1
“What was that?”
“What?” Bronwyn asked sleepily, her eyes barely fluttering open.
“That noise.”
“Probably a coyote. Don’t worry,” she said. “They don’t get close to the fire.”
“That was not a coyote,” Josh said.
The noise got louder.
“That’s metal.”
She sat up on her elbows. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something kinky that Griff and Tammy are doing.”
“That was the scrape of metal, Bron. It came from over there.” Josh pointed toward the Pimpmobile. He noticed just how far away they were from the road. To get to the car would take more than a minute. For some reason, this bothered him. It wasn’t exactly a quarter mile away, but the car was far enough off in the darkness that it bothered him.
As if he had never been passed out at all, Ziggy sat straight up so fast that it freaked Josh out.
“It’s that little bastard.”
“What?”
“Ziggy, don’t be silly,” Bronwyn said. “You’re high. We’re all a little stoned.”
“Maybe,” Josh said, weighing this as a possibility. He sniffed the air. It had a curious mix of the dusty road and mesquite to it. But there was something else. Something that reminded him of a church smell. He wasn’t sure what that was, but he assumed it was in his head. All of it, in his head.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Bronwyn said. But she said it as if she were trying to deny something even to herself. “I mean, I heard something. Just not something that seemed strange. I bet it’s because those two are going at it. They’re probably breaking the seats. They’re going at it in your car.”
“I don’t think so,” Ziggy said. “It’s that little bastard. That’s what it is. It’s that little rat bastard.”
Bronwyn pulled her knees into her chest and looked at the fire. She puffed away at her cigarette, and didn’t seem bothered by the noise. It’s because she doesn’t want to think about them, Josh thought. She doesn’t want to think about Griff screwing Tammy. She loves Griff. There’s no way around this. He hits girls. He’s stupid. But he looks good and girls want that. They want to feel they got the football hero. They want to feel like they won some prize. Just like guys want pretty girls, no matter what the girl is on the inside.
She’s never going to look at me the way she looks at him. And he’s a complete jerk. But she doesn’t notice that. She just knows she wants him.
He scootched over in the dirt and sat next to her, crossing his legs in front of him. “You okay?” he asked.
She shrugged, holding her cigarette aloft as if she could write in the sky with it. “Life just sucks, that’s all.”
“I’m here,” he said, looking at her, trying to make her see him. Really see him.
She turned her face toward him, and had an inscrutable look. “Don’t cozy up to me if you just want something from me.”
Ziggy pushed himself up from the rock on the other side of the fire. He stood there, beyond the crackling flame, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “What if it’s all true? What if we brought that thing to life?” He balanced his weight on one foot and then the other, and looked toward the car nervously. “It’s dark over there. I can’t see anything. But I heard that.”
“Sit down, Zig,” Bronwyn said. “It’s okay. You’re freaking me out. Just calm down, have a smoke or something. I promise you that Scratchypoo isn’t coming out of that trunk.”
Josh laughed. “Scratchy-poo.”
“Scratchy-poo,” Ziggy repeated, but didn’t laugh. He just kept watch in the direction of the car. “You know, I heard that sometimes these things have special powers. I mean, there are stones in England that Druids put together and they have ceremonies there still. And there’s a place in France where there are these caves and they found these bones. It was some ancient religious thing. And I saw on National Geographic about this temple in India where there’s this cult . . .”
“Zig,” Bronwyn said. “What’s your point?”
He looked at her, and the flickering from the firelight cast his face in a brilliant yellow and red shadow. “People believe in things. They do. And maybe if they believe in them bad enough, maybe those things can be real when they don’t seem like they should.”
“We should never have dragged you to Texas Chainsaw Massacre at Halloween,” she said. Turning to Josh, “He screamed like a baby the whole time.”
“You never know what stuff is like until it happens to you,” Ziggy said. “You never know. People go missing all the time. Bad things happen to people and no one can explain them. I heard in Oregon that two kids got lost in the woods and got torn up, and they thought it was a tiger only no one could see how tigers could be in Oregon.”
Bronwyn raised her hand. “Oh, pick me. I know! I know!”
Josh cracked up, laughing.
“What’s so funny? It happened. They said the woods were cursed. They got torn up,” Ziggy said.
“Zig, it was because of marijuana farms. That same weed you smoke doesn’t come from nice Midwestern farmers. Some of them use tigers and mountain lions on their property to scare off—or kill—intruders.”
Ziggy looked at the joint in his hand.
“What, you think marijuana is grown by Old MacDonald? That the Feds don’t raid the plantations in Hawaii and the Northwest? That nice people run them and everybody’s stoned and happy? They’re drug lords, Zig. You smoke that stuff—hell, so do I now and then—and we’re ultimately supporting people who would be happy to cut our throats if we stole an ounce of their stash. I know about those kids. I read about it. They were hiking where they shouldn’t have gone hiking,” she said.
“You know everything, don’t you?” Ziggy said, an edge to his voice that wasn’t quite sarcasm but close to it. “You know everything. Well, maybe we’ve gone where we shouldn’t go hiking. I saw that thing. It’s a sacred relic. I believe someone at that gas station stole it from where it was meant to rest. It’s from some old religion that we can’t even begin to understand. I believe people used to believe in it. And they died because of it. They laid down their lives in sacrifice. It freaks me out. It does. I think we’re like those kids in the woods, off the path. And that thing is a tiger. Maybe a sleeping tiger. But sleeping tigers wake up. And when they wake up, they get hungry.”
“Sit down,” Bronwyn said. “It’s the two sex fiends doing the nasty in the Pimpmobile.”
2
Griff and Tammy hadn’t made their way to the car until after they’d been up against a big flat rock that they’d stumbled across in the dark. Griff had his shirt off fast, and then was unbuttoning his shorts, which dropped to his ankles and he did what Tammy called his “penguin walk” over to her and nearly tore her top off to get to her breasts. Their lips locked, with tongues tickling, and Tammy kept whispering things to him when they weren’t kissing, and it all turned him on more. She had left the condoms in the backseat of the Pimpmobile, and so she had to disengage. “I’m all dirty,” she said.
“I feel that way, too,” he said, grabbing around her back to keep his fingers on the nipples of delight, but she peeled his fingers back.
“I mean dirty dirty,” she said. “All this damn sand. Now let go for a sec. I do not intend to get pregnant just yet and unless we just fool around, that’s a distinct possibility.” She jogged to the car, opening the back door. “My bag is in here somewhere. We just used them last night. Where’d I put those Trojans?” She kneeled on the seat, bending over to check the floor for her handbag.
“Maybe it’s in the back,” he said.
“The trunk?” she said. “Oh, maybe. Go pop it for me, okay?”
He wanted to pop more than the trunk, but he went around to the driver’s side, opened the door and found what he hoped was the lever for the trunk.
It popped open slightly.
“I’ll look,” he said. He shut the door and went around to the back of the car and lifted the trunk.
The light hadn’t come on in the trunk, so he rooted around in things, and threw a couple of suitcases out on the dirt. He reached into a pile of clothes, but they felt funny. He wondered why they felt so ragged.
Then he felt the top of Scratch’s head.
3
He nearly jumped when he felt it. It was bumpy, but he knew he was touching bone. He laughed to himself at the slight chill he got from the contact. It was kind of gross having a dead little guy in the back, even if it was about five hundred years old.
He thought he found Tammy’s little round suitcase, and as he reached for it, something grabbed him by the wrist.
It wasn’t just a grab. It felt like razors on his skin.
For just a moment he thought he’d stuck his hand into one of the other guys’ shaving kits, and somehow, someway their razor blades were all laying in a circle, like a bracelet on his wrist.
Then he felt a pain that shot from his hand up his elbow and finally ended at his jaw.
Something had scraped skin off his wrist.
He tried to bring his hand out, but whatever had it gripped it tight. It was like a bear trap on his wrist. His mind wasn’t working right as he tried to see in the dark, among the piles of crap. The razors dug deeper and he screeched.
Maybe if he’d been over at the fire, like Josh and Bronwyn and Ziggy, they’d hear that as a metallic sound.
Maybe.
4
Tammy scrambled out of the car seat, and ran back to the trunk. She could make out Griff, but wasn’t sure what she was really seeing. It looked like he was doing some kind of crazy fast dance. His arms were jerking around and his legs were all wobbly.
And then he began moving toward her, now slower, almost slow motion, and she saw something that looked almost like a small dog snapping at his heels.
“Griff?” she asked.
As he got closer to her, he whispered, “Help me. Help me. Get it off me.”
She saw it, finally, as it scrambled up his back and perched on his shoulder, its teeth going into his neck.
She tried to scream, but her voice was gone. All she could do was whimper. She stood there, naked, watching Griff fall to the ground, to his knees, while something on top of him made the most awful sucking sound. A spray of blood hit Tammy across her face, across her breasts, and she tasted Griff’s blood on her tongue.
And then her voice came back to her, and she screamed loud and long.
5
Before the three around the fire could register the scream, let alone get up and go running to them, Tammy remembered the gun. She tried to swallow the feeling of horror and shock inside her—if you stop it gets you, move, girl, move and do something, don’t just be scared, take action—and she remembered Griff’s gun. He kept it in his duffel bag. The duffel bag was in the trunk. If she could run around the other side of the car, she could get it. She knew she could. She had no other weapon. There was nothing else. Quickly, she turned around and ran. She heard a strange yelp from Griff’s throat, which would be the last thing she’d ever hear from him.
Her mind spun a mile a minute as she tried to process what she had seen, what was happening, but her thoughts moved into a darker place where survival was more important than logic, and where nightmares could be faced. She reached into the trunk, and felt around the suitcases and the clothes, and then she found it. His duffel bag. She reached in, pulling out his dirty laundry. Her hand touched metal. The gun. She grabbed it. She wasn’t even sure how to work it, but she knew it wasn’t rocket science. Point, aim, pull trigger, fire.
She brought the gun up in the dark at the thing. Her hands were shivering so she kept both of them on the gun, holding it as steady as she could. She felt for the trigger. She tried to aim as best she could.
Griff fell completely to the earth, and that little thing was moving over him rapidly, its arms going up and then down on his body, and she saw what might have been scraps of . . . skin? It was skinning him?
Oh my god oh my god oh my god, she thought as she closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger. But she hadn’t squeezed hard enough. Come on. It’s a gun. You can do it. You’ve watched TV. You know how guns are shot. She squeezed it again, this time using all her strength.
She heard an explosion that was momentarily deafening, and saw a bright light. For the barest second, she saw it—the bloody mass that was Griff, and that Scratch thing, its claws going up and down like a Benihana chef as it skinned Griff. Blood poured everywhere.
She hadn’t hit it. She hadn’t hit anything. She hadn’t even aimed well.
Scratch made gurgling sounds as it moved rapidly around Griff’s body.
When a flashlight’s beam hit its face—those turquoise eyes shiny green and alive in the light—it made a noise that was part growl and part shriek, grabbed something, and ran off into the darkness.
6
Josh stood there, his flashlight focused on Griff’s body.
Bronwyn came up behind him, holding a long stick that burned at one end, like it was a torch.
Josh put the light on Tammy. She pointed the gun at him. “Tammy,” Josh said.
The gun went off.
Josh instinctively fell to the ground.
“Tammy!” Bronwyn shouted. “Put the gun down now!”
Josh hit Tammy with the flashlight beam. Tammy’s naked body was covered with blood. Her eyes seemed wide and vacant as she stared at them. Then she started screaming and wouldn’t stop for the longest time.
7
Ziggy was shivering as if he’d been doused with ice-cold water. He kept the blanket wrapped tightly around him, and he was standing as close to the fire as he could get without burning himself. He kept turning slowly around and around as if sure that someone or something would pounce at any second. He rolled the fattest doobie he could, lit it up, and sucked in as much of the smoke as possible. The world turned into the blue haze of smoke with tongues of flames shooting up from the fire.
He saw something coming toward him in the dark—a low, thick shadow moving among the low scrub brush.
“Heya, Zigster,” it was Griff’s voice, and as the thing moved into the aura of light from the fire, he saw the little bastard monster with bloody skin all over him, moving rapidly forward, claws clicking, waving the skin of Griff’s arms and hands like too-long sleeves from its own arms, and on its large skull head, Griff’s face-skin, with eyeholes that showed shimmering green.
Ziggy felt his heart in his throat, and his pulse grew rapid. He took another toke and tried to get his feet to move, but something in the purple weed smoke seemed to make him feel safe. He was transfixed as the little bastard wearing Griff’s skin moved around the fire, and came toward him.
“You ain’t gonna get me,” Ziggy said. “I’m high. I’m floatin’.”
The little bastard scurried well around the fire, and Ziggy knew that it was the fire itself that scared the creep. Ziggy reached in and picked up the end of a stick from the edge of the fire. He waved the burning stick in front of him, slashing at the air.
He saw the green eyes through the bloody skin. They seemed to be twitching. It was like the little bastard was thinking.
Ziggy took a step backward. He could run. He could climb into the fire and burn up to protect himself from the little bastard, or he could run.
He stood a chance if he ran.
“What are you thinking, you dumb stoner?” Griff’s voice came from the creature. “You can run from the Great and Omnipotent Flayer of Men? You can’t. This thing can run, boy, let me tell you. It can run like a jaguar. It can leap real high. It can do all kinds of things. But Zig, it ain’t so bad. It really ain’t. Getting your skin all torn off ain’t the worst thing. It feels pretty good. It’s sweet. It’s about giving your life to something bigger than you. Something eternal.”
Ziggy held his breath, and tried to get as stoned as he could off his last hit of weed.
And then, the little bastard leapt through the air, discarding Griff’s skin, which floated slowly down into the fire as the creature latched on to Ziggy’s balls.
8
“What in the world is that . . . stench?” Bronwyn asked. It was in the air—smoke from the fire off the road smelled like a barbeque gone bad. She and Josh and Tammy had been standing around the car, stunned. She had her arm over Tammy’s shoulder. Tammy had finally calmed for a few seconds—enough time to lower the gun and quit shooting haphazardly.
Then they heard Ziggy’s choking scream.
“Zig!” Tammy shouted.
She ran down the road, her arms raised up, gun in hand, no doubt terrified for her life.
Bronwyn began swearing, and Josh held his breath.
They both stood there one more second, and then Josh exhaled and said, “Ziggy.”
9
Josh went running out on the desert, toward the fire. He felt he was moving too slow, and he saw Ziggy’s red-lit face as he approached the fire, but it wasn’t just the firelight—blood spurted up from his body. Josh got there just in time to watch the creature tear open Ziggy from neck to bowels. His steamy entrails poured out in loops. Ziggy’s eyes seemed to follow his body being ripped open, and Josh wondered for a second if he could see it.
Josh stopped at the opposite side of the fire. He grabbed a stick from the flames. It was so hot that his hands felt as if they were burning, but he slashed it in the air, its trail of flame lighting up the night. As he got closer to the creature—now scraping at Ziggy’s skin and laughing gleefully in a voice that was too close to Griff’s—Josh began slamming the burning stick down on it. It squealed, and leapt up onto Ziggy’s head, leaning over to scratch Ziggy’s eyes out and hold them at the end of its black talons.
It stared at Josh, but it was nearly comical-looking. Its turquoise eyes seemed to change from blue to green and back to blue again. Now it spoke first with Griff’s voice and then with Ziggy’s, alternating back and forth as if, in tearing out both their throats, it had stolen their voices.
“Get away!” it screamed. “You son-of-a-bitch, this is your old pal! Come on, boy, get the hell away!”
As Josh brought the stick down to hit the creature’s head, it leapt up as if it could fly, its claws spread wide, its arms impossibly long, and ran off into the night, letting out a shrill scream that sounded like the way Ziggy had screamed one night in his sleep.