Scary Rednecks & Other Inbred Horrors (23 page)

Brooks sat down on a tombstone and lit a cigarette, the glow of the match making his pale face look eerie.
 
He held the pack out to me and I grabbed one hungrily.
 
I watched as he blew smoke into the black night, wondering what we were going to do.

I gazed around the place with my writer’s eye.
 
Greyson’s
Cemetery had a mix of graves, both old and new—some of the graves dated back all the way to the colonial period.
 
Thick trees reached out to the moonlight like mottled arms.
 
The tombstones dotted the landscape like crooked teeth, a light breeze blowing through them.
 
After spending the last four nights in here, I had begun to hate it.

“You know, there is a way to make money out of this,” Brooks said, inhaling deeply on his cigarette.

I knew exactly where he was going. “Yeah. The kind of people that rob graves would hardly want the police to find about it.”

It was decided that easily.
 
We spent the rest of the evening putting the dirt back in the hole.
 
The plan was to catch the sick motherfuckers in the act of stealing the bodies.
 
We would ask for a nice sum of money and then disappear with the loot.

There was only one dark road that led to
Greyson’s
Cemetery, so we parked just outside, hiding the Cadillac carefully in a thick clearing of trees and shrubbery.
 
Any car that passed by in the darkness would have no choice but to ride right by us.

They didn’t show up until four nights later.

A truck cruised by, its headlights off.
 
It drove about a hundred yards past where we were hidden and stopped.
 
It pulled inside the trees, not unlike the way we had done.
 
We didn’t see them again, they had probably just entered the graveyard from the woods.

We waited about ten minutes and then quietly crept up to where they had parked.
 
We both had our guns out, not taking any chances.

We moved as silently as possible through the darkness.
 
Although we didn’t see anyone, I still held my gun out in front of my face like a talisman.
 
No one was in the front seat.
 
The back of the truck was empty as well and smelled vaguely of rotting meat.

“Should we wait for them here, or go get them inside the graveyard?” I asked, studying the trees for any kind of movement.

“Let’s wait here,” Brooks said, just as the world exploded into noise.

Brooks’ fat body was sent airborne.
 
He landed on me heavily, crushing me into the ground like a pinned bug.
 
Brooks was gasping as if he couldn’t breathe.

A boot stomped down onto my wrist, sending waves of exploding pain
spidering
up my arm.

“Let go of the gun,” a deep, cold voice said in an odd accent that I couldn’t quite place.
 
He kicked the gun out of my hand and stepped back.

I couldn’t see his features.
 
His body was unnaturally thin and his arms and legs jutted out in spider-like sticks.
 
The glare of the flashlight hit me in the face, blinding me.

Brooks was still coughing to my left.
 
The flashlight moved over to him, revealing a huge gaping wound in his stomach.

The flashlight stabbed back into my face.
 
“Who the hell are you, nigger?” the man asked. “You sure as hell don’t look like no cops.”

“We were just curious,” I said, squinting in the light.

The man laughed, a sound like glass being ground together between two cinderblocks.
 
“You just entered into a fucking nightmare, kitty cat.”

“What in the hell is going on, Caleb?” a voice said from behind the truck.

“Looks like you won’t need to dig tonight,
Jobe
,” the man answered.
 
“I got your corpse right here.”

Two more shadowy figures walked down and stopped a few feet from me.
 
Although I couldn’t tell in the darkness, one appeared to be a child.

“Don’t go too close, Hezekiah,”
Jobe
said. “We
gonna
take them both?”

“Yeah,” Caleb said. “Daddy will be happy.
 
Hold this flashlight into the nigger’s eyes.” He moved forward and stuck the barrel of the shotgun into my forehead.
 
“Roll the hell over and put your hands behind your back.
 
Hezekiah, go grab that wire that’s under the seat.”

A few minutes later and I was hog-tied, my hands attached to my ankles.
 
They lifted me up and tossed me in the back of the truck like a bag of garbage.

“Oh shit, this is a fat one,”
Jobe
said and I felt Brooks’ body land heavily on my leg in a flash of bone cracking pain.
 
Warm blood spilled out onto my thigh from Brook’s wound.

The truck lurched forward as I struggled, the wire digging excruciatingly into my skin.
 
We drove on for about forty-five minutes.
 
I had given up trying to get out, because every time I pulled, the wire sunk deeper into my flesh.
 
Every time we hit a bump, Brooks’ heavy body would bounce up and down painfully on my ankle.

When the truck came to a stop, I was almost weeping.
 
My imagination was beginning to taunt me with all sorts of heavy shit.
 
Every redneck movie I ever saw was beginning to creep up on me.
 
I half expected that retarded boy from
Deliverance
to jump out and start plucking away on his banjo.

A family that needed corpses would do anything.

“Hezekiah, go tell Daddy we got a surprise for him,” Caleb said, pulling the back of the truck open. “The nightmare is only beginning, kitty cat.”

Jobe
laughed, sounding like a man who was being choked and was enjoying it sexually. “Why do you keep calling him kitty cat?”

“The poor nigger told me he was just curious.
 
Curiosity killed the cat, get it?”

“That’s just ripe,”
Jobe
said in between fits of giggling.

They pulled Brooks’ corpse from the back of the truck and left me alone for a few moments.
 
I was surprised by what I had glimpsed of their house.
 
Judging by the way these sick dudes were acting, I expected to be taken to a trailer or something, but it was a large two-story Victorian that appeared to be well maintained.
 
The porch light was on, diminishing the darkness considerably.

An old man was watching at me from the end of the truck.

He studied me quietly, cocking his head to the side as if he heard something that my ears could not pick up.
 
His eyes, in the dim light, looked like those of an insect-no pupils, impossibly large and expressionless.
 
His neck was wrinkled, leading up to an unnaturally smooth face.
 
White hair stuck out of his head in dirty and greasy tufts.

“Oh, Maria,” the old man rasped. “I will bring you back to me, I promise.”

He walked away, leaving me to puzzle out what he had meant.
 
For some reason his sentence scared the hell out of me.
 
It sounded so bizarre—so insane.

Caleb appeared at the end of the truck.
 
His hair was shoulder length, protruding out of his skull like thin spider webs.
 
His skin clung to his face in the same way rotting skin clings to a decomposing skull.
 
He smiled widely, his cheekbones jutting out as they threatened to break through his frail skin like knives.
 
“Hello, Kitty cat.”

Jobe
came up from behind him, his eyes narrowing under a thick bushy eyebrow.
 
He had one of those brows that my daddy used to call a
unibrow
—one solid line of hair from eye to eye.
 
A smile appeared in the confines of his wooly beard.
 
“Here, kitty
kitty
.”

They untied my hands from my ankles, but tightened the wire into my wrists.
 
I could feel the blood dripping down into my fingers as the wire dug deep into my flesh.

They led me onto the porch of the Victorian house and through the freshly painted front door.
 
The smell hit me like a brick, smashing into my nose in a way that could only be called intrusive.
 
The word that came to mind was
rancid
.
 
It smelled like someone had opened up a mass grave.

To my left was a living room.
 
The tow-headed boy, Hezekiah, sat mesmerized by a television.
 
He glanced at me as we walked by but showed little emotion.
 
Family photographs dotted the wall.
 
They led me down damp stairway and into a brightly-lit basement.

As soon as I saw the room, I started shrieking.
 
Caleb slapped me across the face so hard that I felt my jaw come loose momentarily.
 
I studied the place, trying to remind myself to breathe.

It looked like the room of a morgue.
 
Brooks’ body was laid out on a metal table, dozens of wires running into his opened chest.
 
His eyes stared up blankly, his mouth still open in the shock of being shot.
 
The wires ran into some contraption that looked like something out of an old horror movie, all projecting parts and protruding electrical lines.

The corpse of a woman sat in a wheelchair.
 
It looked older, the skin already pulling back and unmasking a leathery skeleton.
 
It wore a blue sundress, the hands laid out on its legs as if it was simply relaxing.
 
The eyes had not yet rotted completely, but they were pulled back into the sockets exposing the hard whites.

The old man studied me with his black eyes, worm-like lips pulling back over brown teeth.
 
He followed my line of site to the shriveled corpse in the wheelchair and then he moved towards it, lovingly kissing it on the forehead.

“Oh, my God. You sick fucks,” I heard myself say, almost like an out of body experience.
 
My sanity wanted to flee, threatening to leave me and watch the whole drama from the ceiling.

“Don’t talk like that in front of Maria,” the old man said menacingly. “She doesn’t like bad language.”

At this point I didn’t care what I said.
 
I knew I was dead anyway.
 
“She’s a goddamn corpse, you fucking lunatic!”

Caleb growled dangerously. “Want me to kill the nigger, Daddy?”

The old man studied me. “She’s coming back.
 
I’m bringing Maria back!” He pulled a photograph out of his shirt pocket and thrust it into my face.
 
A smiling old woman peered at me from the picture.
 
She wore a blonde wig in a desperate attempt to cover her wrinkled head.
 
“Isn’t she beautiful?
 
She’s coming back and we’ll dance again.”

I glanced at the corpse and back to the photograph.
 
I tried to speak but only a desperate squeak came out.

“I’m working on a way to bring her back,” the old man continued as he watched me with his unblinking dark eyes. “We’re almost there.
 
The machine will bring her back.”

Caleb was nodding as his father spoke, tears running down his face. “You’ll do it, Daddy.
 
I know it.”

The old man moved back to Brooks, grabbed a pair of protective glasses, and put them around his head.
 
He picked up a circular saw and then brought it buzzing down into Brooks’ skull.
 
Blood splattered up onto the old man’s glasses and he brought his hand up and wiped it away with his sleeve.

I closed my eyes, feeling my sanity slipping away ever so slowly.
 
The sound of the drill screamed in my ears.
 
I counted for two minutes, telling myself it was all a dream.

When I opened my eyes, the top of Brooks’ head was removed.
 
His eyes were still open and the old man was attaching little wires into the insides of the skull.

The old man had the bloody glasses pulled over the top of his head like an obscene, crimson-splattered party hat.
 
He walked over to a badly wired control panel and pushed a button.