free 4th chapter: rest stop

HARVEY LEE OSBORNE

High summer on the highway, night, the fecund perfume of new-mown grass and the whirring choir of insects, eating and being eaten. Cigarette smoke snaked out the window, the radio tuned to something country. Cough syrup tang of Southern Comfort, a half pint lying on the passenger seat.

O, for a cheerleader to make it all complete, with short white socks and short, curly hairs. But I've got an even sweeter treat in the trunk.

Such are the thoughts of Harvey Lee Osborne as the big Oldsmobile eats up the road. He is careful not to weave, nor to go even one mile over the speed limit. Harvey Lee has no license and no wish to spend more time in jail. Bad men were in the jail, men who wanted to do bad things to Harvey Lee, men who wanted Harvey Lee to do bad things to them.

Careful, careful, number nine, don't you cross that yellow line.

His eyes were drawn to the rearview for the umpty-umpth time, but squinting didn't help. It might be the same car. It might, and then again it might not. The same car that had followed him since Ohio. Since the sun went down. Following Harvey Lee, who is doing exactly the speed limit on a summer nighted highway, with not a smokey bear in sight.

Right. Right right right right right…

Harvey Lee slowed down to ten below the limit. Wait a beat. Look. The other car wasn't going to pass. It was in the same spot, fifty yards back.

Following. Waiting.

Harvey Lee didn't read the papers or watch the news, but that morning he had overheard some guy at a McDonald's talking about the most recent round of car-jackings. What they did was, one bunch got behind you and called their buddies in another car up the road. When the time was right, the guys up ahead pulled out in front of you and the guys behind boxed you in. Then it was all over.

The Olds lurched forward under Harvey Lee's right boot, passed the legal limit and left it behind in a thunderhead of blue exhaust. Harvey Lee gritted bad teeth against the fear. He is running like the rabbit runs, knowing it is dead, but running nonetheless.

He looked back. The other car was fading into the distance. Going... going... He looked ahead, but saw no other traffic, and the treat in the trunk wasn't making any noise, either. Good. Harvey Lee's heart had almost stopped when his latest crush saw the meat. He remembered getting it, vaguely, but sometimes things had a way of bunching up in his mind, like clothes in a dryer, tumbling. He didn't think that he had opened the trunk since getting it, so maybe it had just died in there. It had been dead awhile, anyway.

He would explain to the QuikMart boy that the meat didn't matter. It wasn't as if he'd been caught with a live boy in his closet, after all. The meat was probably too far gone to be salvageable, anyway, which was a shame - especially since Harvey Lee could remember so little about it. It had had pretty hair - flaxen hair, like his own had been when he was a boy.

Back when mama was around. Mama and her boyfriends.

He had watched them, sometimes, through the crack beside his door. It always made him want to do the pee-pee thing, so he did until his mama heard him and came and smacked him, calling him dirty little animal and pulling his hair and sometimes hitting his pee-pee with her hair brush to teach him better, only it never seemed to work because a few days later there'd be another boyfriend and another bottle and more noises through the door.

A wave of cold slapped through Harvey Lee, a sharp reminder that he still had the squirts and needed to find someplace to shit now. He couldn't stop at the gas station next to the QuikMart - someone there might have seen what happened - and he was fearful of taking an exit to a Mickey D's for fear the trunk wouldn't stay quiet.

A green sign loomed, and Harvey Lee nodded, because when your luck was in, it was in, mama, and sure as shit your luck was in when you had to shit and a Rest Area 3 Miles sign showed up.

He almost missed the turn-off, because all of the lights were off. That was also why the Olds hit the chain before Harvey Lee saw it. The impact slammed his chest against the steering column and smacked his head on the windshield.

"Fuck me!"

The Olds immediately died, rolling into the parking lot on inertia alone. When that was gone, it coasted to a stop.

Harvey Lee rubbed his head and chest. They burned with the force of impact. When the hell did they chain a rest area closed? He barely had time to think it before he had to clench his butt-cheeks shut. Even so, he let what he immediately knew was a wet brown fart, and popped the door before he could have another, running with his legs as tight together as he could manage without tripping.

There was one other vehicle in the dark parking lot, a pickup truck with some a county emblem on the door. Although the big streetlights in the lot were turned off, lights shown reassuringly in the bathroom windows. The reek of fishflies was everywhere; they popped like popcorn under his Curly-shuffling feet.

Harvey Lee made for the restroom door, doing the tight, short step known to all sufferers of the trots, and got his first wave of chills. Diarrhea was one thing - nothing to wish for, but still no big deal. But when you got the chills, too, you knew it was going to be B-A-D. It was all he could do to tighten up in time, stopped dead in his tracks, a horrible grimace on his face.

Oh, God, Harvey Lee prayed, sweat standing out on his brow even as ice water ran down his back. Please, God, just let me get to a toilet – please oh please…

Hm, his brain ticked, trying very hard not to think about anything else and failing. That’s weird. I haven’t seen anyone since I got here. There's a county truck, there's a chain across the drive, and the lights are off. What the hell’s going on?

When the next wave hit him, a low, low cramp with teeth, the thought fled. Getting on a toilet seat NOW was all that mattered. Anything else could wait until mission-starting-to-feel-like-it-might-be-impossible had been accomplished, forever and ever, amen.

The mayflies were godawful around the low building, attracted in vast, fluttering rains by the yellow sodium lights hung under its low, sloping roof. There were literally drifts of them piled against the doors, sex-obsessed snow, and every step was like setting off ten or fifteen small firecrackers. The worst thing, though, was the smell – mayflies stank like nothing else in the world.

The door opened easily. Harvey Lee quick-peeked around the corner. The tiled room appeared empty. He looked again and sure enough, it was, so he said one more silent prayer and bent down just a bit, to look under the stalls.

A pair of hiking boots occupied the farthest stall. Beside them, leaning against the wall, a faded green backpack.

Harvey Lee paused, thinking. This didn't come easy for him. He had to go, he really had to go, but someone was in there - with a chain across the drive and the parking lot lights off. Maybe this guy was some kind of druggie county worker, on the nod or hopped up on some kind of drug. Who knew?

His backside made the decision for him. He reached around and took out the snub-nosed .38 he kept tucked into the back of his pants, and whistled loudly as he side-stepped to the closest stall. He thought there might be someone standing on the seat to fool him, but it was empty. He listened carefully as he quickly dropped his drawers and sank onto the clammy seat, the .38 pointed in the direction of the occupied stall.

"Ahh..." he groaned, finally letting go, the discharge like a firehose. What the hell had he eaten, anyway? That big, black bitch at Nacho Mama’s must have put something nasty in his burrito. He didn't like the way that she looked at him, like she knew every thought in his head. Maybe tomorrow night he would go back, catch her on the way to her car and suck her accusing eyes right out of her head.

…Oh God here comes another...

He grunted with the ferocity of it. It was as if everything he ate in his entire life was reduced to swamp water, set on fire, and shot out his ass. Wave after wave, it clenched his belly and screwed his eyes shut.

How can there be so much? Harvey Lee had butchered a whole family, once, that he found camping, and even that good work hadn't been as wet as this. He braced his arms against the walls of the stall, pushed against them, lest the torrent carry him away.

In the stall next to him, maggots were busy doing what maggots do.

Six feet below:

Above it, the light disappeared, indicating the presence of food. Instinctively, it extended its sides to feel the wet piping around it, sensitive to every vibration, as if the ground was a drum. The volume and character of the thuds from above indicated that the prey was alone, and similar in size to its last two meals.

It filled its preyhooks with tenderizer. Blind but for the ability to detect light or dark - the organ that it 'saw' with and was now retracting from the bottom of the toilet’s bowl could barely be classified as an eye - it rose up through the pipes, compressing its boneless body to fit the smaller diameter. It snaked its mouthparts up into the bowl, where they opened like the petals of a flower. It hesitated only long enough to be sure that it had not been detected.

"Ow!" squealed Harvey Lee. How bad could one night get? He was keeping a juicy piece waiting, he had the trots, and now a goddamned bee had up and stung him on the ass.

"There's a goddamned bee in here," he said loudly, for the benefit of his neighbor, in case he was wondering why Harvey Lee had squealed like a little girl. "Bastard stung me right on the ass."

He shifted a bit on the seat, but his legs had gone to sleep. They felt as heavy as lead pipes. He lifted a foot to stomp the pins and needles out, but a sense of pressure made him look down. He was rewarded with the sight of his foot turning in a slow, impossible arc, until it was facing the opposite direction as his knee, pointed at the toilet bowl.

Somehow he had managed to break his ankle, too. How in the fuck had he managed to do that? He hadn't tripped or anything on the way in. It didn't hurt at all. Prob'ly I'm in shock or something, he thought. This can't be right - this has to be some weird kind of muscle thing. His legs had fallen asleep, and the muscles had gone all soft, somehow.

Then his right shoe fell off, and he saw what was going on with his feet. That was when he tried to stand up.

"Shit!"

Something yanked him violently down, banging his elbows against the walls of the stall, the strength of it overwhelming. Some animal part of Harvey Lee's brain, older than words, howled in terror.

He braced himself, breath ragged, hanging on for dear life. Something was trying to pull him down into the toilet bowl. He didn't know or care what it was. All he cared about was that his legs weren't working, weren't right, and if there was one place he didn't want to go, it was into that toilet.

"Help!" he cried, as his sweaty palms fought for purchase. The pull became unbearable - fighting it was like trying to lift a panel truck. Harvey Lee was strong - given his often combative love life, he had to be - but this was strength of an entirely different order. The metal box under his left arm that held the toilet paper popped off the wall of the stall, screws sheared off. He scrabbled for a handhold on the smooth metal stall. Whatever it was instantly took up the slack - his ass was most of the way into the bowl, now.

As he gritted his teeth and pushed against the bowl, Harvey Lee saw his knees soften like melting butter, their bony points become rounded and flat. His legs were no more than bags of meat, like big sausages. He didn't understand it, but he could see his thighs had become a sickly yellow-red, as if the skin was becoming translucent.

Looks like soup, he thought. Tomato soup with milk poured in it to cool it down.

It was getting hard to breathe, as if he had a sudden cold. My insides, he thought. They're melting, too. Probably faster, since they’re softer than my legs.

If he didn't do something right now - something smart - he was going into the bowl for sure.

Will I stop there? Soft as I'm getting, maybe I'll just keep on going. Into whatever comes next.

The thought terrified him more than anything had up until that moment. He scrabbled to get hold of the bottom edge of the stall wall, biting his lip until it popped like an overripe strawberry and he tasted blood. He couldn't feel it - he was numb, and the room was starting to look foggy, too…

What happened to eyes when they melted? Did they pop, too, or just slip backwards into your head?

…and he pulled with everything that was left in his arms, pulling himself down, and he felt it slipping as the meat of his ass tore away, dripping soup, and he pulled again, crying, as he got a good grip and then really pulled, pulled for his life, an inch closer to the floor, an inch further from death.

Yards away, under the wet ground of the old septic field, it felt the food escaping. It wasn't a matter of strength - its kind had taken brachiosaurs, once - but of having hold of the wrong end. It was designed to attack animals that came to drink, its preyhooks and mouth parts gently wrapping around chins and throats as they dipped into muddy water. This had the advantage of letting the tenderizer go to work on the brain right away, turning it into cottage cheese, so that the food didn't fight or try to get away before it could be ingested. The food's heart did the rest, pumping the tenderizer into the rest of the body until it, too, was mush, at which point the food could be turned and the preyhooks used here and there to soften what was left.

Although boneless, its mouth parts and the long whip that attached them to the rest of it had limits to their elasticity. The food's movement was stretching them, and its preyhooks were at an uncomfortable angle, too. Like most predators, it was only successful about once in every five hunting attempts. Although it was very hungry, the risk of damage was not worth the meal.

It let the food go.

The release was so sudden that Harvey Lee banged his head on the wall before falling to the floor. He spat fishflies away from his mouth, gasping wetly, using his arms to pull his legs and jeans away from the bowl. He couldn't move his legs at all; they had turned an angry blue-black in splotches. The rest was a sickly yellow, like a banana left too long in the sun. His skin seemed to be stretching - it felt doughy. He pulled himself a little farther into the next stall, watching the bowl he had just escaped.

That was how he saw the black flower that rose out of it, smelling of used burrito. It rose a good foot above the bowl, on a glistening, snaky stalk, then bloomed. Inside, it was a bright pink, with small, fleshy tentacles and hooked barbs spread around the edges. Instinctively, he pushed himself away from it.

It went straight for his face.

It had nothing that could be called an eye. It had evolved before anything had eyes, and there had been nothing to see but pond scum and mud, in any case. It did well enough just by feeling where food moved, at the edge of the water. It shared the truth of alligators and crocodiles - sooner or later, everything came to drink. Whatever was left after it fed (little more than skin and – much later - fur) drew more food.

On and on, meal after meal, for millions of years.

It did have, immediately above and behind its mouth, an organ that could tell dark from light. A shadow meant that there was food within striking distance. Light meant there was no food or it was too far away to reach. The organ was too rudimentary even to discern movement.

It could feel the food above it move, though. The concrete floor of the bathroom was like a drum. But the bathroom itself was confusing – too much light, too many shadows. This food, though, presented a dark shadow against the institutional grey door - the contrast was high.

Harvey Lee became a bull’s eye.

When it struck at his face, Harvey Lee thought for sure he was dead. He couldn't see well - everything was blurry, with white snow he guessed must be mayflies - but his evolved eyes caught the movement and the color and he squealed like a ten-year-old girl as he felt the droplets of shit hit his face.

It didn't touch him, though. It was too short! He could almost hear the twang as it reached its limit and snapped back like a bullwhip. Instead, it whipped around the edge of the bowl closest to him, like an octopus arm, slapping wetly against the side and trying to snag anything it could.

Harvey Lee didn't wait to see if it could reach any further. He crawled under the door of the next stall and across the floor, his legs dragging, useless. His bare ass shone like a yellow moon under the fluorescents, and mayflies settled on it as he pushed his way through them. The place where it had grabbed him was a round, oozing hole about three inches across, expanding rapidly as he strained across the floor and the tenderizer worked on him. His face felt funny, and his tongue was swollen like a softball. His breath bubbled thickly in his chest.

By the time he got to the outside door, he was exhausted. He couldn't raise himself up high enough to reach the handle, so he tried hooking his fingers under the door. His fingernails slid off, leaving red meat behind, but he didn't care. All that mattered was getting out.

After a few moments of attempting to recapture the food, floor vibrations told it that the food was no longer within reach. Its hunger was profound - since tunneling into the septic field two weeks ago, leaving a network of slime-walled tubes all around the building, it had only fed once. It needed to bank its remaining energy for more likely food. It pulled its mouth parts back down the pipe, drawing them in while simultaneously extending its side vents to better sense other food.

Food drew more food. That was what happened. Something died, other things came to eat it, they died, drew more food. Once established near water, life became a buffet. It would gorge its way through summer, tunnel deep at the end of autumn, and sleep far below the snow, huddled in a brown/black ball, protected by a coating of its own waste. When the ground thawed, it would rise through the soil, thin as a garter snake and ravenous.

It felt Harvey Lee's movement across the floor from moment to moment - identifying him over and over again as a food object, then that he was out of reach, which required no action. Like most other predators, it spent most of its time in this simple, lethargic state, saving energy until using it presented the best possibility for attaining food.

Food! Far. Wait. Food! Far. Wait...

Harvey Lee continued to move away, slowly, his thumps and drags resounding on the concrete walk, now. They were becoming softer, just like Harvey Lee. Softer, weaker, wetter.

It stopped moving, except for the slow expansion and contraction of its respiration pores. When nothing further happened, its metabolism automatically slowed. It felt the distant rumble of trucks and cars out on the highway, but they moved too quickly to register as food.

Then it felt movement near the edge of its sensory range, out in the parking lot. The vibrations were heavy and frantic, food in trouble, food on the run.

Excited, it slipped down out of the pipes and into the black maze of its slime-coated tunnels.

Harvey Lee was having trouble. That was how he thought of it, deep inside his cottage cheesifying brain:

I'm having some trouble, Ma.

He pulled himself along with elbows and hands, the tips of his fingers starting to burst like overripe grapes. He couldn't raise himself much off the cement - he couldn't trust his arms - but it hurt his chest to lie too flat, hurt bad. The fishflies covered him, but he didn't mind. In fact, he couldn't even see them, anymore, except as vaguely winged blurs. His mind called them fairies - not the bad kind, that did bad things to you, but the kind he'd believed in when he was small.

He laughed a little as he crawled, the laugh ending in a deep, wet cough and a bubble of blood that popped in his eye. It stung a bit, but Harvey Lee didn't mind that, either. He had a goal in mind, a goal the faeries were escorting him to, because he couldn't quite see it in all this snow. If he could just make it back to the Olds, he could get away from this scary place, away from whatever had tried to get him. If he could just get into the Olds, he would be safe. Everything would be okay then.

Grab some concrete. Pull. Slide. Faeries everywhere. He couldn't smell them - his nose was stuffy. He blew through his nostrils, trying to clear the greenies out. A sledgehammer hit him in the back of the head, and everything swam for a minute. He laid his cheek on the sidewalk, wondering why it was painted red. Then he remembered he had a date waiting in the car.

What had the boy looked like? As frequently happened, Harvey Lee already thought of him in the past tense. Had he been a towhead? A red boy? He remembered an Irish boy he'd had once, the quivering white thighs. He couldn't remember what he'd done after. Had he eaten him? Sometimes he kept fingers, to help him remember what it had been like, but eventually they dried up and turned the same dark, greasy color as spoiled bananas. Then he had to go find a new one, and try to make it better than the time before. More interesting, so he could remember.

He couldn't remember what the boy looked like.

Well, that was easily solved. He would just open the trunk and take a look. He wasn't quite up to lovemaking at the moment - this damned cold and the shits had certainly laid him low - but he might be persuaded. Yeah, he might.

The thought pushed him along, and he half-fell off the curb into the parking lot, landing heavily and clipping his two front teeth a good one. They popped loose easily, and he swallowed them before he was even aware what had happened. It was that damned bitch Tumblina's fault. She had looked at him in a bad way and done something bad to his burrito, maybe squatted over it like the fat black cunt she was. Maybe she squatted over all the meat before it was cooked. There was just something about her, like she could crawl inside your head and poke around in there.

His forehead bumped something. It was a ... what was it? A tire. That seemed important, somehow. Why had he wanted a tire? He lay down on the warm asphalt to think about it, the faeries dancing across his fluttering eyelids. He felt hot all over - prickly heat, his mama called it. Then he remembered he had a boy in the trunk. A boy was just what he wanted right now. He could show him the faeries. They were so pretty. They whispered to him to come dance with them. Dance under the streetlights.

"Need a danshin' pardner," he mumbled, his swollen tongue gliding over the puckered spot where his front teeth had been. "Jush a sheck."

Harvey Lee held up one finger to show the faeries how long a sec was. It was as swollen as a Ballpark frank, plump when you cook'em.

He waved the faeries away from his face so he could see if he was near the front or the back of the Olds. The blue license plate swam into view. The back, then. That was lucky - as sick as he felt, he had almost crawled right past it. He reached back for his keys, then remembered that his pants were still around his ankles. Oh well - there was no one to see but the faeries, and they didn't mind.

He couldn't make his legs move, so he curled up as best he could in order to reach his pocket. It didn't occur to him that he shouldn't be able to bend backward so far - what drew his attention was that he was somehow seeing his own ass. It looked huge and angry, and jiggled like jell-o when he moved. His pants were sticky with blood. It seemed to be coming from underneath him. Well, there would be time to figure that out later. Right now, he was having enough trouble trying to make his cucumber fingers fit into his pants pocket, thank you very much.

Ah - success.

It took him a moment to find the right key in the crowd. He didn't remember what most of them were for - like the fingers, many were trophies with only vague memories attached. Some were clearer, like his key to the Dawn Treader garbage truck. They had a funny little church up north, where lonely old ladies went in and only their heavily perfumed dresses came out. Funny that he should remember that, when everything else was so foggy.

He looked up at the Olds, then at his keys. What had he wanted them for again?

A loud thump came from the trunk, startling him. Then there was a muffled scream. It sounded far away. He lifted the key to the trunk. It was hard - his arm didn't want to move right, and it felt as heavy as a tree. The key pinged off the lock, then again, scratching the paint. He couldn't seem to make his hand do what he wanted, either, even with the faeries' help.

A racking cough made him drop the keys. They landed on his right eye, which popped softly. The mush inside was mostly grey. Harvey Lee blinked. He didn't feel any pain, but half the world had suddenly gone away, and he was curious where it had gotten to. He felt around for the keys, managed to raise them above his head again. By now, most of him was natural casing sausage, but he was stubborn - his ma had always said so, and damned if he was going to let a little cold keep him from opening his own goddamned trunk.

He finally managed to get the key in the keyhole, but turning it was difficult - the bones in his fingers kept moving around, the muscles too soft to confine them any more. He seemed to be sinking, but in reality it was more a matter of spreading out, like a pat of melting butter. It took six attempts to make the key turn. All the while, the trunk was silent, and Harvey Lee forgot that he had heard anything. This wasn't entirely his fault. By now, some of his brain was sloshing out his nose. The rest was sitting in a clot at the base of his skull, looking for a way out.

The key turned, the lock popped, and the trunk opened like Dracula's coffin. A face, looking down at him. Harvey Lee smiled, or tried to. His face wouldn't cooperate - it was trying to slide off his chin.

"Hi," he gasped, always pleased to meet someone new.