Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

Very little blood hit the floor. Most of it was running down the guy’s face, down his neck, soaking into the plaid shirt. The guy’s eyes had rolled up, showing nothing but white slits. His mouth hung open. His hands hung straight down on either side of the toilet, arms more limp than his dick. Frank left the guy’s jeans down around his ankles and snagged the wallet. Eight crisp twenties waited inside.

Frank shook his head. His luck was making him nervous. The trucker had a fistful of pills in a plastic baggie in his shirt pocket. Frank tried the boots. They fit much better than the shoes, a little tight, but not bad. The suit legs were so wide that the cuffs nearly obscured the snazzy snakeskin; Frank felt like he’d just stepped out of some seventies exploitation movie.

Frank slipped the large black shoes on the trucker’s feet, rearranged the limp arms in the man’s lap, and locked the stall door from the inside. Frank slipped under the door and backed away, scrutinizing the closed door. It simply looked as if the trucker, with his jeans down around his ankles, draped over some large black shoes, was simply taking a long, unhurried shit. Maybe he was reading the paper. It would have to do. Frank tucked the money and baggie of pills away in the inside pocket of the suit jacket, flexed his toes in the boots, and left.

* * * * *

He hit Reno an hour later and headed north, rising suddenly into the Sierra Nevada mountain range. He came around a hill and nearly had a heart attack when he saw the border station. With much of the state devoted to agriculture, California had established permanent roadblocks around its borders, stopping every car that crossed over into the state, asking everyone if they were bringing any fruits or vegetables across. But the officer, a young woman with a face as round and smooth as one of the state’s peaches, hadn’t shown the slightest interest in Frank. Even before he shook his head to her question, she was already waving him through.

He bought a bottle of rum and spent and hour in a tiny town called Milford. It wasn’t exactly Appleton Estate, but it would work. He parked near an old cemetery full of genuine gunfighter skeletons, sipped from the bottle for a while, and finally slept.

His dreams were dark, full of slippery shadows and galloping hooves on tight sand.

* * * * *

The midmorning sun hammered through the windshield like the stern gaze of God and left Frank sweating and confused. The bottle, half-empty, sat upright in the passenger seat as if waiting to be seatbelted into place. He screwed on the cap and threw it under the seat. That was fucking smart, leaving an open bottle in plain sight within the vehicle. Sucking at the sweet and sour film on his teeth, he found an empty campground near Honey Lake and took a shower. It felt good to scrape off the slime from the alligator tank, not to mention the piss on his leg.

Frank slid back behind the wheel, feeling clear and level. He decided the bottle could wait. He wasn’t sure what to do. The long, black car had half a tank of gas left. The urge to keep running still seethed through his veins, so he decided that he needed more ground between him and the zoo.

* * * * *

He followed a rough two-lane road northwest, through vast plains of sagebrush and patches of bleached, gray husks of trees, scorched long ago by forest fires, still standing guard like silent ghosts. The pavement curled out through lava-strewn hills, eventually spitting the long, black car into a narrow valley. To the southwest rose the steep, forbidding Sierra Nevada Mountains. To the west and north, more mountains. To the east there was nothing but the high desert wasteland beyond the few low foothills.

He spotted the water tower first, a dying Martian crouching over a cluster of white buildings and a few scattered homes. The green, bullet-specked sign read, “Welcome to Whitewood. Home of the Wildcats.” The population was three figures; he figured that might be a generous estimate.

Frank pulled into the gas station on the right side of the highway at the edge of town. Behind the gas station, there wasn’t much but empty desert and rolling foothills. He stopped next to the pumps, remembering this time that the tank was on the passenger side of the car. The place only had two pumps, no roof, just a tiny store next to the one car garage.

Frank climbed out and nearly went to his knees in the heat. “Good fucking Christ,” he blurted in venomous surprise as two hours of air-conditioning bled out of the car. The air smelled dry and full of lead.

A three-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch sat directly across the street from the gas station. The house looked old, hurt. The wood may have been painted green once, a long time ago. Somebody had started nailing up aluminum siding along the north wall, but gave up after a while. Chunks of shingles were missing. Most of the windows were covered in flattened cardboard boxes, swollen and splotched from rain. The place looked like it was suffering from a serious case of gangrene.

The surrounding yard wasn’t much better. Ten or twelve cars had been eviscerated in the patches of dead weeds and smooth dirt. Amongst the tires, car doors, bumpers, and broken glass, was a rusted horizontal freezer. A pair of lawn chairs flanked a gigantic satellite dish, nearly eight feet across, perched awkwardly at the edge of the yard like some fat vulture, and looked like it was capable of picking up signals from one of the moons of Jupiter. Frank got the feeling it was some kind of shrine.

A leafless oak tree, gnarled and twisted in slow-motion agony, rose from the center of the yard, rising into stumps of limbs nearly forty feet in the air. It took him several seconds to realize the dead tree was full of children.

Frank froze, holding the gas nozzle in midair. The children’s silent stares made him powerfully uneasy. Still keeping his eyes on the tree, he jammed the nozzle into the gas tank and squeezed the handle. The clicking tank behind him made him feel a little better, but not much. He had a little over forty dollars left, more than enough for the gas, but while looking at the deserted streets, he’d been thinking of breaking one of his own rules, seriously considering robbing the gas station. But now that was out of the question.

One of the kids had a slingshot.

The kid, a boy with a flattop that may have been trimmed about three or four months ago, raised the slingshot. It had some kind of brace that came out of the bottom of the handle and wrapped around the kid’s wrist. He was seven or eight, wearing shorts that hung to his calves and a #54 Chicago Bears football jersey. He stretched the elastic surgical tubing back, straightening his left arm, pulling his right hand back to his jaw, and let fly.

Something popped into the rear window, about a foot from Frank.

Frank tried hard not to flinch, but knew he was too late. Then he got pissed. He knew from hearing the deep crunch that it had left a small crater in the window. He left the clicking tank behind and started across the empty street. Weeds grew from cracks that zigzagged across the pavement. He put his hands in his black suit pockets to hide them in case he suddenly had to curl his fingers into fists. He just wanted to talk to the children, not scare them. Not yet, at least.

Frank stopped in the middle of the road feeling like he’d just stepped onto a cast iron skillet that had been left on the campfire for too long and wished he hadn’t left the sunglasses on the dashboard. “Hi there.”

The children didn’t say anything. They stood on limbs, leaning against the trunk or quietly hanging from the branches with both arms. In the vicious afternoon light, the kind of light that carves shapes into greasy slivers of silhouettes, it looked like the burnt husk of a tree full of skeletons. To Frank’s sunblasted eyes, the tree looked like it was still on fire.