Jeff Strand - A Bad Day for Voodoo

He jabbed it into the doll’s foot again.

The fourth toe on my left foot shot off like a bottle rocket, leaving a trail of red mist instead of smoke.

It struck Blood Clot right in the face.

“Aw, bleagh!” Though it hit him in the cheek and not the mouth, he spat a couple of times and wiped his mouth off on his sleeve. “What the hell, dude?”

I screamed some more.

“That was awesome!” Gary shouted. “Let’s try that again! Open wide!” (I couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying with all of the screaming I was doing, but I think that’s a pretty accurate guess.)

Eight toes. I only had eight toes. Did this mean I’d have to start wearing narrower socks?

Suddenly, the garage door did not burst open and no reinforcements arrived to save me.

I clutched at my leaking foot and howled like one of those howler monkeys in South America.

“Stop doing that,” said Blood Clot.

“I just lost two toes!” I shouted. “What else do you want me to do?”

“Not you! The screaming’s okay.” Blood Clot pointed his gun at Gary. “Knock it off.”

“I’m sure you don’t have a gun pointed at me,” Gary said, his voice filled with rage.

“This is one of the most amazing discoveries of the twenty- first century, and you’re using it to play around and blow off toes. I can’t stand here and let that happen.”

“Ribeye, kill that traitor.”

Ribeye hesitated for a moment and then pointed his gun at Gary as well. “Sorry, dude. We really should be using this for something more ambitious.”

Scorp pointed his gun at Blood Clot. “Who do you think you are? You throw down that gun, or I will drop you where you stand!”

Shark pointed his gun at Gary. “Screw all of you guys!” he said. “None of you ever acknowledge me! You probably forget that I’m even here, and I’m tired of it! I’m just as important a part of this gang as anyone, and all I want is a little respect, okay? Is that so much to ask?”

Gary dropped the voodoo doll. None of my bones broke when it hit the floor, which was nice. “Listen to me, Blood Clot,” he said. “You have exactly five seconds to lower your gun, or I’m going to kill you with my bare—”

Blood Clot shot Gary in the chest.

Scorp fired, missing Blood Clot.

Ribeye turned his gun on Scorp.

Shark fired, hitting Gary in the chest a second time.

Blood Clot turned his gun on Scorp.

Ribeye fired, missing Scorp.

Scorp fired, grazing Blood Clot’s ear.

Blood Clot fired, grazing Scorp’s ear in almost the exact same place his own ear had been grazed. Honestly, you’d think they’d planned it out.

A few more bullets were fired with nobody getting hit.

Gary dropped to the floor.

Ribeye shot Scorp right in the freaking eyeball, which made my wallowing about my two missing toes seem kind of petty.

Scorp dropped to the floor.

Ribeye shot Blood Clot in the chest. His motive was not entirely clear to me, but I’m sure he had a good reason.

Blood Clot pulled his trigger a couple of times as he fell, but he was out of bullets.

Shark fired a bullet that I assume had to have been meant for Ribeye, because he was the only one left, but it was so far off the mark that I was a little embarrassed for him.

Ribeye fired at Shark, missing.

Shark fired at Ribeye, also missing.

They fired simultaneously, and I swear I’m telling the truth when I say that their bullets struck each other in midair and.. .Okay, no, that didn’t happen. They just missed each other again.

Ribeye shot Shark in the foot, and he went down screaming.

Shark blew a couple of holes in the ceiling, apparently just to prove that he could hit something .

Ribeye shot Shark in one of the three places that I would least want to get shot.

And then Ribeye fired a bullet that definitely, positively, inarguably, with 100 percent certainty killed Shark. It was pretty disgusting.

Until today, I had never seen a dead body, and now I was in a garage with four freshly murdered ones. I knew that if I were to ever write about this experience, I’d have to do so with an inappropriately lighthearted tone to help me cope with the horrors I’d witnessed.

Ribeye pointed his gun at me.

“Aw, c’mon, seriously?” I asked.

“Seriously.”

“Why would you need to shoot me?”

“Because there are four corpses in this room and you know who made them. One corpse, not such a big deal, but I can’t have you squealing about four of ’em.”

I tried to scoot away from him, even though I knew it wasn’t going to be very helpful. “I won’t say a word,” I promised. “I’ll say I shot off my own toes! I’ll tell everybody you were a hero, but I’ll say you were a mystery man whose face I never got to see, that you were always in shadow!”

“Stop talking,” Ribeye said, and then he pulled the trigger.

I was going to put a chapter break here, so that you might think I died and that the book was going to suddenly switch to Kelley’s point of view as she set off on her quest to avenge my murder, but I figure a couple of hours after this is published, the Internet is going to be filled with spoilers saying that I don’t die at the end of Chapter 11, so why bother?

What really happened is that he pulled the trigger and the gun didn’t shoot anything, because it was out of bullets. Kind of a cop-out, I know, but sometimes real life doesn’t follow the rules of good storytelling.

My foot was bleeding a little less than it had been immediately after my toes had come off, though this fact wasn’t all that reassuring. Also, I’d been in here for quite a while, so what exactly were Adam and Kelley doing? Shouldn’t somebody have stopped by to at least check on me?

“Please,” I said. “Don’t kill me. You could be rich.”

“How?”

“The doll has more power. A lot more.”

Ribeye raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“It can grant wishes.”

On a scale of one to ten of “Awesome Ways to Convince a Thug That He Shouldn’t Kill You Because a Voodoo Doll Has More Power Than What He’s Already Seen,” that ranked about a two. It was better than shoving a finger up my nose and saying “Durrrr.I dunno!” but not by much.

There was a knock on the garage door.

It was sort of a timid knock. Probably not the police with a battering ram.

“You’ve lucked out,” said Ribeye. “If you can get a sock tied around that foot in the next few seconds, you can come with me.”

I grabbed my bloody sock and tied it around my foot, pulling it as tight as I could. Ribeye picked up the doll and spat on Gary’s dead body.

“Think you can walk?” he asked.

I nodded. As bad as my left foot hurt, at least I still had 60 percent of my toes left, and the ones remaining were the three biggest.

“Then let’s go to the secret passage.”

CHAPTER 12

Because Ribeye was the only one left, I guess I should probably give you a physical description. He was not a handsome gentleman. It wasn’t the scars—those were actually kind of cool—or even his basic facial structure that made him so unattractive. A lot of it was his hair, which looked like it hadn’t been washed for the past six to eight weeks, unless he’d recently dunked it in a barrel of bacon grease.

His eyes, nose, and mouth were where they were supposed to be and perfectly fine in size and shape. His facial hair was...uh, sporadic. Look, I’m not saying that I’m a beard-growing superstar. I was rocking the whole “peach fuzz on the upper lip” style for a while. But when you grow out of your teenage years, if your facial hair grows in weird, random clumps around your face, it’s time to consider that perhaps the clean-shaven look is best for you.