“Uh, yeah,” Gut obliged, and he shore didn’t have no trouble obliging. He could razz with the best of ’em, but he didn’t want no part of this. Just weren’t natural to be doin’ it with a Creeker. So he moseyed around the clearing, finished his beer, and chucked the can. He could hear Scott whooping it up fierce in the pickup. Sheee-it, he thought morosely. He knew Scott-Boy real well, and knew how his head worked, and he figured that the girl’s deformities added a lot of extra spark to Scott’s razz.
Groaty hobknobbin, he mused. Jaysus…
He looked around the grove, up at the moon, up at the sky. He didn’t want to think about what was going on in the truck, but it was a spot hard not to. Scott kept the dome light on, and Gut couldn’t help but catch a few ganders. He could see the Creeker gal’s funny feet sticking up, then he could see her head hangin’ out the window as Scott-Boy turned her over and gave it to her in the behind. Then she started pukin’, and Scott-Boy was just laughing away and slapping her around and all in the truck. “Got’s ta get rid of this dog-dirty hair so’s we can see yer purdy face, jabberpuss,” he was saying, and then he started cutting her dirty coal-black hair off with his buck, right close to the scalp and throwing it all around and laughing it up real good, and this poor Creeker gal looked a sight when he was done, just tufts of scrap sticking up on her big, cockeyed head.
Gut sat down on a stump to wait. Hurry it up, Scott-Boy, he thought. We got a run to make later. These dust dealers they drove for, they wouldn’t take too kindly to he and Scott bein’ late, but ‘acorse that was really just an excuse, bein’ late fer the run. He wanted to get out of here was all. The low, sicklike feelin’ in his breadbasket was still there, not just from what Scott was doin’ to this poor Creeker gal, but from a bit of everything. The whole night just had a bad feel to it.
“Ah-no-save-me!” he thought he heard the girl shriek from the cab. “Ona-prey-bee!”
Who knew what the gal was tryin’ to say. Hell, she probably didn’t know herself, so et up she was with the messed up kromerzomes. Gut guessed it must’ve been some scientist fella named Kromer who discovered ’em. These kromerzomes, see, was so deller-kit, if families hobknobbed together long enough over generations there never weren’t no babies born right. No, none at all. ‘Least, that’s what his daddy’d told him.
“Ah-no! Lep! Evernd! Peese! Ona!” the gal wailed.
Scott’s whooping voice echoed through the grove. “Hot damn, Gut! This is a reg-lar hoot, this is! This splittail’s box is shore somethin’!”
Uh, yeah, Gut thought. He was fidgetin’ like he had ants on him, the bad feel of the night or the cryptic whispers of the augurs of ancient Rome. He got back up then and began to pace about the moonlit dell, and every time he glanced toward the truck all he could see was Scott-Boy’s devil-grinnin’ face whiles he continued to put serious blocks to this Creeker gal, and then Scott was guffawing, “Oh yessiree bob, I’m gonna blow me a nut so dandy it’ll be squirtin’ out this jabberin’ bitch’s fucked-up ears, it will!”
“Hey, Scott-Boy?” Gut feebly called out. “Hurrys it up, how ’bout. We got that run to make, don’t ferget.”
But Scott-Boy, so busy he was just then, didn’t even hear what Gut had said.
The augural thickened; Gut was sweating now, itching and rubbing his face in some unnamed dread, and the pickup truck was rockin’, and the Creeker chick still jabberin’ away whiles Scott-Boy set to bangin’ her warped head bam bam bam! against the door a country mile a minute, and suddenly—inexplicably—Gut felt a fear like he couldn’t ‘magine, and he ducked behind a tree for no reason he could really put a name to, and that was when Scott-Boy started screamin’…
In an eye’s wink, big, quick-moving shadows were crunching around the pickup, and Scott-Boy, he was screaming right away—it didn’t even really sound human, like the sound Cage George’s ’Cuda made that time he was red-lining it and the oil pump went—and next off, another pickup truck was pulling up in the grove, not from the road but from a dirt lane in the woods, only this pickup was real old and beat to shit, with real dim headlights, and then these shadows was dragging Scott-Boy out of the truck, and he was still screaming bloody murder. Other shadows took the Creeker gal out and then carried her to the truck with the real dim lights, but dim as these lights was, Gut could also see Scott-Boy and what happened to him to get him screaming like that
Keeeeee-riiist…
Scott-Boy had no works left at all ’tween his legs, just a crotch-full of blood pouring like a faucet. One of them shadows had cut Scott’s dog and bag clean off, and Scott was still screaming and flailing away in the dirt as several of these big shadows got to holding him down, and one of them was smack smack smack! bringing a tire iron or something down fast and hard on Scott-Boy’s arms and legs, breakin’ bones like they was pencils, and another shadow whipped out a buck bigger than Gut had ever seed in his life and started scalping Scott-Boy alive right then and there.
More of that Creeker jabber shot up into the grove, only this weren’t the gal, these were guys by the sound of ’em:
“Ah-no-prey-bee!”
“Ah-no-for-blood!”
“Skeet-inner this one!”
“Ona!”
But then there was another voice Gut coulda swore he heard, but, see, he seemed to hear it in his head instead of his ears, and what he heard was this:
Redeemer Sanctifier, bless us…
Ah-no ah-no!
To thee we bring this gift of flesh…
Ona!
Gut felt like part of the tree he was lookin’ past; he couldn’t move at all. These shadows was really doin’ the job on Scott-Boy, the likes of which turned even Gut’s breadbasket. “Gut, Jaysus ta Gawd ya gotta help meeeee!” screamed Scott-Boy, crushed and scalped but still alive. One of the shadows was givin’ it to Scott-Boy something fierce up the tail, while the one with the shank took to cutting off Scott-Boy’s ears, and whittling the skin off his fingers, and chopping off his toes like they was carrots for stew on a butcher block. Gut shuddered frozen behind that tree, not able to move but knowing if he didn’t, these fellas would surely do the same to him.
Gotta move gotta get out of here right now!
When the one fella finished havin’ his nut up Scott-Boy’s tail, he slid that tire iron right up the same hole and jiggled it around fierce up there, and that other fella with the big buck cut Scott’s throat so deep you could hear the blade scrapin’bone, and that was about it for Scott “Scott-Boy” Tuckton, yes sir.
He shore did pick the wrong folks to razz tonight.
Then them shadows, what they did next was they hauled what was left of Scott-Boy back to that beat-ta-hell pickup of theirs and throwed him in the back like he was a sack of farm feed. And then—
Another fella stepped outta the shadows.
Fuck, Gut thought.
This fella was taller than the others, and Gut guessed he’d been standin’ back in the dark whiles his buddies did the job on Scott-Boy. He stood there a speck and kind of made to sniff the air, and then he turned in the moonlight and—
Fuck! Gut thought.
—looked right at Gut squattin’ behind that there tree.
Gut’s eyes bugged like they might jump out his head as this big killer dude took to staring at him, and Gut figured he’d just up and die, but what he did instead was piss and shit his pants both at the same time. He only saw the big fella’s face a second but a second was enough, a face squashed up worse than the gal’s with one ear twice as big as the other and fucked-up teeth stickin’ out of his smile, and then he pointed right at Gut with a long, crooked finger, staring back at Gut with eyes just like that gal’s.