Wormfood (26 page)

Junior slowly pulled his hands out of Misty’s front pockets and slid his palms up her stomach, inch by inch, until he was cupping her breasts. Misty’s expression never changed. Junior stuck his tongue in her ear and wriggled it around like a fat worm. I vowed to cut
his
goddamn tongue out if I ever got the chance.

“You want me, don’t you? You want this, don’t you? Don’t you?” Pearl opened her mouth wide, flicking her pink tongue up and against his dick. “Tell me. Tell me where it is and I’ll suck you off until you explode.” Then she took Fat Ernst in her mouth and suddenly I found I could close my eyes.

The slurping sounds didn’t help.

“Tell me where it is!” I heard Pearl say, panting a little.

No answer.

More slurping.

After a couple more long seconds, I heard “Tell me!” again. “Tell me where the buckle is and I’ll finish you off, big boy.” Pearl paused for emphasis. “And I’ll
swallow
.”

I’ll admit it, I peeked. Pearl was on her knees, staring up at Fat Ernst, right hand wrapped around his dick, giving him that lopsided smile.

“Fuck you, you ugly old bitch,” Fat Ernst said, spitting little flecks of blood into the air as he spoke. “I don’t care what the fuck you do, you ain’t getting jack shit outta me.”

Pearl froze.

Just for a second. Then she nodded. But the lopsided grin never left. She opened her mouth wide, and I suddenly feared that she was just gonna bite Fat Ernst’s dick right off. Instead, she said in a low voice, “Junior, get your ass over here.”

Junior stopped kneading Misty’s breasts. “But, Ma …” he whined. “I was just getting started.”

“You mind your mother,” Pearl snapped. “Less you want to sleep with the hogs again. Besides,” she said, not taking her eyes off of Fat Ernst. “We get that buckle, and I’ll let you take her home.”

“You mean it?”

“Of course. You can keep her as long as you want. This flood here, nobody’ll know what happened to her. If you’re careful, she’ll last weeks, maybe even months, if you’re extra damn careful.”

Junior licked at Misty’s eye and whispered, “You stay right here now. I’ll be back right quick.” He pushed her down into the booth and left the end of the leash on the table.

Misty gave him a smile I hoped was fake.

“Drag that goddamn deputy back in here. Find out if we caught anything,” Pearl said and let go of Fat Ernst’s dick. She put her hand on his thigh for support and pushed herself to her feet. “You don’t know what you’re missing.” She didn’t zip his pants back up, and that made me nervous.

Junior and Bert yanked on Ray’s cowboy boots and slid the body back inside. Once Ray’s head cleared the doorframe, Bert dropped the leg and sank into a nearby chair. His face had gone nearly totally white, and he kept scratching at the skin around the top of the cast, where his arm joined his shoulder.

“You got your knife?” Pearl demanded, leaning on her cane, still standing between Fat Ernst’s knees.

Bert nodded feebly, working his fingers under the top of the cast.

“Junior. Cut his head off.”

That got Fat Ernst’s attention. His eyes snapped open, jerking up to Pearl’s face. She grinned back down at him. “You had your chance,” was all she said. The muscles in Fat Ernst’s arms tensed, and fresh droplets of blood started rolling down his wrists, the backs of his hands, collecting in small puddles on the floor.

Misty methodically twisted and rotated her wrists, still bound in the extension cord. I kept staring at her, but she wouldn’t look up.

Junior bent over, plucked the huge Rambo knife out of Bert’s boot, and sank to his knees by Ray’s head. Ray’s legs were pointing toward me, and I couldn’t see much. Junior cocked his head for a moment, studying Ray’s long, crooked neck, readjusted his grip on the knife, then brought it down like he was pounding on a stubborn nail. He sawed the knife back and forth for a moment, and a dark pool of blood began to grow under Ray’s shoulders.

After a couple of seconds of sawing, Ray’s head rolled lazily away from his body and came to a stop, resting on the left cheek and ear.

“Bring it on over here,” Pearl said, waving Junior over.

Junior drove the tip of Bert’s knife into the table. Bert looked like he wanted to focus on the quivering handle, but his eyes wouldn’t work right. Junior picked up Ray’s head by the thinning hair, holding it out as if Ray wanted to keep an eye on the floor, and carried it over to Fat Ernst’s chair.

Ray’s eyes were closed. His mouth was open, fat tongue hanging limply between his teeth. His eyes had nearly disappeared inside his orbits, as if they had been pushed aside, driven deeper into the skull. The huge Adam’s apple had been raggedly severed in half.

“Well, well, well. Let’s see what we caught here,” Pearl said, taking Ray’s head by the hair. She dangled it in front of Fat Ernst’s face for a moment. The fingers on her ruined left hand stretched out, forcing Ray’s jaws open even farther. The thumb and forefinger slithered inside, pushing the tongue out of the way. She yanked the head away from her chest with her right arm, and there, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of her ruined hand, was a worm. Maybe three inches long, slick with blood and slime, squirming and twisting between Pearl’s two fingers.

Pearl flung Ray’s head at me. I flinched and jerked out of the way as it hit the bar and bounced into my lap. I bucked, kicked it down the bar, yelling something, and looked frantically down at my T-shirt. No worms, thank God. Nothing had crawled out of his head.

Pearl held the worm up to Fat Ernst’s nose. “I think he likes you,”she said, and laughed, a high, whistling, joyless sound that seemed to be more of a wheeze than an actual laugh. The worm contracted, drawing its tail up to its head until it was nearly a complete circle. It slapped its flat tail back against Pearl’s thumb, sliding sluggishly, urgently around the liver-spotted, leathery skin. “Told you, you had your chance,” she said, and without any kind of warning she dropped the worm onto Fat Ernst’s naked dick.

Fat Ernst started screaming then, a soul-shredding sound that filled the restaurant, inarticulate strangled gasps and sobs between each shriek of pain. His body bucked and jerked against the barbed wire, taking the chair on a shuddering dance around the dining room. Pearl leaned on her cane and watched. Finally, he tipped over backward and crashed into the wooden floor. I heard something crack.

Oh God, please let that be the chair
, I thought.
If I can just distract Pearl and Bert long enough for Fat Ernst to get loose, then we might get out of this alive
. All Fat Ernst would have to do would be to roll over, crawl six or seven feet toward the jukebox and grab Ray’s Super Redhawk. I’d like to see the look on Pearl’s face
then
.

In the meantime, Bert clawed frantically at the skin around his shoulder. His motions were getting so frantic he was starting to draw blood.

Fat Ernst kept rolling and twitching, sliding the back of the chair around on the floor, his head whipping back and forth, and I got a blurred impression of his white face, mouth open in silent horror.

Hang in there
, I thought.
Just keep going. Don’t quit yet. I need you to snag that fucking revolver
. The black and white slivers of his eyes found mine and glared at me accusingly.

Pearl clomped around to Fat Ernst’s head and gazed down at him. “We could have had something,” she said, almost sadly, and gently placed the sharp tip of her cane in the hollow of Fat Ernst’s right eye. He stopped shaking and started making sounds then, just gurgling moans really, but it was enough to let Pearl know that he felt the pressure on his eye. She leaned forward, putting all her weight on the top of thecane. I saw the tip of the cane slide into Fat Ernst’s eye about an inch and hold for a moment. Fat Ernst flopped and jerked against the wires, but they held firm.

“Fuck … all of you … Ahhhhhhhhh—
shit
…” Fat Ernst gasped.

Pearl put more weight on the cane, and something popped. The cane suddenly sank another four or five inches into Fat Ernst’s head. His body jerked and he farted, a deep, ripping noise that filled the restaurant with the pungent aroma of ripe shit. The smell made even Pearl wince.

Fat Ernst twitched once, twice, and that was it.

Fat Ernst was dead and so were my escape plans.

Pearl yanked her cane out of his right eye, and forced it down deep into his left eye as well, just for the hell of it, I guess. She paused for a moment, working the cane back and forth, really scrambling Fat Ernst’s brains, back curved, leaning over Fat Ernst like some kind of thin buzzard hunched over a dead squirrel on the highway. She rested and took a moment to catch her breath. The cane in Fat Ernst’s eye socket stood up all by itself.

Pearl took another deep breath, let it out slowly, and jerked the cane out of Fat Ernst’s head. She slammed the cane on the floor, shaking off tiny spatters of blood and bits of meat and shouted, “All right then, boys. Boys! Bert! Get over here, stop screwing around. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Bert didn’t look up. “I … I can feel it moving … in my arm. It hurts …”

“Quit whining or I’ll give you something to whine about. Now,” Pearl leaned on her cane, swiveling her head around. “You boys peel this place open like an orange. This goddamn cocksucker hid that buckle in here somewheres. I can smell it.”

“What about him?” Junior pointed at me. Everything got tight and frozen inside, down deep under my stomach.

Pearl fixed her staring eye on me. She chuckled. “If Ernst wasn’t gonna tell us, what makes you think he’d tell this little pip-squeak?” She leaned over me, slamming the cane into the floor between my thighs, too damn close to my crotch. “Eh? You know where it is?”

I shook my head enthusiastically. “Fat Ernst never told me anything.” I was hoping that would be enough, and because I couldn’t help them, they’d have to let me go.

Pearl nodded, leaned back. “That’s what I thought. Junior, drag his hide out back, dump him in the water. Let them worms chew on him for a while.”

Blind terror scrabbled up my chest and filled my throat. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“Hey,” Misty said. “Stop picking on him. He’s just the fucking dishwasher. He wouldn’t know anything.”

Pearl whipped her head around and said, “Shut your hole, bitch. This don’t concern you none. You keep quiet or I’ll take care of you myself. And let me tell you, there’s far worse things that can happen to you than just letting my boys loose on you. Things worse than that pretty, empty little head can ever imagine.” She was quiet for a moment, waiting to see if Misty would say anything else.

Please, please, keep quiet
, I thought. I’d rather die than see her get hurt. Misty dropped her glare, clasping her hands together. I could see the knuckles grow white.

“Junior,” Pearl said sharply. “You do like I asked now.”

“You got it, Ma,” Junior said, digging around in his jeans for a moment. He pulled out Ray’s key ring, squatting down in front of me. “This’ll teach you not to go around shooting at our truck, you little bastard,” he said and unlocked the handcuff.

“Please,” I whispered, as Junior jerked me to my feet. “Please, wait, I—”

A guttural cry from the corner stopped Junior. The cry started low, then rose to a high-pitched, almost childlike scream. Bert was on his feet, back to the front window, broken arm raised high. His scream reached a fever pitch as he brought the cast down against the table. The dirty plaster cracked with a dull crunch. Bert jerked his right arm up, brought it down a second time. Plaster crumbled off. He smashed his arm down against the table again and again, clawed at the disintegrating plaster. Ragged chunks of the thick plaster were peeled away, revealing a swollen, bulbous upper arm, almost black from the congealed blood inside. Bert stopped to catch his breath and jerked his Rambo knife out of the table.

“You put that—,” Pearl started to say, but before another word made it past her lips, Bert brought the knife around in a tight arc across his chest and sank half of the thirteen-inch blade into his shoulder, just above the cracked top of the cast. It didn’t seem to bother him much, because he yanked it out and jabbed it in again. And again.

“Bert!” Pearl shouted. “You stop that this instant!”

Bert wasn’t listening. He stabbed himself a fourth time, sinking it awful damn deep this time, then worked that handle around, twisting it into the thin meat of his shoulder like he was digging for clams at the beach. Blood cascaded down the black skin and yellow cast. He kept at it like a man possessed.

We all watched, transfixed, nobody moving until finally Pearl snapped out of it and yelled to Junior, “Stop him! Now!”

Junior brought his left elbow up in a swift jab and smashed it into my nose. I fell back into the bar and sank to the floor, my butt landing painfully on the brass bar. Then there was some sort of scuffle between Bert and Junior, but the only thing I really remember clearly was that at some point Bert was on the floor, like me. He slowly pulled something long, flexible, and bloody from his wounded shoulder and held it triumphantly out for his mother and brother to see. He flicked his wrist, flinging the thing away from him, and Junior promptly ground it into the floor with his boot.

Several long seconds of heavy breathing. I heard Junior say, “Too goddamn much blood. He ain’t gonna make it.”

Quiet for a moment. Then Pearl, “Go get my bag.”

The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back on the bar, and Pearl was saying, “Now you hold still,” as she jabbed something cold into the crook of my right arm, at the soft part at the inside of my arm at the elbow. It was some kind of goddamn needle attached to a long stretch of surgical tubing.

The only thing my fogged brain could think of to say was, “Hey, hey, waitaminute … is that thing sterile?”

Pearl gave me her lopsided smile as the yellow tube grew red, starting at my arm and traveling down into Bert’s arm. He was down beneath me, lying on a table that had been shoved against the bar. He looked unconscious or dead. His shoulder was wrapped with the rags that Fat Ernst used to mop up spilled beer on the bar.