Shut The Fuck Up And Die! (20 page)

Inspired by the threat of his brother’s
wrath, Daryl’s mind seized upon an alternative almost immediate.
The kitchen. Mama had boxes of candles tucked away in the junk
drawer for times when the power went out in the middle of a storm.
Even if he somehow still managed to get locked in the dark room,
Earl would be back long before the candle ever burnt out. He’d be
pissed, no doubt, that his little brother had been so easily
trapped . . . but it still wouldn’t be as bad as if he came home to
find him doing absolutely nothing.

Daryl bolted up the front steps and careened
around the corner of the hallway. He’d just passed the open cellar
door when he skidded to a stop and cocked his head.

He’d thought he heard something. Very low and
very soft, but he was sure it hadn’t been his imagination.

“
Daryl . . . .”

There it was again. A voice, barely audible.
It sounded old and tired and wavered as weakly as if the last
vestiges of strength were being used to find the words.

“
M . . . Mama?”

Hope stirred within Daryl’s chest and he
remained perfectly still, straining to hear a reply.

“
Daryl . . . help me . . .
.”

Yes! That was definitely Mama’s voice. Even
though it sounded as if she were in pain and fading fast, he would
have recognized it anywhere.

“
Daryl . . . .”

The cellar. Mama’s voice was coming from the
cellar. And he saw it all as perfectly as if he’d been there:
there’d been a struggle at which point the record player had been
knocked over and, as they scuffled, they’d kicked ash out from the
fireplace and onto the floor. Mama had fought them back, probably
trying to drive them out of the house, but when they go to the
cellar door something had happened. She’d tripped. Or perhaps been
pushed. Either way, she ended up toppling down the stairs. She was
down there right now. Probably with a broken hip or leg or arm. Or
worse. She could have bashed her head open, could be bleeding to
death even as he stood there putting it all together.

“
Daryl, please . . . help.”

Normally, he didn’t like going downstairs and
hadn’t set foot down there for nearly two years. But this time, he
had no hesitation. He darted through the cellar door so quickly
that he almost tripped around the piece of twine that Earl had
apparently tied to the doorknob for some reason. His hand grabbed
onto the rickety banister and he regained his balance before taking
the rest of the steps two at a time.

The cellar floor was made of concrete and it
was so cold that he could immediately see his breath in the harsh
light of a bare 100 watt bulb. However, that same light also
revealed what he took to be proof to his suspicions. For at the
very bottom of the staircase was an oblong smear of blood, as if
something large had lain there for quite some time.

She must have drug herself away, perhaps to
somewhere safer. Or maybe there was a phone down here. Maybe she’d
been trying to claw her way to it so she could call for help.

“
Daryl . . . .”

Her voice was louder now, but only because he
was closer to the source. It still sounded raspy and pained, as if
each breath might be her last.

“
I’m here, Mama! I’m comin’ for
ya.”

The cellar was cluttered with bloated
cardboard boxes that smelled of mildew, appliances that Earl had
hauled down over the years, and a lifetime’s worth of castoffs. His
Daddy’s old tools, dress forms that almost looked like dismembered
torsos floating atop a sea of junk. So much stuff that it’d take
forever for him to find her on his own.

“
Keep talkin’, Mama. Guide me in. I’m
comin’”

“
Daryl, hurry . . . it hurts so
bad.”

The old woman sounded as if she were nearly
in tears and her son tore through the collected debris in a frenzy.
Old newspapers fluttered in the air while boxes of books toppled
their contents onto trunks that grated across the hard, bumpy
floor.

“
It hurts . . . .”

“
Hang on, Mama!”

He rounded what almost appeared to be a
miniature Stonehenge of bookshelves and end tables and saw her feet
poking out from behind an old chest freezer. Scrambling through the
junk, he cried out in relief: “I see you! I see you, Mama! Hold on,
I’m almost there!”

As he came to the freezer he fell to his
knees, so intent on helping his wounded mother that the jolt of
pain may have as well been half a world away. He grabbed her
shoulder as tears trickled from his eyes.

“
Mama, I . . . .”

But something was wrong. Her skin was as cold
as the floor he knelt on. She shouldn’t be that cold, should she?
Even with blood loss, she . . . .

His confusion was cut short as her head
lolled to the side. Where her eyes should have been were what
looked like two squished slugs and the tip of her tongue poked out
from between lips as dark and blistered as a singed hot dog. The he
noticed, for the first time, that her dress was ripped and
tattered. The yellow fabric was covered with inkblot-like stains
and the waxen flesh below was marred with ragged gashes. One of the
pockets she’d sewn almost seemed to be peeling away and he saw
something that looked like a thin wedge of metal lodged into her
belly like the head of a large staple. However, the piece that
still stuck from the skin looked jagged, as if it had actually been
the part of something large and had broken off.

Another scene replaced the one he’d imagined
earlier. In this retake, Mama still toppled down the stairs, but
only after she’d been brutalized by that bitch and bastard. Maybe
she was already dead when they tossed her down like a bag of
garbage. Or perhaps that first tumble snapped her neck. But at some
point, as she rolled down into the darkness, the handle had snapped
off . . . it all made sense.

Daryl then noticed the semi-circular gash in
her lower abdomen and the something glistening and pink that seemed
to be trying to force its way through the cut. Lots of blood there.
So much that it was impossible to tell that the dress had ever been
yellow to begin within. And that was probably what killed her.

He shook his head vigorously as the weight of
these thoughts finally sank in. When he’d first started noticing
these things, his body had turned numb and that anesthetic-like
feeling had quickly spread to his mind. He was actually able to
think more clearly than he normally could . . . but, at the same
time, he felt detached from the process. Almost as if it were a
movie he were listening to as he faded off to sleep.

But now that feeling was beginning to
fade.

Mama couldn’t be dead. She just couldn’t. If
she were dead, then how did she call to him for help? How did she
let him know that her body was even down here to begin with?

As Daryl struggled with these questions, Mona
yanked on a piece of cord from her hiding place. The cord rounded
one of the stair banisters and snaked up to the top of the steps.
But when she pulled, the thin rope was drawn taut and the door it
was tied to slammed shut.

Daryl sprang to his feet at the same moment
Mona threw the switch on the breaker box and plunged the cellar
into a darkness so complete that it seemed as if they’d been set
adrift in space. She removed the welding goggles that had already
adjusted her vision to the gloom and tried not to giggle as Daryl’s
screams pierced the darkness. The acrid stench of urine flooded the
air as he tripped and fell in the clutter and she suspected that by
the time she was through playing, that shit would also add its
pungency to this mess in the terrified man’s pants.

This was going to be even more fun than she’d
hoped for . . . .

SCENE SIXTEEN

Earl looked down at the dead body before him.
No final snorts of air flared the nostrils, nor did the chest rise
and fall even marginally. The dark eyes already had a glassy look
to them, as if they’d been secretly replaced with marbles at the
moment of death, and the pool of blood surrounding the body looked
as if it had caused the snow to sink down ever so slightly. Almost
as if its heat had melted through the top layer as the thick, red
liquid spread out from the trio of bullet wounds that punctured its
tawny fur.

The bellow that erupted from Earl’s throat
escaped with such ferocity that has jowls shook as he threw back
his head. Raising his fists to the sky, he punched at the air as if
he could somehow sock whatever God was responsible for this
squarely in the jaw. The tendons in his neck bulged and his eyes
were clenched shut so tightly that the tears of frustration
squeezed from them ran the risk of freezing his lashes
together.

“
A fuckin’ deer? Are you kidding me? A
mother fuckin’
deer
?”

On the short walk to the body, Earl had
already figured everything out. He’d drag that dickhead out of the
wood by the feet; Hell, would fireman carry the corpse if he had
to. Once he’d made it back to the house, if Daryl hadn’t already
killed her as well, he would have propped the dead body up on the
living room chair and made it watch as he and Daryl took turns with
that little cunt. And she would have been forced to look at it the
entire time. He would have superglued her eyelids open if he’d had
to. And then, the last thing she would see as the life drained out
of her ravaged body would have been her sorry excuse for a man. The
pathetic loser who couldn’t even manage to keep her safe.

And he’d been pretty certain that was the way
it would have turned out. Daryl wasn’t capable of finding a
Christian in church, much less one woman in a two story house. Earl
wouldn’t have been surprised if his little brother were sitting in
the police car with the doors locked and awaiting his return. It
sounded like something that turd would do.

But now there was a chance that this
beautiful plan had been flushed down the crapper. That piece of
shit was still out here somewhere, still hiding and running through
the woods. And, even though it was highly unlikely, there was the
possibility that Daryl might actually find the woman. And an even
slimmer chance that he wouldn’t get his ass kicked by her. And if
Earl ended up hauling nearly two hundreds pounds of dead weight all
the way back to the house for nothing, then someone was going to
pay.

“
I’ll find you yet, cock knocker. Mark
my words.”

Stepping over the deer, Earl took up the
trail again. Luckily, it wasn’t still coming down like it had
earlier in the morning. If that type of accumulation had still been
falling from the sky, then the footprints would have been all but
covered now; there were hundreds of square acres of wilderness out
here . . . miles and miles of nothing but trees, rocks, and hills.
Unless you knew the landmarks, you could freeze to death before
ever finding your way to a road or another house and, after that,
it could be years before some hunter stumbled across your scattered
bones. If you were ever found at all.

And that was a real possibility as well: that
Earl might be denied the satisfaction of revenge. If Matt found a
cave to hole up in or if he just continued trucking on without ever
losing steam, then sooner or later hypothermia would set in.
Shivering in the freezing temperatures would turn to fatigue as the
body tried everything within its power to protect itself. And all
it would take would be for that pretty boy to think he’d lay down
for just a minute or two, just a little cat nap to recharge his
batteries. He’d close his eyes and slip into a darkness from which
he’d never awaken.

So, no . . . he had to find this son of a
bitch and had to find him soon. After whatever he’d done to Mama,
the bastard deserved far, far worse than dying in his sleep. He
needed to scream. To beg. To know what it meant to be hunted and
look into the eyes of his killer with the knowledge that he was
about to die.

“
What the fuck?”

Earl stepped out of the trees and into a
clearing where the thick, gray clouds overhead could clearly be
seen. They amassed in the sky like a gathering army, closing in
ranks for one final assault against the world below. However, it
wasn’t what was over his head that caused him to gape as his brow
knitted in confusion. It was what was in the snow.

Up until this point, Matt’s tracks had been
pretty straight forward. They had been meandering impressions that,
without fail, cut a path that lead deeper and deeper into the
woods. Occasionally, they would weave in and out through the trees
or cut a wide swath around a boulder or deadfall. But they were
nothing like what Earl saw before him now.

The clearing looked as if a hundred people
who all wore the same shoe size had trampled through the drifts.
Like the spokes of a wheel, the tracks radiated out in all
directions from a central point that had been reduced to nothing
more than a mire of muddy snow. Each spoke doubled back on itself,
sometimes so often that it was impossible to tell which footprints
were leading into the forest and which were returning to the
clearing.

Because of this, Earl had no idea which
direction his prey had actually went. It could have been any one of
two dozen possibilities and he stood, scratching his beard, as his
eyes looked across the clearing.

“
You slippery son if a bitch . . .
.”

Earl walked forward as carefully as if he
were stepping onto a frozen lake. He had it in his mind that he
would put himself in Matt’s shoes but felt the need to be cautious.
His plan was simple really: he’d walk to the middle of the
clearing, just as Matt had done, and then study the different sets
of tracks that branched off from there. Though they looked like a
confusing mess at first glance, there had to be one particular
direction that had more footprints leading out than coming back in.
And once Earl was able to identify that set then he would be back
on the trail again.