Shut The Fuck Up And Die! (12 page)

For Darlene Honnicker, the agony of her
torture had finally come to and end . . . .

SCENE NINE

The added weight of the car being towed
behind them made it seem as if the scenery were slowly scrolling by
and the vehicles simply sitting still. This illusion was enhanced
even more for Daryl, who sat in the driver’s seat of the wrecked
Honda. Without the rumble of an engine, the interior of the car was
eerily silent and he found himself wishing he were in the cab of
the truck with his brother. Not to mention that it would be warmer
up there. The motor of the car was completely shot, which meant the
heater was out as well. Even with his layers of clothing, Daryl
could still feel the cold upholstery of the seat seep into his back
and ass and his teeth chattered between clouds of breath. Every few
moments, he had to lean forward and wipe the frost from the inside
of the windshield with his arm, but other than that his part in the
operation was monotonous.

Basically, all he had to do was watch for the
brake lights of the truck to wink at him and apply pressure to the
pedal in the car as well. A few small adjustments were required
with the wheel, but for the most part the chain that connected the
two vehicles made this a simple task. Which was perfect, seeing as
how Daryl had never actually learned to drive. However, this lack
of participation also gave the mustachioed man ample time to think
. . . and his mind turned, time and time again, to the book that
sat on the passenger seat beside him.

He glanced at it for what must have
been the hundredth time in the past five minutes. That worn leather
cover, the elegant handwriting, and those three seemingly innocent
words:
Mona’s Secret
Delights
. A chill coursed along his spine that had
nothing to do with the sub-zero temperatures within the car and his
stomach felt as if it had turned into a writhing knot of worms.
Earl had said he was just being a little baby, that the book was
obviously some kind of joke; but, at the same time, Daryl’s older
brother certainly hadn’t put up much of an argument against going
straight home and disposing of the car later.

“
Everything’s gonna be okay.” He said
aloud. “It’s gonna be right as rain, you’ll see.”

The quiver in his voice, however, betrayed
the fact the he was trying to talk himself into accepting what he
secretly believed to be a lie.

Mona’s Secret Delights.

He looked at the book again and his thoughts
immediately turned to Mama. Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of
the night with the remnants of a dream still clinging to his
consciousness like a tenacious rottweiler. He’d sit in the glow of
his night light and listen to his own haggard breath as sweat dried
cool on his drenched body.

The dream was always the same: it was Mama
and Earl tied to the chairs in the upstairs room, only they were so
much smaller than what they were in real life. In fact, Daryl
seemed to tower over them as if he were a giant in the halls of his
castle. When he walked, the floors rattled with each thudding step
and showers of dust cascaded from the rafters overhead. His shadow
fell over his mother and brother, engulfing them in a darkness so
complete that Daryl could only see the frightened gleam in their
eyes.

In this dream, his fingers were
actually slender needles that clinked against one another and
dripped sizzling beads of acid onto the floor. In each amber
droplet, Daryl could clearly see his mother and brother reflected:
their faces were gaunt and colorless, their mouths pulled back into
screams that never seemed to come, and their eyes wide and glassy.
Within those eyes, there was another reflection, this one of a
small boy with a blood soaked tee shirt. The boy was being fed into
the darkness of a closet whose doorway was lined with fang-like
teeth; his feet scrambled over the floor and tears glistened on his
cheeks, but still the hands urged him ever onward. For a second,
the young boy locked gazes with the towering giant and his mouth
formed two words:
help
me
.

The dream always ended with Daryl’s
needle-fingers thrusting through the air, their gleaming tips mere
inches from Earl and Mama’s chests. A fraction of a second longer
and they would both be impaled as the acid liquefied their organs
and turned them into empty husks . . . but that moment of contact
was always preempted with a jolt of consciousness and a choked sob.
Sometimes, Daryl longed to see the dream through to completion, to
see if his dream-self truly was capable of killing the only family
he’d ever known. But then guilt would wash over him: he’d push the
images to the back of his mind, would pull his own hair until the
pain overpowered all thought and emotion, and rock back and forth
while silently crying.

He didn’t really want to kill Mama.
Sometimes, when he thought about the past for too long, images of
the dream would bubble up from his subconscious like a dark and
malevolent Leviathan rising from the depths . . . but, even then,
part of him still knew that he’d brought it all upon himself. Mama
simply wanted him to be a good boy, to grow up strong and brave, to
be more like Earl and less like a sniveling child. Everything she’d
ever done was due to love and he had no right to question the
methods of her guidance. He just had to try harder, that was
all.

Mona’s Secret Delights.

In this situation, maybe Daryl would be able
to prove to her once and for all that he was a man worthy of his
mother’s respect. Once Mama saw the book, once she knew how Daryl
had pieced it all together and insisted that they rush back to her
as soon as possible . . . once she had all this evidence in front
of her, she’d have no choice but to heap praises upon her youngest
son. He’d bask in her adoration and maybe even get one of the
“secret gifts” that Earl was always being taken away for. He had no
clue exactly what the gift was but understood that it was the
highest form of approval Mama could give; and he wanted that more
than anything else in the world.

A loud boom shuddered the car and jarred
Daryl out of his thoughts as his body pitched forward. His head
banged against the steering wheel and, for a moment, he simply sat
there and blinked his eyes as he tried to understand what had
happened.

He’d been so lost in thought that he’d
forgotten to wipe the frost off the windshield for quite some time
and every inch of glass was now covered with an icy film. The
morning sun filtered through it, but everything beyond was nothing
more than indistinct blobs of color. The car, however, was no
longer moving forward . . . . Earl must have stopped for some
reason and Daryl had been so engrossed in daydreaming that he’d
never seen the flash of the taillights. Luckily, they hadn’t been
going very fast; if they had, then the crash would have been a lot
worse and there was a chance he could have damaged the old truck.
If that had happened, Earl’s wrath would have been of biblical
proportions; and, more importantly, they would never have been able
to make it home in time.

“
In time for what?” part of Daryl’s
mind whispered. “What are you afraid of this time?”

His eyes drifted to the book again and
he felt his breathe catch in his throat. Somehow it almost seemed
as if, by opening its pages, he’d unleashed some dark and terrible
demon upon the land. The chill bumps tingling the nape of his neck
were the cold wind displaced by the flapping of leathery wings and
the headache clustering behind his left eye was from talons sinking
into the soft mass of his brain. He could feel the creature’s
presence, pressing in on him from all sides as it repeatedly
whispered three words like some archaic incantation:
Mona’s Secret Delights . . . Mona’s Secret
Delights . . . .

A flash of color in the rearview mirror
caught Daryl’s attention and he saw red and blue strobing through
the ice-encrusted glass of the hatchback’s window. The frost
diffused the lights into fuzzy halos that flickered and flashed in
an almost random pattern. At the same time, Daryl became aware of a
sound from outside the car. It was like a voice emerging from the
crackle and pop of static, distant enough that the words were
indistinguishable but close enough that he instantly recognized the
source: a police radio. So that’s why Earl had stopped the truck .
. . he’d been pulled over.

The demon’s hot breath tickled Daryl’s ears
as it hissed dire warnings into the man’s thoughts: too late,
you’ll be too late, you’ll never be a good boy now, you’ll always
be a useless simpering crybaby, no use to anyone, you’ll be too
late and it will all be your fault . . . .

A shadow, vaguely man-shaped, passed the
window and the tinny voice of the dispatcher sounded as if it were
as close as the demon Daryl imagined to be latched onto his back.
As the shadow receded, however, so did that sound of the radio,
leaving Daryl with only the whispered litany of derision in his
mind: dead, she’ll be dead because of you, all because of you, and
you’ll never get to prove to her that you were anything other than
what she always thought you were . . . .

A voice that sounded as if it were speaking
through layers of cotton broke through the contempt that plagued
Daryl’s consciousness.

“
License and registration,
sir.”

Daryl’s heart felt as if it were fluttering
so fast that every other beat was missed; his breath came in quick
pants and he felt slightly dizzy, as if the interior of the car had
lost its grip on reality. And he felt a tremor somewhere deep
within him that almost made it seem as if every organ in his body
quivered in unison.

His eyes darted to the book again.

Mona’s Secret Delights.

The demon sank its claws deeper into his eye,
shredding nerve endings and snyapses with barbed tips that were
nearly molten from a thousand years in the lake of fire.

“
Sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to
ask you to step out of the vehicle.”

Earl’s voice, low and gravely. Daryl knew the
tone all too well: anger tinted with frustration, the way even the
most innocent words seemed to mock.

Mona’s Secret Delights.

“
Step out of the vehicle
now
, sir!”

The demon crushed Daryl beneath its weight
and caused the doors and ceiling to constrict in response to its
incessant murmur: and she’ll hurt you, she’ll make you scream
again, there in the dark with the rats and the mice and the scent
of fresh blood all up and down your arms and chest, all because you
weren’t good enough, weren’t strong enough, because you failed her
when she needed you most and lacked the backbone to do what needed
to be done . . . .

Earl was shouting now, his voice booming so
loudly that the thud of the truck door almost seemed as
inconsequential as the chatter on the cop’s radio.

“
Fuckin’ pig, I know my damn rights, I
wasn’t doin’ nothin’, you stupid piece of shit.”

“
Put your hands on the hood of the car,
sir . . .”

“
What? You gonna shoot me, asshole? You
gonna blow me away with your big, bad gun? Mother fucker, I ain’t
scared of you and that tin fuckin’ badge . . .”

“
Put your hands on the damn
hood!”

Daryl panted so quickly that his breath
seemed to warm the interior of the car to the point that sweat
moistened his armpits and chest. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping
that he could force the talons out of his head with his tightly
clenched eyes and grinding jaw.

But, even in the darkness, he could sense the
book beside him.

Could picture that leather cover . . . .

“
Sir, I’m not fucking telling you
again!”

The little note card inside the gilded frame
. . .

“
Or what? Or what, you son of a bitch?
You gonna taser me, pig? You gonna zap my fuckin’ ass? That it, big
man?”

The curves and loops of such innocent looking
handwriting . . .

“
Step back! Step the fuck
back!”

Mona’s Secret Delights.

The shouting from outside of the car now
sounded distant, as if it were nothing more than a television
playing a little too loudly through the walls of a padded room.

“
Come on! Come on, mother fucker! Pig!
Let’s do this . . . .”

The growl of Earl’s voice degraded into a
garbled mash of sounds that, for some reason, made Daryl think of a
man sitting in an electric chair. He could picture spittle spraying
from his brother’s lips, drool sliding down his chin as layers of
fat quivered and jerked, his eyes rolling back into his head as his
body flopped in the snow like a headless snake.

The demon’s spiel had now reached a frenzy
and it filled Daryl’s head with a cacophony of hissed whispers
whose words bled into one another: now, prove yourself now, show
your worth, be a man for God’s sake, grow a pair and make her
proud, oh so proud, be a good boy, be the best damn boy she could
ever ask for . . . .

Daryl’s eyelids opened and the voice fell
silent. Turning slightly in his seat, he looked into the back of
the car. His eyes took in the mounds of clothes and baggage, the
plastic bottles of brake fluid and motor oil, all the flotsam and
jetsam that had come rushing forward when the vehicle had come to
its abrupt stop.

And there, poking out from underneath a pink
t-shirt, he saw the curved tip of a tire tool.

Reaching back, his fingers closed around the
cold metal and he lifted it slowly. It was heavier than he thought
it would be . . . thick and sturdy like they used to make them. Not
one of those cheap aluminum rods with the swiveling lug head that
came with newer model cars. This was solid, a single piece of
forged steel.