The Mountain Page 8

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong. I mean, there’s no doubting he can play the hell outa that guitar, but, I don’t know… seems like he’s wasting his time beating out those golden oldies, even if they are great old tunes.”

  “Classic tunes, but, yeah, you’re right. I’ve told him a thousand times: you’ve gotta move on, dude; get away from the southern fried stuff. But he won’t listen. We grew up on that shit. It’s in his blood, and he still thinks he can put a kickass southern rock band together and bust ‘em out of the pack.”

  “He should head for Nashville, see about becoming a studio musician or something.”

  “Heh, I told him that, says he can’t read music.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? Don’t you guys watch TV? Half the people up there can’t read music. Hell, most of ‘em can’t even read the newspaper.”

  Mark laughed and so did Thel. The car passed the drop off point and they glanced up the hillside.

  “You see them?” Mark asked.

  “Huh uh.”

  They traveled a little further, until Mark pulled onto a small, wooden bridge. Backing up and cutting the wheel, he slipped the car into Drive, and started back up the old dirt road, pulling up several yards short of where they had dropped Eddie and Brenda, where he killed the lights and the engine, and then turned to Thel. “He really likes your friend.”

  “Yeah, I could tell.”

  “And I like you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Sure I do,” Mark said, and then put an arm around her shoulders, and drew her close. She smiled up at him, and put a hand on his chest. The hand felt soft and smooth as it glided slowly across the fabric of his shirt, and then settled on his side. Her face rose to meet his. Her lips parted, and all hell broke loose as a multitude of dogs began to bark. Up the road a ways, a barn door banged open and several men rushed into the yard.

  “Holy shit!” Mark said, as Thel’s eyes grew wide.

  The men ran across the bridge and onto the road.

  Mark’s jaw dropped when he saw the shotgun. “This is not good,” he said, opening the door as the men ran up the hillside.

  “Are you crazy?” Thel whispered. “They’ve got guns!”

  “It’s okay,” he said, and then eased the door shut, hoping like hell those guys were too far away to hear the latch click into place. He was stealing up the roadside when a shotgun blast ripped through the night. Seconds later, muffled voices and laughter floated down the mountainside. Mark could see them standing in the tree line, Brenda and the four who had run out of the barn. Mark’s stomach fluttered when he realized that Eddie was nowhere to be seen, and the gut wrenching implication of what that gunshot meant nearly knocked him off his feet.

  It happened fast, and Mark saw everything. Beneath the faint wash of moonlight, somebody advanced on Brenda and ripped open her shirt; fire belched from the shotgun and the guy’s head exploded. Then it was Eddie, scrambling to his feet, he and Brenda running like hell as the shotgun roared again, through the bushes and on to God only knew where as two more blasts thundered in the night.

  * * *

  Charlie Rodgers could go forever, and Tina loved him for it. Actually, Tina loved a lot of things about Charlie: his smile and his sparkling brown eyes, Charlie’s trim and muscular physique and the way he held her when they made love, the way he was holding her now, how her breasts felt against his chest. Lots of things. She’d had a few lovers before, but none were like Charlie. He wasn’t just in it for himself. He cared about how she felt. And right now she felt wonderful, sliding up and down him, knees digging into the sleeping bag spread beneath them, the soft glow of the kerosene lamp casting their shadows upon the wall.

  She gazed down at the anguished look of someone trying to hold himself back, in spite of all her efforts to bring him to climax; tightened herself around him and he threw back his head and groaned; bit his neck and he clamped his hands tightly on her buttocks, guiding her up and down… up and down. A thin sheen of sweat covered her body, even though it was chilly inside the shack. Charlie’s skin looked golden beneath the soft glow of the lamp.

  Tina didn’t slow her rhythmic thrusting when something rustled outside; she couldn’t, not now, not this close to the end. “What was that?” she asked breathlessly as she rocked back and forth.

  Charlie’s eyes remained closed as he moaned out, “A dog… a dog or something.”

  Tina rose up, back straight, hands on Charlie’s stomach, and continued to ride him. A footstep thudding on the porch brought her to a standstill.

  “Don’t stop,” Charlie whispered as his eyes fluttered open.

  “Somebody’s out there.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  Then footsteps sounded in the dark hallway.

  And they both heard that.

  * * *

  “What happened?” Thel said, as Mark jumped in the car and fired up the engine.

  “Some guy just got his head blown off.”

  “What?”

  “What am I, speaking Chinese? Didn’t you hear that shit? One of the guys that ran up the hill got his fucking head pulped!”

  “Jesus Christ… what about Brenda and Eddie?”

  “The rest of those fuckers chased them up the mountain.” Mark closed his eyes, fingers massaging his temples as he tried thinking this through. Their long and tiring day had picked up considerably after meeting Brenda and Thel at Farley’s this afternoon, even with the run-in with Thel’s brother. Eddie bringing the crowd to their feet and the house down had been a total gas. Everything was working out just great—they’d even managed to get the girls alone. And now a bunch of bloodthirsty rednecks were chasing his best friend through the woods.

  And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  “We’ve got to get the cops.”

  Thel huffed out a derisive breath.

  “What?”

  “There’re only two cops in town, dude. One’s home in bed and the other’s probably in somebody else’s. Drive back to town to get the cops? Yeah, that’d be a good idea if a pack of lunatics weren’t chasing my best friend through the woods.”

  “What, you got a better idea?”

  “Pedal to metal and turn when I tell you.”

  * * *

  A young girl appeared in the doorway that led to the darkness beyond. She wore dirty jeans and soiled tennis shoes, an unbuttoned beige sweater over a cut-off white halter top that showed off her flat midriff. Her long, unkempt hair lay flat against her shoulders as she stepped further into the light.

  Tina gasped as recognition flooded her. “Cindy? My God, Cindy!” she said.

  “What the fuck?” Charlie said, twisting around and looking behind him.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” Cindy said, as a giant followed her into the room, a thick, full beard covering his face, a lump of flesh the consistency of a potato left to rot in the fields where his nose should’ve been, flattened to the side of his face as if someone had mashed it in place with a hobnail boot; one dull, bloodshot eye sitting lopsided halfway down his cheek, a full inch lower than the other. His dark, shaggy hair looked like it had never seen a comb. He had to stoop to get through the entryway, he was so big. A grimy pair of bib-overalls covered his chest, like he’d stepped out of some bizarre episode of Hee Haw gone terribly wrong. He stomped across the room and two more guys appeared in the doorway behind him.

  “It’s okay,” Cindy said, smiling.

  The giant approached and, Tina, who had scrambled off her boyfriend, snatched her clothes off the floor and held them in front of her, covering herself as best she could as he stopped in front of Charlie.

  “Don’t hurt anybody!” Cindy yelled as a booted foot smacked the side of Charlie’s head, sending him sprawling onto his back. He tried to get up and caught a blow to his gut for his troubles, Tina screaming while his air rushed out and another savage kick left him lying limp on the hardwood floor.

  The giant took a step to
ward her, smiling like he’d just discovered a bagful of hundred-dollar bills lying in the middle of the cabin.

  “Wh… what are you going—”

  “It’s okay,” Cindy said, as Tina stumbled backwards and lost her footing, still clutching the handful of clothes against her breasts while the huge mountain man came closer and closer, until he was standing directly over her, smiling and leering down at her pubic mound.

  “Please…”

  “It’s okay. You’ll like it up here,” Cindy said, still smiling, but now her smile looked different, forced, as if she wasn’t so sure about what she was saying, or maybe about what they were doing.

  “Stop it!” Tina cried out, kicking at the massive hands reaching down to touch her, shrieking when they grabbed a foot and dragged her back to the sleeping bag. She looked at Cindy, who stood with an arm around one of the intruders, while the last one joined Tina and the drooling redneck in the middle of the room.

  “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS!” she screamed, as Cindy shot a nervous look her way. Then the mountain man’s bib-overalls fell down around his ankles and she started shrieking like she was on fire. A rough pair of hands grabbed her, pinning her arms by her side. Something wet landed on her leg. She looked up to see slobber sliding off the lunatic’s lips while he rubbed his massive cock. Hot breath as rancid as spoiled meat washed over her as the guy holding her arms said, “Hurry up, Lewis!”

  The floor shook when Lewis fell to his knees, and wrenched her legs apart.

  Tina closed her eyes.

  It wasn’t real.

  It couldn’t be.

  It was a nightmare. She’d made love to Charlie, drifted off to a deep and blissful sleep, and found herself in a nightmare world with Cindy Jackson and a bizarre circus of inbred freaks.

  Then the giant rammed himself inside, and she knew it wasn’t a nightmare.

  It was much worse than that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They ran through the bushes and into the woods, angling their way up and to the left, briars and brambles snagging their clothes as moonlight guided them across the thick foliage populating Rickert’s Mountain. They could hear their pursuers scrambling down below, calling out Brenda’s name as they plowed through the overgrown brush. Every once in a while a pale disc of light would sweep across the mountain. Those guys wouldn’t stop now. Blood had been spilled, somebody had died, and if Brenda and Eddie didn’t keep going, they would be next. No way could they be allowed to tell what had occurred on the mountainside.

  “Brenda!” somebody shouted. “Hold up a minute! Let’s talk about this!”

  “Like hell,” Eddie whispered, and then cut to the right, leading her away from where the voice had emanated, toward a clearing twenty or thirty yards in the distance.

  The twigs snapping beneath their footsteps as they hauled ass down the trail sounded like cannon shots to Eddie—he was sure they’d been heard, but all he could do was forge ahead and hope for the best.

  “Oh, God, I’m gonna puke,” Brenda said, as they stumbled into the clearing, her shirt hanging open, bloody smears and bits of flesh clinging to her bra and her breasts, her stomach and her face. “I’ve got to stop for a minute.”

  Eddie looked around nervously, half expecting Butchie and his band of rednecks to come bursting through the bushes, or maybe up through the rows of cornstalks stretched out before them. Brenda, who didn’t seem to notice much of anything about their surroundings, dropped to her knees, huffing in deep gulps of air. She brushed a hand across her stomach and held it in front of her, staring wide-eyed at the blood and gory flecks of meat plastered to her shaking palm. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, my God!”

  Eddie took a knee beside her. “Here,” he said, “let’s get that off you.”

  He began to strip off his sweaty t-shirt but Brenda stopped him.

  “Just use mine,” she said. “It’s already messed up.”

  She struggled out of her red-and-white checkered top and handed the bloodstained garment to Eddie, who shook it out, and then, manipulating the top, pressed the back of it against Brenda’s stomach, Brenda looking skyward as the blood and what was left of Jerry Markham’s face smeared with the first swipe, and then started to disappear as he moved the cloth back and forth across her sweat-slicked skin. He stopped for a moment, holding the shirt in front of Brenda’s breasts, partially exposed by the bra dangling across them. Even with the bloody smears, they still looked pretty good to Eddie, tight and full, nipples standing erect against the cool breeze.

  Brenda looked down, a soft chuckle escaping her lips when she saw the look on his face: consternated, yet full of wide-eyed wonder. She lifted the bra. Looking upward again, she said, “Go ahead.”

  A tooth fell from one of the cups, momentarily clinging to her right breast before Eddie flicked it away and started scrubbing the shirt against her. The sight of it turned his stomach, and he was thankful she hadn’t seen it. Probably would’ve blown some chunks, then, Eddie thought, because he’d come close to blowing a few himself. When he’d finished, and Brenda had fitted the bra back into place, he said, “Who were those guys?”

  “Butchie Walker and his crew, bunch of drug smuggling moonshiners. He owns the trees you were sawing down.”

  “No wonder he was pissed.”

  Brenda stood up, wiping the shirt across her face. “We’re in trouble, Eddie. Big trouble. Those guys are tight. One of them is dead and they blame us… they’re not going to let us live.”

  Eddie sighed. “Over a goddamn Christmas tree,” he said.

  “Jesus,” Brenda said, as she shrugged into her shirt.

  Eddie got to his feet. Staring back at the tree line, he said, “Maybe we can talk to them, you know, reason with them. You and Thel know them, right?”

  Brenda shrugged, nodded her head.

  “It was an accident, that’s all. We’ll tell them Mark and Thel let us out and they know we’re up here. Just let us go, we won’t say anything about what happened. We’ll all go back to doing whatever the hell we do and act like nothing ever happened. You heard ‘em. They said they wanted to talk it over.” The last part Eddie added by way of convincing himself they could believe what had been shouted up the mountainside, even though no one in their right mind could’ve believed that.

  The smell of pine wafting through the breeze caught Eddie’s attention… pine, and, something else, something very familiar. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “No wonder they’re so pissed.”

  “What?”

  Eddie took a step further into the rows. “These aren’t cornstalks. Smell that shit. We’re standing in a field of high-grade marijuana. And those guys are gonna come straight to us. Even if they can’t find us, they’ll want to make sure their crop is okay.”

  And right on cue, Butchie Walker and what was left of his crew burst through the tree line, guns blazing as Brenda said, “Still wanta try talking your way out of this?”, and Eddie cried out, “Hell no!” as buckshot and whizzing bullets sent sheared off pieces of stalks to the ground, and he and Brenda ran zigzagging through the marijuana field.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You said nobody would get hurt, Gerald,” Cindy Jackson said, as Gerald’s cousin grunted and Tina lay dwarfed beneath him. “You promised.”

  “He’s not hurting her, he’s loving on her, just like you and me.” He nodded at Lewis, who had a firm grip on both of Tina’s arms while the other cousin stood off to the side, watching. “See?” he said. “She’s not screaming anymore. She likes it.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to bring one back from the valley, let her see how peaceful and beautiful it is up here. Get her used to the idea first. Let her pick somebody out. It wasn’t supposed to be like… this.”

  “What’d you expect would happen, with her laying there all naked like that?”

  Lewis groaned and arched his back, and Cindy let out a long sigh. Leaning into Gerald, she said, “Well, it’s not like we knew they’d be here…
Is it?”

  “Right,” Gerald said, smiling, as if happy to see her coming around to his way of thinking. “How were we supposed to know they’d be in here at all, let alone doing what they were… well, you know.”

  Cindy cocked her head sideways, shrugging her response as Lewis stood, pulling up his bib-overalls and snapping them back into place while Tina lay on the floor, staring off into the distance. She had a dull, blank look on her face, as if her mind was far, far away from the madness surrounding her, a mind-numbing madness consisting of rednecks and freaks, and Charlie lying limp in the middle of the room while an oozing mess leaked from between her legs.

  “Maybe we should get going,” Cindy said, and Gerald said, “Okay.”

  “C’mon, Arley.” Lewis, who had spoken for the first time since entering the shack, nodded at Tina. “Let’s get her upright.”

  Arley took an arm and Lewis grabbed the other, and up she went, their captive’s clothes falling to the floor as they pulled her naked to her feet. She didn’t struggle, she didn’t fight. Just stared across the room as if she were the only person in it. Her arms, bruised where Arley had gripped them, dropped like wet strands of rope when the cousins released her. A couple of dark-purple splotches covered her inner thighs where they’d been gouged by Lewis.

  Cindy walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay, honey?” she said. When Tina failed to respond, she bent over and picked up her shirt. “C’mon, let’s get your clothes back on you.”

  “Why don’t we leave ‘em off?” said Arley, whose eyes had been trained on her since they’d first walked into the room.

  “Why don’t you just leave her alone? It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”