Tentacle Death Trip (10 page)

“Well, I didn’t say
I was going to try for it. The time I spent here already means I’m going to be
behind. I figured those other assholes will be preoccupied with that.
Might give me a better chance.”

“You think you’re
the only racer to have that idea? I’d get going if I were you,” Cobra said.
“And speaking of which…I’m glad as hell I
ain’t
you. No offense.”

Samson grunted.
“Yeah.”

Cobra turned to
Paulo. “Looks like you’re staying with Uncle Cobra. Can’t say I have much in
the way of toys but I have a dirt bike I’m almost done fixing. You might like
to take a ride on that when it’s done.
How about it?”

Paulo said,
“What’s a dirt bike?”

The men laughed.
They shook hands and went outside.

“I owe you,”
Samson said.

“You get out of
that shit alive and we meet again, you can pay me back in good conversation or
a game of chess.”

“I’m sure I’ll
find time to kick your ass.”

Cobra laughed.

Samson went into
the backseat of the car and pulled out the crabs he had gotten from Lee. “You
have any use for these?”

Cobra smiled.
“Sure do.”

“You might be able
to trade these to someone. You can’t eat them, though. They’re not safe.”

“Sure as hell I
can. I have an iron stomach.” Cobra took a small one out and started to eat it
raw. “Haven’t had this shit in a long while.
Reminds me of
home.”

“Enjoy,” Samson
said. He turned to Paulo. “You
be
good for Cobra,
okay?”

The boy stared at
him. “Don’t go.”

“You can’t come
with me, kid.”

“Don’t go.”

Samson patted the
boy on the shoulder and got into his car. He revved the engine, sending dust up
into the air. He pulled away while looking in his rearview. Cobra was still
eating one of the crabs.

VI.

Paulo watched
Samson drive away and then heard Cobra cough. There was a gurgling sound and a
crunch.

Cobra’s abdomen
exploded, and out of it came a crab claw covered in stomach acid and bile.
Another claw tore through his rectum. A third thing, not quite a crab claw but
definitely made of crab parts, made its way up Cobra’s throat and out his
mouth, plucking his teeth out. His body was carried away by his new, gory
appendages, moving into the desert.

Paulo screamed,
jumping and waving his hands so Samson would see. He saw the car in the
distance, skidding and spinning 180 degrees, speeding back in his direction.

The boy ran
forward and away from the crab-thing.

Samson’s car
reached him within seconds, skidding around with the passenger side door
already open. “Get in, kid!”

Paulo ran to the
car and jumped inside.

“What the hell was
that?” Samson said.

The boy shook his
head. “I don’t know. He was eating the crab and then they just came out of
him.”

Samson couldn’t
believe it. One minute he’s talking to his friend and the next the man’s dead.

“You didn’t eat
any of the crab, did you?”

“No.”

“Good,” Samson
said, putting the petal to the floor. “I guess you’re coming with me.”

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

I.

Three Years Ago

Drac
was anointed with fish and motor oil by Simon
Revair
, pastor and head mechanic of the Church of the
Starry Engines.

They had taken
Drac
, the last son of the
Dunwich
clan and “
souped
” him up like they would any machine,
any car. It was experimental to say the least; they had tried it on dozens of
young men with occult inclinations but always with disastrous results. All of
the test subjects were either deceased or roaming the wasteland as
biomechanical deformities from the pits of automotive hell.

Drac
endured the surgery, the incantations, and the
blasphemous repairs. He forced himself into a half-sleep state as his veins
were pumped with sigil-laden gasoline and mixed with accursed blood of some
shunned ancestor. Dreams came quietly, easily, and in the form of winged slabs
of neon meat. Their tendrils wrapped around his dream-body and forced him to
acknowledge their supreme role in an ancient but advanced patriarchy. He
acquiesced to the mysterious
mechanolater’s
repairs.

When it was all
done,
Drac
was dropped back into the cellar of his
father’s house. He didn’t remember much, only the sight and sound of
leather-like wings. The cellar was just as his father had left it: full of
obscure
militaria
and esoteric texts wrapped in
crumbling desert cloth. A wooden donkey sat in one corner, dusty and staring at
Drac
with those eyes that implored him to burn the
house to the ground and let it fall into ash.

That night
Drac
dreamt he was a child. He was at the seashore with his
father, walking along the beach and on the boardwalk almost simultaneously.
Spatially there was no difference between the two places. To the right of him
was the ocean and to the left there were impossible games where one could try
to win prizes from simple machines and archaic automatons. There was also a
mirrored labyrinth and a spook house and a place that was something in between
the two. It was called a scratch house and
Drac
instinctively knew it was horrifying.

His father was in
full military attire with his arm around
Drac
,
protecting him from harm in the form of the violent ocean spray and splintery
boardwalk. Then without actually falling,
Drac
hurt
his knee on the ground below him. It was an instantaneous wound, bubbling and
bloody.

“Daddy, I got a
boo-boo.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,
son,” his father said, stooping down to eye-level. He gently lifted
Drac’s
leg and kissed the wound. “All better.”

“Thanks,
daddy.”

Drac
woke up with the eyes of the wooden donkey staring at
him, begging to be set on fire.

II.

Drac
had met Lord Bing Bong once and that one meeting left
him intrigued at the weirdo historian of occult tomes.

The man was leader
of the
Zoners
, the group of people insane enough to
live in the Zone of Dead Roads, an area ravaged by radioactive winds, marauding
killers, fecal floods, and the long-headed freaks known as the
Yuggs
.

As far as anyone
could tell, the
Yuggs
were just another result of
radiation but some said they existed
before
the war and that they only
made themselves known after the collapse of normal society. The
Yuggs
were short and yellow with long skulls that stretched
their skin to the breaking point. Their facial features were mostly human but
their arms were slightly longer than normal and their legs slightly shorter. Traveling
mostly in groups, they survived by stealing things while chanting in an
unintelligible language.

Lord Bing Bong
didn’t approve of the
Yuggs
or their noisy thefts. He
instructed all of the
Zoners
to slaughter the freaks
on sight. Over the course of just one year, hundreds of
Yuggs
were captured, tortured, dismembered, and killed. Their body parts were used to
cook up a strong hallucinogenic. Lord Bing Bong had told
Drac
he had gotten the recipe for it from a large tablet of black plastic he had
found emblazoned with bizarre hieroglyphs. After nearly a year of translation,
one recipe was unearthed and it involved using the skin and organs of those
ugly
Yuggs
.

Drac
didn’t have anything against Lord Bing Bong. He was a
crazy motherfucker, there was no denying that, but he had shown
Drac
some respect though it was probably due to Bing Bong’s
having received a rare tome from him. It had been
Drac’s
father’s book, something he had no use for: the 1856 edition of Ian Griffith’s
Examination
of the Great Space and the Deconstructing of Some Inner Societies
. It was
heavy reading, even for
Drac
.

So with that in
mind,
Drac
decided he could use the history he had
with Bing Bong to get close to him.

“Guess I’m off to
see the Lord,” he said, stepping on the gas and keeping his eyes on the tall,
disfigured buildings on the horizon. Those buildings marked the boundaries of
the Zone of Dead Roads. It was an urban, labyrinthine hell. The
Zoners
repaved the streets after the war, making sure to
keep them smooth enough to allow unsuspecting drifters to drive on through the
zone in order to be shot, stabbed, raped, impaled, or set on fire.

When the
Zoners
were paving the roads, in their minds they were
setting down an offering to important visitors from another world, a world only
opened to them after the ingesting of the
Yugg
hallucinogen.

As he entered the
Zone,
Drac
saw an intimidating group of sentries
standing in front of every building on the block. They held guns and were naked
except for spiked elbow pads and ball gags.
Drac
saw
their eyes turn yellow as they stared at him.

He slowed down and
waved his hand out the window, moving his fingers the way Lord Bing Bong had
instructed him. It was a bizarre gesture, one that revealed
Drac
to be a person of occult knowledge and therefore safe until Bing Bong said
differently.
Drac
was, after all, the son of
Willum
Dunwich
, sergeant in the
United States Marine Corps and expert in all things metaphysically obscure and
magickal
.

The sentries
nodded slowly, their eyes turning to black.

Drac
drove past them and noticed things were different
since the last time he had been there. Though the Zone had always looked like
an urban cesspool, it had gotten worse. The buildings were still run down but
now they were covered in black sludge and railroad spikes. Rusted chains and
animal skins hung from the lampposts. There were groups of
Zoners
on the corner of every block, gesturing conspiratorially as
Drac
drove past.

The
Zoners
were made up of people from all age and racial
groups. The one common characteristic they shared was an unwavering dedication
to removing themselves from the past. They refused to acknowledge the nuclear
war but instead used the
Yugg
hallucinogen to expand
their inner worlds.

Drugs weren’t the
only things the
Zoners
were obsessed with. When
Drac
had first ventured into the Zone of Dead Roads, he had
noticed that every building had a television on at all times and there was only
one movie playing at all times. Each and every day, every
Zoner
would sit through multiple viewings of
Under Siege 2
:
Dark
Territory
.

He didn’t
understand Lord Bing Bong and his
Zoners
but luckily
it didn’t really matter. He had been able to trade with them and that was all.
But now he had to decide how he was going to kill the man.

Drac
was trying to figure it out when Mama Hell rammed into
his car.

III.

“Fuck you!”
screamed Mama Hell as she slammed into that glass-
skulled
freak, sending him onto the sidewalk where a group of
Zoners
was watching a television that had been placed on a pile of dead
Yuggs
.

Mama had never
been one to watch television and she wondered why these people would bother to
use the limited electricity still being produced by the dwindling number of
Silver-owned hydroelectric plants. Didn’t they have anything better to do with
that power? But no, they used it instead to rot their brains with secular
nonsense.

She was delighted
to see
Drac’s
car run into the
Zoners
,
spraying the air with blood and body parts. His car also ran over the
television and
Yugg
corpses which covered his car
with sparks and yellow flesh.

Drac’s
car didn’t crash, though, and that pissed Mama off.
She grabbed her gun, stuck her hand out the window, and fired several shots.
The back of
Drac’s
car was riddled with bullet holes
but no substantial damage.

Mama stayed even
with
Drac’s
car as it drove off the sidewalk and back
onto the road. Her minivan crashed into
Drac’s
car
again but this time he was ready for it. A tentacle shot up from underneath the
car and punctured the side of the van. Mama tried to steer away but found
herself stuck.

“You fucking
asshole!” she screamed, interpreting the penetration as some form of automotive
rape. That glass-
skulled
freak was a typical man
using his car to compensate for his lack of manhood.

Underneath her
ass, she could feel the tentacle molesting the bottom of her van, tearing
pieces off her car while also sucking up gasoline. One of her tires was
punctured and then another. Mama tried steering away from
Drac
but it didn’t work. The car was out of her control.

Another of
Drac’s
tentacles entered Mama’s car but this time straight
through the back window. It rooted around, tearing up the seats and upholstery.
Mama screamed, cursing that ugly freak to hell, wanting to get her hands on him
so she could cut him up with her turtle shell, break open the top of his skull,
and piss into it like a champagne glass.

She looked over
and saw
Drac
smiling while waving his fingers at her,
taunting her, wanting her to make a move. Mama Hell screamed in fury, cleared
her throat, and then hocked a gob of phlegm out the window towards
Drac’s
car. It splattered to the asphalt only to be scraped
up and eaten by one of the
Zoners
.

The two racers had
just driven ten blocks into the Zone of Dead Roads and they were approaching a
building that used to be a high school but was now converted into a processing
plant for the
Yugg
hallucinogen. It was also the home
of Lord Bing Bong.

Drac’s
car and Mama’s minivan sped through the front lawn
of the high school and just as they were approaching the building,
Drac
retracted his tentacles and made a quick 180-degree
turn. Mama, on the other hand, crashed directly into the front of the school.

IV.

Samson decided he
wouldn’t kill Lord Bing Bong.

He had wasted
enough time visiting Cobra and it just wasn’t worth risking his life and
Paulo’s for some unknown prize. Samson had heard stories about Bing Bong and it
wasn’t as if the man hadn’t done things to deserve a death warrant. Still, who
knew what traps Silver laid while hoping the drivers would take the bait?

What he had to be
careful about, though, was making it through the Zone of Dead Roads. If Lord
Bing Bong knew Silver had put a price on his head, he might be all ready to
send out his own bizarre assassins to eliminate the racers.

When they were a
mile away from the “official” start of the Zone, Paulo turned to Samson and
said, “Why do they call it the Zone of Dead Roads?”

“I think it has
something to do with how dangerous it is. People tend to drive through there
and they don’t come out unless Lord Bing Bong lets them,” Samson said, not sure
if he sounded convincing enough. It wasn’t a total lie. The Zone was truly one
of the most dangerous places. But that wasn’t why it got its name.

“Really?”
The kid was a shrewd one. His eyes told Samson he knew the whole truth hadn’t
been told.

“Well…..”

Their car
approached a burnt down train car with the words
LEROUX RAILWAY COMPANY
painted
on the side. Dozens of plastic masks hung from the train car, worn out faces of
werewolves, spacemen, vampires, robots, pre-war presidents, and fish-faced
monsters.

 
Samson took the opportunity to change the
subject. “Wow, pretty cool masks, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

That’s when Samson
saw the sentries standing around the boundary of the Zone. They were holding
their weapons up, itching to blow an outsider’s car to bits. But from what
Samson had heard, they weren’t indiscriminate slaughterers. There was a
specific method to Lord Bing Bong’s bloodthirsty madness. It was all a
hallucinatory game to him and to his
Zoners
.

“Hang on, kid,”
Samson said, making a hard right into an alleyway, immediately realizing that
it could be a trap. He grabbed a shotgun from the backseat and activated the
blow gun on top of the car.