“There’ll be none of that, now. There’s only us here and we need to depend on each other. Attitudes like that can get us killed. What Gert did or does is her business and not ours. Fuck, boy. You were a crack dealer and you got the gall to call her a whore? To push yourself on her? If I wasn’t the humanitarian I am, I’d kick you just to see you bleed some more.”
“Hold on now,” MacHenry said, cinching up his blanket. “Don’t hurt the kid, Adamski. He doesn’t know any better.”
Buckley stood there attempting to control his rage. It wasn’t all because of the boy’s remark- no. It was also for his own impending death. He needed to tell them soon. He needed to leave. A traitorous thought crucified his good intention. If he’d never gotten these people together, if he’d refused to help and done things his own way, then maybe he'd have actually survived.
Dead cat in the highway, dead bird in the tree,
Dead rat in the gutter, and little old dead me.
Dead sun up in heaven, dead stream at my feet,
Dead calm all around me, earth full of dead meat.
Everyone turned and stared at Grandma Riggs as she sucked on her glass pipe, grinning wickedly.
“Well, that about sums it up,” MacHenry said. “Dead sun up in heaven, earth full of dead meat. Come on, Gert. Let’s get cleaned up.”
They went down the hallway, the used car salesman’s white ass visible through a rent in the blanket. The sound of the door slamming made everyone jump a little.
Buckley backed up and grabbed a towel from the back of a chair. He threw it at Sissy and pointed to Bennie who held his nose gingerly. “Clean him up, girl. He’ll be all right.”
She immediately moved to help the fallen boy. With Samuel’s assistance, she got Bennie to his feet and down the hall to the bathroom.
Buckley wiped the sweat from his eyes and inhaled the staleness of the room. There were too many people in too small a space. The place smelled like a locker room tinged with the sweet toxicity of crack smoke. He turned to leave but paused as Grandma Riggs spoke.
“I smell you, Mr. Adamski. I smell you right fine.”
"What do you mean, Grandma?"
"You know good and well what I mean."
Buckley sighed. Yeah, he did. “I smell me too, Grandma. I best be finding a way to get clean.”
“That sounds like a grand idea. Maybe Little Rashad here can help you. Go help our Garbage Can Dictator, Rashad. Mr. Adamski’s got hisself a boogeyman problem.”
CHAPTER 9
She'd heard nothing but her own breathing for hours.
The noise had gone on outside for so long, even when it had died out, she thought she heard things from time to time. Screams. Cries. She’d even thought she’d heard her name once or twice, but a tiny part of her that commanded with her mother’s voice told her they were phantoms, that they weren’t real.
Finally she screwed around her courage and crawled to the door. It was a tortuous journey, across hard cold things she wasn’t familiar with, her imagination filling in the possibilities where her knowledge ended. At the very edge of terror, she finally embraced the metal door and placed her ear against it.
Her mother and father were out there somewhere. Scenarios ran through her mind where they led the white worms on a merry chase, always one step ahead, always safe. Her mother laughed. Her father skipped fearlessly down the street. An image of him feinting left and running right, like he’d done with Uncle Brian during the football game after Thanksgiving last year made her grin, the expression scaring away webs of fear.
But as soon as it lit her face, a frown crept in and replaced it. Her daddy wasn’t going to be playing any more football. Uncle Brian wasn’t going to be coming down from Pennsylvania anymore. There’d be no reason for Thanksgiving dinner, because there’d be no more family.
She suddenly wished she wasn’t alone. She wanted to be with someone, anyone. Her breathing filled the silence. She listened to it for a time and wondered if maybe she wasn’t alone. What if the sound she heard wasn’t her breathing, but someone inside the freezer with her?
The very idea made her hold her breath as terror once again engulfed her.
CHAPTER 10
Fifteen minutes after he punched the banger in the nose, Buckley found himself staring at the bottle in front of him. Unopened, it promised the redemption of forgetfulness. The clear liquid cajoled him, its promises of better times stretching through the glass. He felt like Alice — Drink Me all but written upon the vodka.
Rashad sat next to him sucking on a root beer, both of the boy’s large black eyes fixed upon him.
“What made you think to blow the horn?”
“I dunno. It just felt like the right thing to do, I guess.”
“Why that song?”
“What?”
“Why did you choose that song to play? Why not another one? You do know some other songs, right?”
The boy nodded.
“So why Rocky?”
“I dunno.”
“Is it your favorite?”
“No.”
Buckley was stumped. He knew there was something important going on. One of the ideas that’d been pinballing through in his mind was that if there was a God, maybe this wasn’t how he wanted the world to end. Either this was a modern day flood, a nastier way to cleanse the earth and start over, or this had nothing to do with God. Buckley chose to believe in the idea of intelligent design, opting for a supreme being over the Trekkie idea of alien forces, prime directives and intergalactic federations-as if the maggies were an earthly infestation of tribbles. And because of his belief, the single thing he kept wondering about was whether or not God would allow the devil to get the upper hand, for surely this was a thing of devilish doing.
All of a sudden an itch prickled his forearm, followed by tingling, burrowing, a searing pain and then a pop. A maggie squeezed free and began to wiggle, dancing in the air, reminding him of the governor singing The Thrill is Gone. Buckley quickly pinched the beastie with his thumb and forefinger to hold it in place and hid his hand in his lap. He glanced over to Rashad who was staring into space, maybe remembering his parents, maybe trying not to. Buckley glanced at the doorway. No one there, either.
Jesus fucking Maggie fuck!
All Buckley needed was for the others to see him sitting there with a maggie in his hand like he was some sort of maggot wrangler, then he wouldn’t have a choice. They’d shove him out the door with a shotgun up his ass as sure as Grandma had a crack addiction.
He felt a twinge of pain as the maggie in his hand tried to bore through the tough skin of his palm. Slowly, so as not to make a noise or any sudden moves, he reached under the table with his other hand and pulled the maggie out. He grimaced, the corners of his mouth dipping to his jaw-line as he felt it come free like a night crawler reluctantly leaving the sanctity of the cool dark earth that was his skin.
Rashad stared at him, his eyes wide with concern. What was it Grandma Riggs had said? Little Rashad can help you.
Buckley stood, trudged over to the counter and grabbed an empty glass jar. Blocking the view of anyone who suddenly came into the room with his back, he dropped the maggie inside and watched as the creature tried to slide through the container, microscopic teeth no match for glass. He brought the jar to eye level. This was the closest he’d ever been to one-ever dared be.
Just as he thought, they were eyeless. Unlike a worm, however, which seemed to absorb food, both ends of this little creature had mouths, small oval orifices with tiny teeth disappearing within the creatures’ interior. Buckley imagined that if it needed to, the maggie could use it’s feeding as propulsion, like a tiny jet, shooting through the soft tissue of a human.