Pete Risley - Girl of Prey

“Is there anything that sounds good?” Shannon sounded unenthused.

Dewey pulled a leaflet from his coat pocket. “I’m kind of interested in this Highway of Lost Souls, which is tomorrow at eleven.” He read aloud. “‘The zombie apocalypse takes to the road! A lone teenage runaway hitchhiker finds that thumbing a ride has become even more dangerous than usual when—’”

“I heard about that one. It sounds stupid.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s supposed to all be about zombies driving around in cars. How is that different from just regular people in cars?”

“Okay. Let’s see what else they got. Saturday at 9:30, Peter, Peter, Child of Woe, 1973. ‘Peter Wilbury is mistakenly released from an insane asylum fifteen years after stabbing to death his mother and his sadistic junior-high gym teacher when he caught them together in flagrante—’”

“I don’t mean in the morning. I don’t want to go until afternoon at least.”

“Saturday at one p.m., Cannibal Camp 2: Eat it Raw, 1996. ‘Return to Camp Dahmer, where—’”

“Is that one of Hobie’s Bongoville movies?”

“Yeah. I saw the first one.”

“Fabulous? A laugh riot?”

“It wasn’t terrible. I don’t think you’d like it, though. The usual cute shit.”

“They all are. I can’t deal with Bongoville.” Dewey didn’t much like that studio’s movies either, self-parodying campy schlock movies, though some were better than others. It was true that Hobie couldn’t get enough of them, though otherwise he considered himself a sophisticated film enthusiast.

“Well, then at 3:20, Lovely Lepers, or the Devil’s Harem.”

“That’s more of that zany shit.”

“No, actually, it’s an Italian movie from 1958. I saw an article about it somewhere. Not a comedy. S’posed to be real creepy. ‘On a remote Pacific island, three shipwrecked sailors encounter a bevy of entrancingly beautiful native girls…’”

“Subtitles?”

“I’m sure Hobie would want those if they’re available, that kind of movie.”

“If I wanna read, I’ll get a book.”

Dewey laughed, sort of. “Oh, c’mon.”

“What about late afternoon, or is that just more Hobie bullshit? Aren’t there any gay buttfucking movies? It’s Hobie’s marathon, after all.”

“I dunno, man, fuck it.” Dewey tossed the flyer over his shoulder into the back seat. Shannon had a big grudge against Hobie these days because of Todd and Hobie and the video store and all. Plus, Roni’s job at the movie theater.

“I mean,” said Shannon, “I don’t know how Roni stands it, working for that fat cocksucker. He gets to be more of a faggot all the time, too. Flapping his wrists and shit. She knew he’d try to make her work even later if she’d hung around tonight, that’s why she wanted to meet at the Limbo.”

“Yeah.” Earlier, Shannon said it had been his idea to meet her there, but Dewey wasn’t going to mention that. The silence resumed and stretched on as they continued up I-71 to the Grasso, where Dewey was certain their customers would not be found.

Jaime had followed Roni all the way home from a distance of about a block and a half. She’d walked stiffly and never looked back over her shoulder. He didn’t think she’d noticed him. She got to her house, went inside and turned on the lights. He was tempted to sneak up and peek in the windows to see what was happening. If Shannon was there, it probably meant they were going to fight. If not, Jaime wondered if she would cry once she realized she was alone. He liked to keep a lookout on things but decided not to risk it.

Once when keeping a lookout, a couple years before, Jaime had been peeking in the bathroom window at Shannon’s house and saw Roni naked in the shower. Fortunately, he’d backed away before she saw him, otherwise Shannon would have been after him about that, wanting to kick his ass, which he’d sort of done a couple of times, wailed on him anyway. Still, he’d been kind of especially interested in her since then. She might not look as good now because she’d gotten a little chubbier, though not too bad really, not like Heather, even, and Heather looked okay, he thought, though other people said she looked like Miss Piggy from that kiddie show on TV. Jaime had never even been around a live naked girl before that time he saw Roni, except for his older sister, Cheryl Sue, who was great big and real unsightly that way, and his little sister, Dawnie, though she’d been too young to have breasts and stuff.

The only other girl he’d ever seen naked was the one he found in the woods, and she was dead at the time. She was also the only one he’d gotten to do any sex stuff with, which might not even count since she was dead and all. Cold and stiff, but she was still a girl. Kind of cute, too, even though she was Chinese and had that weird red hair, which Chinese people weren’t supposed to have, he was pretty sure. They all had black hair on TV. Jaime didn’t like to think about the way it ended up, after only a few days. She had gotten all bloated up so he was afraid she might burst open somewhere if he lay on her anymore, and she’d started to smell garbagey, even though it was real cold out then. He was sorry when she got that way, wept when he had to bury her. He wasn’t sure he’d done a good job of that, either, since he wasn’t able to dig a really deep hole, and had never gone back to look at her makeshift grave.

That was another reason why he was keeping an eye on Todd and Shannon. They’d been out there fucking that girl in the woods, and she died. So maybe they’d killed her, though it didn’t look that way to him. Todd was the last one with her, and he was all upset when she started getting sick, ran away calling for Shannon and Dewey to come and help. She was dead a minute later, though. Jaime just wasn’t sure what had happened, and he couldn’t tell anybody about it because of what he’d done with her after he’d dragged her away.

He didn’t feel like going home yet. The toilet was stopped up and the place was getting kind of stinky, and he wasn’t sure how to fix it. It worried him because the stink might make somebody come upstairs and they’d find he was staying there in the attic apartment of the theater, which thus far nobody had bothered him about. In fact, nobody seemed to even know it was there, though it had an old mattress on the floor and even a working toilet, though it was real grungy inside and didn’t fill up with water very well. But now the toilet was the big problem.

Thinking about toilets made him aware of his slight discomfort. He’d needed to take a piss back at the Limbo but didn’t because he had to follow Roni. Well, might as well go back to the Limbo then, before it closed. At least the toilet there worked. Besides, he wanted to know whether Shannon and Dewey had showed up back there. What with those kids that had come in, Jaime kind of suspected Shannon might be selling dope or something.

Todd was in bed, sleeping fitfully, when a sense of impending doom began to kick in. It was like the room was filling up rapidly with water, was suddenly already filled, not with fresh or tap water but with thick, slimy, translucent green glop, like in a neglected aquarium. He took a deep breath, fearing he’d drown, or perhaps puke his guts out and then drown, but found he could breathe fitfully, as if uneven streams of air roped through the slime. The ceiling light was on above him and, though he’d never noticed it before, there was a stairway just beyond the door near the foot of his bed. A swarm of slithery creatures crawled in every direction beyond the door’s threshold. Fearing they’d soon move forward into his room, get into his bed and squirm all over him, biting, scratching and oozing poisons, he closed his eyes in a hard squint, until he heard the thumping footsteps of something much larger and still more dreadful coming.