Alan Baxter - The Gulp - Five Tales of Horror

Carter popped Daniel’s eye out onto the palm of his hand, released the young man’s throat, and stood up, smiling. Stephen stepped back, began threading his belt back into his waistband. Daniel wailed, whipping his head left and right as blood poured from his ruined eye socket.

“Let’s have a look then,” Carter said.

With Daniel’s eyeball resting on one palm, he handed the knife to Stephen and then stuck the thumb of his free hand into Daniel’s empty, gore-soaked socket. As Daniel screamed, Carter tossed the young man’s eye into his mouth. He tipped his head back, chewing, swilling the contents around his mouth like a sommelier experiencing a particularly decent vintage. Daniel howled, Stephen held his head steady with one meaty palm, Carter’s thumb buried to the second knuckle. Rich shook all over, his skin wet and cold with sweat, bile burning his throat, threatening to burst forth.

“I see,” Carter said, slurred slightly by his mouthful. Jelly leaked over his bottom lip. His head was still tipped back, eyes closed, thumb shifting about in Daniel’s face. “You went out into the courtyard for a cigarette and that’s where you had your conversation. A shame there’s no sound with this show, eh? But I see it all. I see you taking the money from Craig Stinson.” He shifted the chewed eye in his mouth, sucking it back and forth across his front teeth. “I see the younger Stinson cunt, William. What’s he giving you there, eh? Wrapped up pretty well, isn’t it. Looks interesting, Daniel. Very interesting.”

Carter smacked his lips and swallowed, opened his eyes to look down at the bloody-faced youth. He pulled his thumb free with a wet slurp. “What was in the parcel, Daniel?”

Daniel shuddered and tipped sideways, taking the chair over with him.

“Out cold,” Carter said. “Not to worry, we’ll bring him to the farm anyway. I’ll put him in the car.” He turned and pointed straight at Rich. “You go and get that one.”

Rich stumbled back from the hole with a gasp, heart hammering. He turned to one side and vomited, but was already up and moving, the puke catching along his arm and left foot. He grabbed his cargo pants off the back of the chair. An identical chair to the one he’d just watched Daniel tortured in. Surely that fucking guy couldn’t see what Daniel had seen, what the fuck? Doesn’t matter, pants on, grab the phone and fucking run!

He got both legs into his pants and snatched his phone off the bedside table. He jammed it into his pocket as his unit door crashed inwards, splitting right through the middle and breaking in half. The top half swung hectically from a bent hinge.

“Fuck!” Rich yelled.

The big silhouette of Stephen filled the doorway. He was a similar height to Rich, but twice as wide. Rich turned, ran to the back of the room, but it was just a wall. He pushed into the bathroom. There was a tiny window with sliding panes of frosted glass. He wasn’t sure he could fit through, but he was going to try. He stood up on the toilet and hauled back a fist to punch the window out, heedless of any cuts he might get, but Stephen was already there. One thick arm went around Rich’s waist and pulled him back.

Rich slammed left and right with his elbows and fists, fighting like a man possessed. Every glancing blow he got to Stephen’s blocky head was like hitting a rock. Stephen planted him on his feet, spun him around, and slapped him hard across the face. Blackness whined in from the edges of Rich’s vision, stars sparkled all around. The world tilted sideways as Stephen picked him up. He tried to struggle, but his body was loose, unresponsive. His head throbbed. He smelled oil and dirt a moment before something hard slammed into him and he realised he’d been thrown into the boot of a car. The lid slammed down, plunging him into darkness.

George twisted aroundin the front seat of the truck cab, trying to align his dick with the neck of the two-litre plastic bottle. Why did something so simple in principle prove to be so difficult in practice? He’d put it off as long as possible, but the need was too great to ignore any longer. He finally managed to get things lined up, using the wrist of the hand holding his dick to press his gut out of the way so he could see the bottle he held in the other hand. It took a few seconds to relax enough for the flow to start and his knob immediately skipped in his hand as it did so, the firehose stream of piss shooting right over the neck of the bottle and soaking hand, his pants leg, the floor of the cab.

“Fucken shit and fucken!”

He clamped tight inside, wincing as he held back the flow. With an incoherent curse, he unlocked and opened the door and half fell out to the cement below, damp trousers around his ankles. Regardless of spying eyes, he turned his back to the road and pissed with abandon, head tipped back, sighing as he painted the road of the loading dock.

When he finished, relief a warm glow through his abdomen, he pulled his pants back up. They were wet, but not as soaked as he’d feared, mainly one patch the size of his palm. He looked into the truck and the puddle on the vinyl matting was already spreading out and he decided to ignore that. He held up his wet hand and looked at it. There should be a service tap somewhere around, but he couldn’t see one. And he wasn’t about to go searching around in the dark. He already felt vulnerable, simply being out of the cab. He had some baby wipes in the glove box and he climbed back in, found them, wiped his hands, had a half-arsed go at the floor, then threw the handful of wipes out the window.

Once everything was closed and locked up again, he felt secure once more. His watch said two-forty a.m. and he was fairly sure he was yet to sleep a wink. Fatigue hung off him like weights, though, and perhaps if he lay down again… At least he wasn’t busting for a piss any more.

He had a bad feeling about the kid, imagined Rich somewhere out there in The Gulp. Where was he? What was he doing? George didn’t hold much truck with psychics or any of that malarkey, but he felt deep in his gut that something was wrong.

He curled on his side across the seats and dragged the coat back over himself, praying for unconsciousness until dawn.

Rich blinked asthe boot was opened, a porch light of some kind directly above him. His head swam. Stephen reached in, grabbed his upper arm in an iron grip and hauled him out. The man’s strength was insane, made Rich feel like a child.

The drive had been only about ten minutes or so, smooth at first with a few turns Rich had quickly lost track of, then boneshakingly rough, an unsealed road that seemed to travel up quite steeply, switching back on itself a couple of times. As Stephen planted Rich on his feet he saw back down the long dirt road, white-fenced paddocks on either side, the town of Gulpepper a blanket of undulating lights down below. The view from so high was wild, over the paddocks and thick bushland the ocean glittered in the light of the half-moon. A naturally level area of land, it had the look of somewhere that had been farmed for generations. The bush rose steeply behind against the night sky thick with stars.

Stephen turned him and pushed, made him stagger past the car which he’d parked in a car port next to a large federation-style farmhouse. White painted weatherboard, russet-painted metal roof, stained glass panels in the old-fashioned windows. A deck ran all around the building. Beyond it were a variety of sheds and barns, tractors and threshers and other equipment scattered about. A Toyota Hilux crew cab ute was parked just beside the car port. Carter climbed out, then opened the back door and dragged Daniel off the seat. The young man hit the dirt with a grunt and rolled up onto his hands and knees. Blood dripped heavily from his face.