He led the girl around behind the tiki hut full of sunglasses, out of sight of his family. The dark-skinned girl must have been feeling eager, because she let him lay her down on the beach blanket and remove her bikini.
Jeremy hurried to get out of his clothes, then he spread her legs and climbed on top of her. He was feeling eager, too, so the whole thing lasted less than two minutes.
When he was done, he rolled off the girl and lay down beside her, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring straight up at the high ceiling overhead.
“This was a mistake,” Jeremy said. “I have to go.”
She said nothing, indifferent to him.
Jeremy returned to his family and lay down beside his wife.
“Nice day, isn’t it, Melissa?” he asked.
But she didn’t have a word to say to him, then or ever again. The kids gave him the silent treatment, too.
When they returned home, Melissa lay rigid in their bed and showed no interest in being intimate with him. After a couple of nights she moved to another bed. He cried and apologized to her again and again, but she said nothing, her face like a hard plastic mask.
Soon after that, Melissa took the kids and moved into Sears at the far end of the mall. The last time he saw her she was with one of those jerks from the menswear department.
Gramps had no sympathy. Neither did Ivana and Marla, who whispered nasty things about Jeremy when he wasn’t around, telling everyone on the north end of the mall what he’d done to Melissa and insinuating he’d done a lot more, like hooking up with various women all over Macy’s, which was just malicious gossip. Skip didn’t seem to care about Jeremy’s suffering, either, but he had never been a true friend. None of them had ever been true friends, Jeremy thought. Eight-ball had been the only one he could really trust, and now Eight-ball was gone.
Jeremy worried that word was getting out about his part in Eight-ball’s death. While nobody said anything to his face about it, he thought he could sense an air of suspicion. The clown gave him a lot of strange smiles whenever Jeremy passed the food court.
One night he went to T.G.I. Friday’s and drank Seagram’s straight from the bottle. He found himself wandering through the mall, drinking and weeping. Everyone came to their windows to watch. The college kids at Old Navy, the sexy ladies at Victoria’s Secret—all of them watched him, no doubt whispering to each other about how pathetic and worthless he was, how he’d lost his wife to some wingtipped jerkoff over at Sears.
“Go to hell!” he shouted at one placid, grinning face after another. “All of you go to hell!” The place was getting too small for him, with everybody full of gossip and judgment, everybody up in his business.
He found his way out to the parking lot. Jeremy managed to climb inside his truck with the camper top, the one he’d loaded with provisions so long ago. He fumbled the key into the ignition and cranked it up.
He would have to press on without Eight-ball to help him. Jeremy swerved his way down the interstate, steering with one hand, sipping gin with the other. He flipped on the radio and listened to the open hiss of dead air for the rest of the night.
J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science fiction into new kinds of stories.
He is the author of The Paranormals series (Jenny Pox, Tommy Nightmare, and Alexander Death) and other books. Fairy Metal Thunder is the first book in his new Songs of Magic series. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina, his baby son John, and some dogs and cats.
Website: www.jlbryanbooks.com
Twitter: @jlbryanbooks
THE INDIAN ROPE TRICK
by D.P. Prior
Mum was thump, thump, thumping on the door. It was raining cats and dogs out there. The rat-tat-tat on the windows made the sound of a gazillion BB guns shooting the glass. Thunder cracked and rolled away like angels dropping coal. Inside, the TV was chattering and Dad was nailing planks across the windows. My breaths were raggedy gasps and my heart was bouncing in my chest. Under it all I could hear the groaning of the zombies, and the screaming and the sirens, and the bang, bang, bang of the policemen’s guns. I couldn’t help myself. My fingers fumbled with the door chain.
“Don’t!” Dad dropped his hammer and shoved me out of the way. He checked the latch to make sure Mum couldn’t open the door from the outside, and looked through the peephole.
“It’s her,” I said. “You have to let her in.”
He snarled as he turned and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“It’s not. Don’t you get it? It’s not. Oh, Christ, I’m sorry, Wes. I’m not…I mean…I’m not angry with you. We just can’t let her in, is all. She’s bit.”
“Then make her better.”
He pinched the top of his nose and screwed his face up. I thought he was gonna cry.
“I can’t, Wes. I fuckin’…I can’t.”
I ducked under his arm so quick he couldn’t stop me.
“Wes—”
I pressed my face up against the door and squinted through the peephole. Mum looked sickly and grey, and there was stuff coming out of her mouth, all foamy and disgusting. Her teeth kept snapping together like she was saying something, but all I could hear was her growling.
“You little…” Dad yanked me back and squeezed my cheeks with one hand so I had to look him in the face. “She ain’t speaking, Wes. Don’t you see? If it was really her, don’t you think she’d be yelling or screaming? She’s bit, I tell you.”
My face felt like it was on fire. I stared him out, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I slapped his hand off me and went to look through the gaps in the planks covering the window. I could see the side of Mum’s coat. There were carrier bags on the driveway next to her. Back a little way, there was a policeman all in black with one of them bulletproof jackets. He had a rifle gun pointed at her and was shouting the same thing over and over, only I couldn’t make out what it was, what with all the other noise. Something shambled past the window. There was a shot and a spray of red on the glass.
“Get away.” Dad’s voice cracked, like he was crying. “Get back from the window. You don’t want… you don’t want them to see you.”
Mum hit the door real hard just then, thump after thump after thump. The frame shook and Mum’s growls turned into angry screams. All I could do was cover my ears and shut my eyes tight, really, really tight. The policeman called out again, this time from closer by. Mum must’ve thrown herself against the door, ’cause the frame split. Thunder rolled, rain pattered, things moaned, the TV chattered. Someone else shouted, “The head, you tosser!” and there was a deafening bang. I screamed and fell to my knees, trying to breathe. Trying, trying to breathe. I felt Dad’s arms around me; heard his sobbing; felt his warm tears on my neck.
“It weren’t her,” he said through sniffs. “She was already gone, Wes. It weren’t her.”
He didn’t try to hold me back when I stood and looked through the peephole. It was smeared with blood and I couldn’t see out.
“Wes…”
“I might be nine, Dad, but I’m not stupid. Got it?”
I pushed past him and headed through the lounge into the kitchen. I tried the back door. It was locked. I could see out into the conservatory through the kitchen window. I knew that was locked, too. We’d checked it earlier, after bringing the planks in from the shed. I heard Dad behind me as I took the key out of the lock.