moving, each plush creature advancing one spot like the candy bars in a vending machine.

The animal at the front dropped off the rack and landed in his arms. It was a green reindeer with brown felt antlers, wearing a red collar with a jingle bell on the front.

Nine-point buck
, Heath thought.
How’s that for a waste of money, Dad?