For Bobbi Kretzel, the waiting was the hell of it. They’d re-dosed him with that nasty shit and pain was no longer a factor. Now, he was alone in the woods with only his dread to keep him company, and every passing moment of his vigil tore away another ugly slab of his sanity. Even worse, the events of the last 24 hours were haunting him on a continuous, repeating crawl in his withered mind, and they held a sick, painful torture all their own.
Bobbi - like Sloop and Tom Speed across town - was a victim of the NOLA dope drought. He’d been two days deep into a wicked detox when T called. Bob’s phone was somewhere folded into the moist sheets and smelly blankets that comprised his “bed”, he could hear it vibrate in there. Mocking him. By the time Bobbi had summoned the energy required to go find the thing, the caller had already hung up and sent a text. Kretzel saw who it was from and allowed himself a little hope. The text came from his fuck-buddy and fellow junky Tanry Certain. She‘d. had been working on a package for two days, promising to call Kretz the minute he found anything. The text indicated that she had.
Twenty minutes later, Tanry and Kretz were pulling up just outside the ninth ward FEMA park in T‘s shitbox black Camry. After a quick Gipper speech by T, Kretz was off, cursing his girlfriend’s confidence in the deal, and himself for being so flaky and addicted. Pam’s trailer found, Bob knocked and called out “Pam?”.
For a few minutes he thought maybe she was out, slinging drugs and attitude in the bars, maybe. He was just about to knock and call once more when he heard noises from inside the trailer. The noises turned to a series of clicks and metallic banging, and then the biggest human being Kretz had ever seen answered the door.
Hey. C ‘min…
And then he turned and headed - Kretz assumed - for the deeper regions of the FEMA trailer. When Bobbi finally got his tired, dope-starved body into the thing, the humongous dude was no where to be seen. Unfortunately Pam was, right there in front of him, eye-fucking him until he sat down at her breakfast nook. She said:
***
Where’s the girl?
Bobbi was no kind of liar even with all his wits about him. Now, in his weakened, confused state of withdrawal, He shouldn’t have even tried. In the end, of course, that’s just what he did:
What girl?
There was silence for almost a minute. Kretz could hear the big guy wheezing away in the other room. What was his name? Kretz spoke again:
Pam, you gotta do me solid here. I know. I know. I owe. But we both sick Pam. I can’t get you paid unless I’m healthy and I can’t get healthy if you won’t bless me for a few days.
Pam thought about it, but not for long:
What balls you got Kretz. Big. Brassy ones. You need a wheelbarrow to cart them shits through? Look at you…
Pam pl…
Shut up. Shut the fuck up Kretz you gonna make me do something both of us regret. You’re into me for a nickel. You ducked me for a week. Now you’re sick, and you know I can help, and so here you are. You have the 5 bucks?
Uh…
That’s a “no”. Ok, you got any money?
The Lady Pam was going bald, and she was old as shit. Kretz heard her yelling but the effect was canceled out by Pam’s comically unappealing visage. She had one tooth, it was in the bottom of her mouth right out front. Pam didn’t close her mouth all the way between sentences. Kretz was staring at the tooth, and he felt it staring back at him, a patch of muddy, leftover snow on the reeking compost pile of Pam‘s face. To distract himself from laughing Kretz patted his pocket and said:
56 dollars.
Pam couldn’t help but laugh then. Drug addicts never failed to amuse her in their predictability. She asked a question she knew the answer to already:
What about your girl? She told me she got money. Just get some her money, no?
No.
No? Why no?
Ugh…
It’s a rhetorical question dumbfuck. I know why no. It’s because you never told your girl about the three grams I gave you last week, or the seven the week before that. She doesn’t know you watched her get sick, and weak, lying the whole time just so you could have a bigger taste. I’m embarrassed for you motherfucker.
And Bobbi Kretzel’s hope, diminutive and unsure as it was, came to a crashing end. He started subconsciously glancing around the room like a trapped alley cat.
***
T. was still asleep when her man came freaking and yelling out of the FEMA-ville. And even, though there was a great deal of freaking and yelling, T remained asleep. Bobbi wasted almost five whole seconds just listening to her faint snoring. He was puzzled. T never snored. Frantic as he was, Bob had no time for subtlety. He plucked a Styrofoam coffee cup from the dashboard console. It was from almost 3 months ago, and about half-full, but T woke up fast when Bobbi dumped I on her head.
Bahhh. Ahugh (cough cough) ah, ah. Eueeeww fuck fuck. What the fuck?! What the FUCK! Bob? Please!
And they both stopped moving. Bobbi sat back. There was a brief silence, then T:
We have to spike right now. RIGHT fucking now Bobbi…
It Kretz another five whole minutes of arguing and cajoling to get the girl to budge. Bob knew she got it from her mother. T’s mother was a cunt. They were speeding away from the ninth by the time Bobbi stopped shivering long enough to educate the girl:
Fuckin dude is 6’ 9” as big as a fuckin’ Mini Cooper. I didn’t know he was out. That’s Pam’s son with the guy who did that thing at the church…The babies?
The babies? Oh shit…
Bobbi could see her remembering at only the mere suggestion. Like everybody else, T. was powerless in withdrawal. Bob felt like sociopath for his deeds and his scheming, but then when he considered how bad he felt, he felt it proved he was no sociopath. He had that exact train of thought three times before the girl spoke again.
That guy did that?
The very same. He’s got a face tattoo for fucks fuckin’ sake! That alone is enough to warrant extreme prejudice. Fuck fuck fuck! You should see him. He’s as fat as a fuckin mini-van. He gotta duck walkin’ around in the FEMA trailer. Like REALLY duck. Fuck.
He took a breath and prepared to continue when a voice - melodic and hurt-sounding - came slithering from the darkness in the Caddy’s back seat:
Damn dood. I aint THAT fat. Fuck.
T and Bobbi wheeled around at once and saw two red eyes glowing from the pitch-black shadows. Pam’s boy Lerion spoke again:
I fit back here, right?
***
The savage mass on the outside of the blazing pile was eventually consumed in the flames. The writhing mob had encased itself in the soot and smoke and for a while, to Bobbi D, it looked as if they’d actually become the fire itself. He watched and watched, his mind playing a double - switch with the dancers and the fire, and he noticed a weird light, like a shadow of a gigantic branch. It was above the gigantic X’s one remaining post. Very bright. Bob didn’t know what it was, but he couldn’t look away.
Eventually, daylight. Bobbi was no longer in the truck bed, because the men had been told not to mess the truck up. Suddenly the day went pitch-dark in the blink of an eye, like an eclipse. L had leaned over Bobbi from the above, invading and occupying the space just inches from the terrified kid’s head. The face was the size of a man-hole cover, and darker than any Bobbi Driscoll had ever seen. All at once it washed over him, the run to Pam’s, the dope search, the fire in the woods, T…It was all too real, too heavy, and Bobbi felt a tear slide down his cheek and and heard it tap onto the soft, rooted floor of the swamp. It seemed like hours he waited for the giant to speak, but over the past 24 hours Bobbi’d learned that Pam’s kid was a man of very few words. More tears dropped with the swamp morphing and breathing around them, and the army of bugs (BUGS) making avant/orchestral sheets of itchy noise. The giant was studying him, Bobbi was sure. He still couldn’t speak, but he felt the tears plummet in slow motion each more cold and wet than the last. Whatever it was they’d hit him with, shit was finally wearing off.
That shit’s wearing off aint it?
The voice was awful. It was low and flat and inevitable - sounding. B found himself thankful he’d not heard much of it, and worried about how much more he might have to hear yet.
Answer me boy. You can feel shit now?
Bobbi had intended to answer, but the words weren’t there in his mind. He wanted to explain to Lady Pam’s boy that, yes, whatever had kept him paralyzed for the last 16 or so hours was finally beginning to wear off. FUCK yes, he could feel the ropes scraping and ripping at the flesh on his wrists, and yes, his legs ached from disuse. All these things he wanted to make clear to the huge black man, but unfortunately for B, his mind and lips couldn’t work to make it happen. Instead he just sighed helplessly and stared into Lerion, grovelling for his very life with nothing but glassy, terrified eyes. The giant spoke again:
We see motherfucker.
And the Lerion grabbed what appeared to be a machete from the trunk bed. Bobby watched the giantscould for as long as he could, with the world turning white and then red, and then black all around him.
***
He woke up, and the pain was everything. His skin was burning and his eyes felt four sizes too big for their sockets. His body and sould felt like they were being cooked in a blast furnace. Inside his mind he was screaming, but only a low, wheezing moan passed his lips. He prayed and prayed for death’s relief.
Instead, they dragged him to the center of a dirt clearing and stripped him naked. Lerion spoke:
Boy if you gonna die, I’d get to it soon. We jus got to the uncomfortable part.
Bobbi couldn’t see the other guy, but he saw that he was being untied. First the ankles, then wrists. He was lying the ground, and may have blacked out, but for the explosive noise suddenly ripping into sudden, bright life just behind his right ear. It was all Bobbi could muster to nudge his head left so he could see, and regretted the move as soon as he’d done it. Lerion was holding the biggest chainsaw he’d ever seen, revving it, and looking the chain up and down like a sommelier testing a vintage for legs. Bobbi tried to close his eyes, but could not.
He didn’t feel the cutting until Lerion hit bone, but when the enormous blade blew through his scapula, a new definition of pain dawned on Bobbi Kretzel. An eternal pain, clear and sharp as broken glass and permanent as death, became the whole of his existence. No forest, no Lerion, no dirt, no fire-ritual in the woods, no dead girl and no hideous bugs. Only white pain shocking through his frame and turning every cell of his being to an angry molten agony. It took minutes, and the giant boy Lerion threw each limb in front of his face in the dirt. He finished and shut the evil saw down, appreciated his handiwork. Bobbi watched the limbs and suffered. He didn’t hear Lerion say:
Still bleedin momma, I knew it. Not enough paste.
He didn’t hear Lady Pam say, from behind him:
Well that’s why I brought this baby. Step back…
Bobbi didn’t see Pam step into his field of vision, flicking a flint over a blow-torch. Didn’t see the blue flame jump from the brass nozzle. Didn’t feel as Pam burned each new-exposed stump into a smoking black nub.
Bobbi didn’t hear Lerion, behind him once more:
Shit momma. Hard part.
He didn’t hear the reply:
I can do it, you can’t. Done it enough…
Bobbi did feel a weird pressure in the place where his legs had been a few minutes ago, but with the pain having short circuited his nerve endings, that weird pressure was about all he felt. The pressure increased, though, and he sure felt that. Something was being jacked into him, and through him. B felt stuff moving inside him, and puncturing. He felt something moving through his gut, into his stomach and then he started gagging. He couldn’t breathe, his tongue was being forced to one side and his head was forced back from the inside. Bobbi felt his teeth, something pushing on his teeth, pushing through them. His mouth opened involuntarily and a rusty pipe two inches wide came blasting out of it, the tip - Bobbi could see it clear, inches from his face - was covered with fluids of black,dark crimson and purple. Suddenly he was being borne up. He has high now, off the ground a bit, and staring at the revolting pipe propping him in the dirt like a demented puppet. He was staring up at cloudy sky, but it turned back, quickly like a thunderhead moving over. Then the thunderhead was buzzing, and it washed over him, and Bobbi’s cursed eyes finally shut.
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