4

HONK IF YOU’RE HORNY

New York City

Maybe New York City wasn’t so bad. Zach Owens was a high school art teacher in Buffalo, and he’d always kind of resented the Big Apple. In fact, Zach always called it the Big Crapple. He hated the way people on TV always meant the city when they said “New York,” as if the entire surrounding state didn’t exist. He hated the way most New Yorkers—which only meant people from the city, there was no point fighting it—came through Buffalo like they were on their way to or back to some place more important, and how they seemed to spend most of their time appalled at how many things Buffalo didn’t offer. Loudly appalled.

Mostly though, Zach hated that so many of his friends had moved to the Big Crapple after graduation. Zach came from a big, tight family; he wasn’t going anywhere. That wasn’t the same thing as going nowhere. Zach also hated the way his friends referred to Buffalo as Cow Town or the Big Cow Patty when they came back to visit their families. Neil goddamned Blevins was a twenty-eight-year-old waiter, and Neil still acted like Zach was stuck in some peasant village because Neil had been an extra in some movie.

Then Zach had met a woman named Carleigh, only she had crossed out the “eigh” on her laminated name tag with a black sharpie and replaced it with an I. It was while Zach was in the Big Crapple for a four-day weekend at the latest educational seminar. Ironically, the seminar on how social media was changing public education had to be conducted in person. Zach and Carleigh-with-an-I had wound up sitting next to each other in a small group where they were examining how social media could lead to unprofessional behavior or misunderstandings. And somehow, Zach and Carleigh-with-an-I fit together. Zach had almost heard the click.

Zach had been pretty smooth about getting Carleigh-with-an-I’s phone number too, and he wasn’t usually smooth. He’d casually taken his phone out and asked for her number as if he wanted to prove something about the texts-gone-wrong exercise they were doing, and Carleigh-with-an-I had smiled when she gave it to him because she knew he was going to text her later and ask her if she knew about any good places to eat or something, and then she would say that she knew a place so good that she wanted to go there herself, and he had, and she had.

And Carleigh-with-an-I was from New York. The city. She was also in Zach’s hotel room. In Zach’s bed. And Zach was flat on his back in a postcoital state of shell shock, wondering if maybe moving away from Buffalo was so unthinkable after all.

That’s when Zach heard the flute outside. The sound was shrill and reedy, playing a kind of music Zach had never heard before, if it was music at all. The notes veered wildly, cheerful one moment, then violently lurching off to someplace spine-jarring. Zach would have yelled at whoever was making those sounds to shut up, except Zach knew way down in the sewers of his subconscious that he did not want to meet that person. Not ever.

Carli (Zach was an old-fashioned guy, and it seemed like they should be on a real-name basis now that he’d come inside her) didn’t seem to share Zach’s instinct. After she and Zach had finished making love—and Zach thought that maybe that’s what they’d really been doing—Carli had pulled the bedsheet up to her chin while giggling at her sudden shyness. That shyness, pretend or otherwise, disappeared when the music started playing. Carli let the sheet drop without a thought, listening so intently that it seemed like her entire body was some kind of tuning fork.

The hotel room lights began flickering as the music got louder, and then the lights went out entirely. The sounds of a television set coming through the walls of the room next door stopped. The digital clock facing Zach turned off. Only the moonlight outlining the closed curtains of the long hotel window remained to alleviate the darkness.

Then a smell pervaded the room, sour and thick. No, more than one smell. There was wine mixed up in it, so heavy in the air that it almost felt like Zach might get drunk smelling it. And the musk of sex. Lots of sex. The smell that he and Carli were giving off, distilled down to its essence. Despite the bolt of fear paralyzing him, Zach realized he had an erection.

Carli ripped the bedsheet off, bolting for the door. Zach gave a loud startled grunt of denial, but the only thing that slowed Carli down was that she couldn’t seem to figure out the door’s backup lock. Naked, she tugged frantically at the door handle while the flute got louder.

Part of Zach wanted to run for the bathroom and huddle in the tub with the shower curtain drawn, and part of him wanted to run over there and knock Carli out of the way and slam his body against that hotel door to bar it. Instead of doing either, he crept toward the doorway tentatively, grabbing his shirt off the floor and holding it over his waist with one hand and reaching the other hand out toward Carli like she might pop. Zach tried to say something, but he was too scared to yell over the sound of the flute. It was irrational, considering all of the noise Carli was making, but as long as somebody was playing that flute, they weren’t doing anything else.

Zach could hear other sounds crashing through the melody in staccato bursts of violence: glass windows breaking, male voices cursing, the sound of floors and concrete walkways vibrating beneath frantic feet. When Zach finally made it to Carli, her scrabbling fingers managed to twist the locking latch by accident, and she yanked the door open an inch, shrieking while she savagely tugged it back and forth against the security lock at the top of the door frame, one of those contraptions where a ball bearing slides into the tip of a metal triangle that folds over it.

For a moment, the lights of some passing vehicle briefly lit the crevasse where Carli had forced the door partially open, and Zach caught a glimpse of a thick, squat hairy back passing by, a flute bobbing up and down from its profile. But Zach didn’t really see the flute or the strange half human/half goat legs carrying the thing. All Zach saw were the stubby horns coming out of the flutist’s head. The weight of every Sunday-school class and sermon Zach had ever attended came crashing down on his imagination. Then the headlight beams and the figure were both gone, but the shrill music and the parade of half-clothed or naked women following it went on.

Zach cautiously put his fingertips on Carli’s shoulder, and Carli whirled on him, screaming. Carli didn’t have very long fingernails, but she had a kind of manic strength that made them long enough. Zach felt something tear and burn at the side of his throat.

He stumbled backward, his hand over his neck, and Carli turned back to the door, already forgetting Zach existed. Panicked, Zach tried to check the hotel room mirror in the faint light. Was he dying? Had Carli torn an artery? Zach didn’t want to take his fingers off his throat in case they were the only thing holding it together, but he did. A loose, bloody flap of skin flopped down, and Zach almost passed out. His knees hit the floor hard, and he bit his tongue half off at the same moment.

He also saw his open overnight bag. If there was a God, and Zach believed there was even if Zach had just spent the evening in a way his preacher wouldn’t have approved of, maybe it was God who put Zach’s face right next to his MP3 player. The MP3 player that still had Zach’s earbuds plugged into it.

A draft of cold air on his exposed genitals shocked Zach back into action, if grabbing an MP3 player and crawling on the floor can be called action. Zach made his way over to the door on one hand and his knees, his left hand clutching his throat again. There was blood against his hand but no spurting. No spurting. No spurting. No spurting. When Zach reached Carli, he fumbled around with the MP3 player in a horribly unfunny slapstick comedy. He put an earbud in each hand, and the MP3 player fell and yanked the cord free of the connecting terminal. Then Zach managed to put the MP3 player in his teeth, got the earbuds in each hand, and realized he’d forgotten to turn the player on. The only saving grace was that Carli was completely ignoring Zach as long as he wasn’t actively trying to restrain her. As small as she was, she had almost yanked out the metal bolts attaching the security bar to the wall.

Zach finally lurched up and body-slammed Carli into the door, shutting it, putting her off-balance long enough to plug the earbuds into her ears. Carli threw an elbow into the soft spot right below Zach’s breastbone, but the Kings of Leon were blasting in her ears full volume, and she stiffened, a confused look coming over her face. Zach doubled over and then fell sideways on his hip, trying to bring more air back into his body than his shallow breaths would allow. Then Carli was down on the floor beside him, wrapping her arms around his neck, her hot tears on his cheek, and they huddled there and waited for the nightmare to go away.