Inferno Park (28 page)

He hugged it against him, which smeared red fluid all over it.

Carrying his prize deer, Heath walked up the midway and into Fools’ Gold. The place really was a ghost town now—several of the buildings had burned to the ground, others had collapsed, and the only light came from the tracks of the Starland Express high above, though the actual depot where riders boarded the roller coaster remained dark.

“Derek?” Heath called into the shadowy wreckage. “Finn? You guys here?”

The only answer was a rusty squeak, and then another, and another, as if some big metal wheel were turning around and around.

Heath followed the sound, calling Derek’s name again.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw the source of the squeaking. The When Pigs Fly ride turned very slowly, even for a kiddie ride. The four grimy pigs crept along through the air, their teeth bared in ugly, muddy grins.

Beyond this, a spot of dim red light, like raw fire, glowed somewhere in the distance.

“Derek?” Heath called again. He started toward the red light.

It burned somewhere deep inside a wooden shed of a restaurant called Pork Belly’s BBQ. He could barely read the wooden sign over the door, which had faded and was partially overgrown with the thick, thorny green vines that half-buried the building.

Heath stepped up onto the creaking porch and peered inside. It was dark, except for that one red spot at the back. He could smell charred meat and smoke, and he thought he could hear the hiss of sizzling fat.

“Derek?” he asked, but he couldn’t manage more than a whisper. The dark interior of the restaurant seemed to require silence.

Heath tiptoed inside, shining his phone around. The floor was sticky and strewn with broken chairs and table legs, so he had to move cautiously.

A serving counter ran along his left side. The entire counter had shifted askew, probably when the sinkhole opened, and now lay as a kind of shattered barrier under the big open window to the kitchen. Heath couldn’t see much through that window.

That’s not where the real action happened, anyway
, he thought.
That’s just where they made the cornbread and cole slaw.

The sales counter with the battered cash register sat near the back. Behind it was an open door, from which emanated the fiery red light and the sound of sizzling fat.

Heath made his way around the wreckage of the counter and nudged open the door.

It led into a partially outdoor area under a slanted corrugated-metal roof. The ground was covered with gravel.

Directly ahead of him, in the weedy area behind the restaurant, sat an enormous black barbecue smoker, the kind so large it had its own tires and trailer hitch. One of its two coffin-sized front doors was open, and pyre of red coals burned inside. It was so hot that he already felt scorched from several feet away. A blistering-hot breeze poured out of the open door, strong enough to nudge Heath’s hair back.

The odor of cooking meat and the buzzing of flies filled the air around him.

Unidentifiable lumps and remnants sizzled on the grill he could see, the one behind the open door. Louder sizzling and popping sounded behind the closed door.

He stepped closer to the second door. It was a horizontal hatch that rolled upward, big enough to justify having two handles for lifting and lowering it. Heath set his green prize deer on the seat of a rocking chair with a broken leg.

He gripped a sticky wooden handle in each hand. The hot black surface of the smoker was less than an inch away, close enough to scorch his fingers red.

He pulled, but the door barely budged. It felt like hundreds of pounds of solid iron.

He grimaced and lunged with all his strength. The door let out an ear-splitting squeal as he heaved it up, and a cloud of smoke billowed out around him, rich with the flavor of roasted meat. Though Heath had just pigged out on the midway not long ago, the savory odor made his mouth water. There was nothing like fresh meat.

As the initial blast of smoke cleared, he looked over the butchered animal on the grill, its skin crispy, grease dripping from its pores.

He tried to tell himself it was a large pig, its limbs severed and arrayed around it, and did his best to try and see it that way, but he knew that wasn’t the case. The limbs were much too big, more like a cow, but the body was too small for that.

He finally let himself look up from the grill, at the rack above. He’d glimpsed it before, but looked down and tried not to see it.

Finn’s head sat on the smoker, his red hair blackened, his glazed eyes open and appearing to look right at Heath. The limbs and torso on the grill below were his.

Heath felt sick for a moment, as if he were going to throw up, but it passed. He stared in a kind of wonder at what had been done, that a person had actually done this to another person. Had Derek killed him? Derek seemed a more likely candidate than Jared or the girls. Or maybe there was some crazy serial killer living in the park, luring people in just to murder them and eat them.

It was a powerful thing, Heath thought. Killing a big buck wasn’t just a matter of putting the head and antlers on your wall, after all. It was a matter of
eating
that big, powerful creature, taking its life into your body.

Heath had figured that out over time, in the months after his father left while he lay in bed at night, kept awake by his younger brother beside him in the bed, who wouldn’t stop coughing. The kid had always been sick, and one day, when Heath was eleven, he’d awoken to find his brother stiff and cold in the bed beside him, his eyes open as if he’d he died while watching Heath sleep.

Finn was not sickly—he was more athletic than Heath, more confident, and he got girls to sleep with him. Given the circumstances, Finn was probably the best choice, if the killer wanted to eat someone with strength and power. Heath could appreciate that. If he had to eat somebody out of their group, he would have chosen Finn or Jared, the ones who seemed to exude the most power. The girls were probably tastier but had less strength to offer.

He licked his lips.

With one shaking hand, Heath reached out and tore a strip of roasted meat from Finn’s bicep.
The drumstick
, he thought.

Heath looked Finn in the eyes while he placed the juicy morsel onto his tongue and chewed.

It wasn’t bad, taste-wise—somewhere between chicken and pork, expertly seasoned and smoked. Heath wasn’t interested in the flavor, though.

“I’m taking your power,” Heath whispered to Finn. “I want it, and you don’t need it anymore.”

He peeled away another juicy strip and ate it.

The buzzing of flies grew louder, and he heard the sound of metal scraping on metal. Heath could feel someone watching him before he even turned his head to look.

The sounds of the flies had been constant, so the man must have been somewhere in the gravel lot behind the restaurant the entire time, possibly hiding behind the big, heavily stained dumpster.

He wore grease-stained boots and jeans, with an apron from his waist to his knees that had once been white but was now stiff with thick, crusty black stains. He wore a yellowed tank top stretched over his enormous gut, the shirt so filthy Heath could barely see the faint PORK BELLY’S BBQ logo underneath the spattered black stains.

The man’s arms were meaty and hairy. He held a long, rusty roasting fork in one hand and a black-encrusted butcher knife in the other, and he scraped them back and forth while he stared at Heath.

Dried blood and entrails encrusted the man’s pudgy face, obscuring his features. Heath could make out pale, colorless eyes glaring out from sunken sockets. The man’s long mullet haircut was clumped together with more filth. Flies swarmed in the air around him, crawling in his ears, nostrils, and open mouth.

Heath found the big man so horrific that he froze where he was, unable to move or think. He just gaped.

The man raised the rusty fork and pointed it at Heath’s right hand, where a shred of Finn-meat still clung to his greasy fingers.

“Thief,” the man grunted. “
Thief.
Stealing from Pork Belly!”

Heath looked at his hand, still damp with hot grease, then back up to the man.

“I...” Heath began, then he realized he had nothing to say and turned and ran back into the restaurant.

He ran as fast he could through the dark space, hearing his own breath puff in his ears. He kept his eyes on the cloudy, grimy light coming from the cracks in the front door. He wasn’t looking when he banged his shin against a broken table. He toppled and crashed face-first into the dark, sticky floor.

Heath struggled to regain his feet while his leg throbbed. The man approached him over the rubble, the broken wooden furniture cracking and crunching under his heavy boots. He was only a few steps away.

Heath limped as fast as he could toward the front door, but when he got there, it was closed and locked tight, with grimy light seeping in through the window in its upper half. He slapped the thick glass, then grabbed a broken table leg from the floor.

He’d meant to use it to smash the window, but Pork Belly caught up to him, still wielding the big roasting fork in one hand.

Heath swung the table leg like a baseball bat. It slammed into the man’s face with a loud
crack
. He pulled it back and swung again and again, as if still playing the Whack-A-Frog game. Pork Belly grunted and fell to his knees. Heath hit him again, and he toppled over.

“There,” Heath said, catching his breath. He turned and struck the window. It didn’t shatter, but a jagged diagonal crack appeared. He hit it again, spawning a few more cracks.

He drew back the table leg a third time, ready to put all his strength into breaking the window, but it was snatched from his hands.

Before he could turn around to look, a pair of sharp blades stabbed him in the upper right corner of his back, just below the shoulder. The impact drove his whole body forward, smacking his face against the cracked window.

He could smell the man behind him, reeking of smoke and rotten meat. Flies crawled on Heath’s ear and scalp.

Pork Belly drove his roasting fork deep into the meat below Heath’s shoulder, and Heath screamed in agony.

Using the fork, Pork Belly turned Heath around to face the glowing red light again.

“Walk,” Pork Belly commanded. Heath hesitated, and the man twisted the fork, creating an intense new explosion of pain.

Heath screamed, and he started walking. The man drove him forward, heedless of how Heath kept tripping and stumbling on the barely-visible broken furniture littering the floor.

He prodded Heath all the way back to open door of the smoker, while Heath wept in pain and confusion.

“I’m sorry,” Heath blubbered through his tears. “I’m sorry, just please just let me go, I won’t do it again—”

The man released the fork, leaving it buried deep in Heath’s back, and instead grabbed Heath’s right wrist with his thick, hairy hand.

He stretched Heath’s right arm toward the open smoker door, toward the grill over the red-hot fire.

“No!” Heath screamed, doing his best to pull back, but the man was much stronger than he was, and Heath’s right arm felt unusually weak.

“Meat for meat,” the man grunted.

He jerked Heath forward, then pressed Heath’s right arm down onto the grill.

Heath howled in pain, but couldn’t break away. The man held Heath’s wrist in his place with a bare hand, heedless of how the heat scorched the hair from his own knuckles and blackened his own fingers.

Pork Belly drew the carving knife from his belt and lay the blade in the crook of Heath’s elbow.

“No!” Heath begged. “No, please, don’t—”

Moving with a butcher’s expertise, the man sliced through Health’s elbow joint and cut off the lower half of his right arm, leaving it sizzling on the grill.

Heath cried out again as he fell, the pain almost knocking him unconscious, but not quite. He toppled over the old rocking chair. The stuffed reindeer tumbled into his remaining arm, and Heath hugged it close, weeping, too weak to stand up.

Pork Belly used tongs to flip Heath’s arm on the grill, and Heath shivered with horror when he saw the grill lines burned into his fingers and wrist.

“Stop,” Heath whispered. It was all he could manage to say. “Stop, please, stop...”

Pork Belly ignored his pleas. Heath made one last effort to stand, though he could feel himself blacking out from pain and blood loss.

This got the man’s attention. He put his tools aside and lifted Heath in his bare hands, hoisting him up as if he were as light as a bag of flour. He looked up at Heath, and his eyes were as colorless as a dead man’s.

“You don’t steal from Pork Belly,” the man grunted.

Then he pitched Heath into the smoker, right onto the grill, and slammed and latched the heavy door behind him.

The pain was excruciating, and death came as a relief.

Chapter Eighteen

Derek yelled for Finn to come back down, but Finn ignored him. Derek watched the three Old West hooker girls draw Finn back through the pink curtain into their brothel. The sign said “Heart of Gold Hotel,” but the place obviously offered a little more hospitality than the Holiday Inn.

“Finn!” he yelled again, but it was useless. Finn was an unrepentant horndog, and he wasn’t going to turn down sex to listen to Derek. The red-haired idiot had already forked over a handful of gold coins to the women.

As they led Finn through the curtain, one of the hooker girls looked back over her shoulder and winked at Derek, as if to say
You’re next
.

No, thank you, baby
, Derek thought.

When they were out of sight, Derek waited impatiently, wondering how much gold the girls would steal from Finn’s pockets while his pants were off. His buzz from several cups of free beer was wearing off, leaving him with a headache. He felt cranky and impatient. He wanted more beer, and he wanted to get the hell out of the park before the rest of their group learned about the gold and demanded a share of it.
Greedy bastards
, Derek thought.