In Laymon's Terms

Tom Piccirilli

HE NOISE TORE me out of bed. The lady next door’s cats had gotten up into the pomegranate trees again and were wailing their scrawny asses off. They did it a couple of times a day, but by now I’d grown used to their screeching. It reminded me of police and ambulance sirens in Brooklyn and even made me a little homesick.

Monty’s place had two main floors, an attic and a mother-in-law apartment around the rear. The landlord and his wife lived in the house proper, but they were always on the run in Mexico from drug dealers they’d burned in East L.A. Monty Stobbs stayed in the attic, and I lived out back directly below his window. He wouldn’t waste time walking down all the stairways and would just call me on my phone instead.

I’d left New York after having a couple of shows presented off-off Broadway, written under a pseudonym. They were both well-received by critics but didn’t draw enough of an audience to stay afloat for long. Monty Stobbs had been hustling the same backers as the director, and he’d invited me to come stay with him in Hollywood to write him a screenplay. He’d made a few no-budget horror flicks in his time: Yokohama Zombie Mamas on Hondas and Cutie Critters from Beyond the Edge of Naked Space.

It was a chance to get out. I wasn’t naive enough to believe it might amount to anything, but for the first time in my life I let myself fall into the starry-eyed Hollywood trap. My wife had left the year before and my day job had gone skidding into the toilet. She’d taken the kid, the dog, and the goldfish, but she’d left me with a case of crabs. The fuckers were so big I could identify them well enough to give them names, and after the cream started to work and they died off, I fell into sobbing fits.

So there wasn’t much holding me in New York.

My phone rang and I picked it up. “What?”

“Listen, I need a little help,” Monty said. “I was scouting locations for the sequel to Cutie Critter. Needed a primeval setting for the crash-landed Love UFO. My car died and I’m stuck out here in the middle of the fucking desert.”

“Monty, all I know is what I’ve seen in the movies. Is this desert like the Sahara, with Bedouins and camels? Are you going to be forced to drink wiper fluid to stay alive?”

“You prick. I’ll give you directions.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“Take the landlord’s. He’s got a ’69 Mustang under a tarp in the garage. It’s not cherry but it’ll work and the keys should be under the floor mat.”

“Can’t you call a cab?”

“A cab?” I could hear his blood pressure climbing. “You’re 3,500 miles from Brooklyn now. Cabs don’t come pick you up in the desert. Cops don’t come. Triple A doesn’t come.”

“How long should it take?”

“A couple of hours.”

“You’ll be all right for that long?”

“Yeah, just try not to get lost. Bring your cell phone.”

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

“How long you been in Hollywood now?”

“Four days.”

“And you still don’t have a cell phone? The hell is wrong with you?” He gave me a set of vague directions that led me out of Los Angeles and towards an even greater unknown. I took the 10 freeway past the sprawl of L.A. and all the chain restaurants and tire stores and strip malls. I hit the 15 North, and the buildings started to thin out as I reached the top of the Cajon Pass. The first billboards for Vegas put in an appearance around then. After I hit Barstow there was pretty much only rest stops and gas stations, then just plain nothing. I was surprised at how quickly the city had fallen away and I was suddenly into raw, rugged, burning territory. You had to be fuckin’ crazy to live in a place like this.

Empty desert, cacti, and endless stretches of highway. I drove for another hour and finally found what I figured must be the general area.

Monty’s 1995 Mazda MX-5 Miata Roadster sat at the side of the road. A few years ago it had been flashy, like Monty himself, but now there was wear and rust and a widespread fade to the car. I got out and checked it over. The doors were unlocked but the keys weren’t in the ignition. Monty was nowhere around. I popped the hood and spotted the problem immediately. The fuel pump was shot.

Either he’d gotten lucky and found himself a ride or he’d gotten tired of waiting and had tried to hoof it.

There was nothing behind me on the road so I decided to drive on a little further. In fifteen minutes I spotted a dark shimmer in the distance. Soon I could discern the outline of a small desert town.

The place looked like every ghost town I’d ever seen on Gunsmoke and The Rifleman reruns. The dust roared around me and sagebrush kicked over and tumbled in the fierce wind.

A heavily weathered wooden sign hanging from twin chains proclaimed MASONVILLE.

Some of the buildings were so decayed that they shuddered and leaned like drunks. Porches had caved in and most of the windowpanes were empty, siding boards and shingles scattered across the tiny streets. Shards of glass reflected sunlight from the dirt.

I got out of the Mustang and wandered around for a bit. I shouted Monty’s name and yelled hello a dozen times and expected vultures to be circling overhead. I was about to turn back when I noticed a half-filled trough out in front of a former feed store. I put my hand in the water—it was warm but not hot the way I would’ve expected it to be. Somebody had to have filled it recently. This couldn’t be rainwater even if it was true that immense storms sometimes passed over the desert drenching everything in brief deluges.

A little further on I discovered some fresh horse manure along the street. I kept walking as the wind slammed and the rotting timbers of the neglected structures creaked and crackled.

Then I smelled meat cooking.

I followed my nose to a smaller set of buildings that had been repaired and kept up. This area seemed to be a compound of sorts surrounded by smaller structures and shacks. Lots of footprints in the dust. I heard voices singing and laughing and talking, so I walked into the main hall.

Perhaps forty people were congregated in all. I saw only a couple of middle-aged faces and heads with gray hair. Of the rest of them, the oldest couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. Men with shaggy beards and homemade leather vests and torn jeans patched and re-patched. Barefoot women wearing headbands and diaphanous lace blouses, openly breastfeeding babies. Children ran around half-naked. I heard one little girl call another “Moonglow.”

I’d stumbled into a friggin’ commune.

They were broken into separate groups doing a bit of everything: sewing, painting, smoking, reading, playing guitar. A couple of infants were in a washtub being bathed. One guy hammered heels back onto boots. Another fixed a busted stirrup on a saddle. I breathed in a hell of a lot of burning weed and it mixed well with the aroma of sizzling steaks.

Whenever someone’s gaze settled on me they froze in their tracks, even the children. If Monty was here, I got the feeling that he hadn’t exactly warmed them up to strangers.

“Hey there,” I said.

The music stopped. A few whispers passed among them and I saw two of the ladies leave the room. Okay, they were getting the head honcho, that worked for me. No one else spoke and none of them approached me. It didn’t quite feel like a love-in.

In a few minutes the chief of the tribe walked out. He was about my age, early thirties, and he had the kind of grin that was meant to disarm but you didn’t trust for a second. Small and wiry and filled with a manic energy that kept him twitching. His thick beard covered most of his face but from the squalor of bushy hair his eyes burned.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Chuck. Can I do something for you?”

He stuck out his hand and it smelled of blood.

My hackles stood on end. I’d shared a cell with a guy just like Chuck once, for about a week out on Riker’s while my attorney worked overtime to get me out. I barely slept at all during those several days, listening to the guy talk to himself about God and Lucifer and murder. He was in for butchering a pregnant woman and keeping the corpse under his mattress for a week. I knew he’d done it and would do it again if he ever got the chance. A few months after I was released I heard he’d shanked two guards and started a riot that had killed eight men and the hospital nurse. The guy lived through it. Guys like that lived through everything.

I decided to play it straight. That always seemed to unsettle Californians. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. His car broke down outside of town and I was wondering if he was here.”

Chuck rubbed his overgrown jaw and tried to look perplexed. I’d been around enough shitty actors to know another one when I saw him. Chuck wouldn’t have even made a call-back. “Well, gee, I don’t think he came this way. We’re a very closely-knit community and I would’ve heard if a stranger had come among us.”

He did a slow once-over, taking in my black suit and tie, the white shirt and starched collar, my thousand dollar Italian shoes. “You’re a bit overdressed for this part of the country.”

“I still haven’t quite acclimated to California.”

“But you’re not even sweating.”

“My antiperspirant is holding up.”

He tilted his head but didn’t alter his smile by a centimeter. I bet he even grinned in his sleep. “Why don’t you come with me and we’ll ask some of the community if they’ve seen your friend.”

“Sure.”

We walked around and he introduced me to people with names like Brown Earth Child and Freedom Boy. I didn’t know if they were hippies or comic book characters. Rainbeaux Sweet spelled her name out for me. She took great pride in the fact that it ended in ‘x.’

They were exceedingly cooperative and friendly and sincerely wished me luck in finding Monty. I was offered everything from carrot juice to pulchre to pot, belly-dancing lessons, LSD and home-brewed whiskey. I shared a few drinks with them and they told me about their community, which had been sustaining itself, more or less, since the early seventies. Most of the old-timers who’d taken over the ghost town and dubbed it Masonville had either died or been drawn back into the establishment. Rainbeaux’s father owned a chain of video stores and lived in Malibu. She nearly broke into tears just thinking about it.

Despite the reality that they all had deep tans from the sun I could see that a few of the folks, especially the children, were a touch anemic. They gave me a plate of stunted dried vegetables but it felt like taking rice from an Ethiopian. Gardening couldn’t have been easy out here, that was for certain. I thanked them for all their help and walked around some more. Chuck had drifted off, and I knew he’d be wherever the real action was.

A giggling kid let out a high-pitched bleat of joy and I turned my head.

And there it was, on the floor.

Monty’s rug.

It was one of the worst toupees I’d ever seen in my life, and it didn’t come close to matching the graying frizz of his own hair that peeked from beneath in back. Nobody could talk any sense to him about the damn thing.

A band of children passed the hairpiece back and forth, trying it on and then dragging it around on the floor and barking, treating it like a puppy.

I knew for sure that Monty was dead then. He never would’ve let the rug off his head otherwise.

Okay, so we were into it.

A nice sense of coolness filled me, like a breeze brushing over my back. I kept smiling and chatting with people as I searched through the compound. There were a couple of main buildings and I walked from one to another. I tried to keep a running head count and discovered there were more people than I’d originally thought. Every door was open and I moved from room to room. Some were private apartments, some storage areas for loads of ancient broken machinery and battered furniture. No one stopped me or seemed to care. I continued roving, inspecting every corridor and passage.

Finally I tried to turn a knob and the door was locked.

I put my hand to it and nearly got my palm seared. The door was large and metal. Wisps of smoke uncoiled from beneath, and I could smell the meat cooking inside. This had to be the kitchen.

Nobody was around. I opened my jacket and reached into the inner pocket for my slim case of tools. I picked the lock in two minutes and realized I’d lost some of my edge. It was a thirty-second job. Writing plays had made me a little soft.

I replaced the case and walked in.

Monty hung upside down from a meat hook, the massive point shoved through his ass. His wrists and throat had been cut; he’d been cleanly eviscerated and most of the blood had poured out by now. His bald head had a hell of a big dent in it. They’d taken him from behind and cracked his skull open. No wonder his rug had flown off.

I walked up and touched his flesh—it was cool but not cold. They’d done him less than an hour ago, probably about the time I found his car. I checked his teeth and found bits of beans and vegetables still stuck in them. Beneath the stink of death was the pleasant smell of that moonshine they’d offered me. They fed him and gotten him pleasantly drunk.

Chunks of his flesh were gone in mouth-sized portions, and his chest had been cracked open and fillets had carefully been cut from him. In the corner stood a large oven and open grill, the kind you find in every roadside diner. Steaks and burgers hissed and spattered.

It was ugly as hell but didn’t even rank when compared to some of what I’d seen.

I hadn’t gotten any sort of murderous vibe off them except for Chuck. Were the others a part of this or was Chuck or someone else simply working on his own?

I turned and saw the girl in the cage.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

She couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. She was naked and bruised badly, with huge pendulous breasts and lean legs covered in welts. When she saw me she scurried to the far side of the cell and hid her face.

“I won’t hurt you,” I said but she just glanced up and stared at me through flowing locks of her hair. She frowned and watched me curiously but didn’t say a word.

The little cage had an old-fashioned turn-key lock. I scanned the area but couldn’t find the key, and just as I was about to kneel and get my tools out again I heard a heavy grunting.

He came out of the pantry holding a skillet large enough for a man to sit in. He weighed an easy 350, most of it flab hanging over what had once been hard muscle. The boy knew how to eat. He smiled and I saw a mouth stuffed with way too many teeth—they came out from every angle, wrenched and twisted, canines in the wrong place, molars crushed down to the nub. His own incisors were rotted black fragments and it looked like he’d implanted others into his own gum line. Shards of coyote fangs, mangled bridges and dentures. They were jagged and infected and scraped clean by gnawing on bones.

His clothing had been made from animal pelts and scraps of three-piece suits. I did a quick count and spotted at least four Armani labels. The kitchen had been in business for a while. He wore a thick leather belt from which hung a variety of clattering utensils. A huge spoon, a corkscrew, and an egg beater hung side by side with a double-sided hatchet, a meat cleaver, and a bone saw.

Knots of scar tissue jutted from his forehead and his eyebrows had been torn off so many times that they now formed a heavy frontal ridge. It gave him an almost Cro-Magnon appearance. I’d seen it on cons before to a lesser degree, the guys who went crazy in solitary and did nothing but smash their own faces into the wall all day long.

“Howdy,” I said. “You the cook?”

Smiley dropped the skillet and drew the saw from his belt. Blood and sweat stains had given the wooden handle a red polished sheen.

“Dis ma kitchen,” he said.

“And I’m sure you pass the board of health inspections with flying colors.”

When he shut his mouth those teeth clashed together like wolves locked in combat. His movements were slow and precise and had a suggestion of dramatic flair to them. He was used to scaring people and drinking in their fear while they died, and he wanted to milk it even more.

Smiley grabbed the hatchet with his other hand and let both weapons swing at his sides, building up a rhythm. A strange noise bubbled up from his guts but I couldn’t place it at first. I cocked my head and listened. Was this fucker laughing at me?

I reached under my arm and drew my .32 from its holster. Not quite as much firepower as I would’ve liked but anything bigger would’ve ruined the crease in my suit. I put one into his forehead.

It was a mistake.

The .32 didn’t have enough kick and the bullet got tangled in all that scar tissue. It barely even staggered him and only two drops of blood leaked out. Smiley kept up with that weird sound and swung the hatchet. I dodged left but couldn’t get off another shot before he had me backed up to the cage. There was no room to maneuver.

“All right, the hard way,” I said.

Bringing the saw up, Smiley tried to take the top of my head off with one brutal swing. If I’d been 6’1” instead of 5’11” my brains would’ve rocketed to the other side of the kitchen.

The thought didn’t thrill me. I elbowed him hard under the heart and tried to gain the space I needed to bring the gun up, but he didn’t back off an inch. The hatchet came down for my thigh and I barely deflected the blade with the barrel of the .32. My fingers went numb and the gun skittered across the floor.

Monty’s guts smoked on the grill. They sizzled and spit and my stomach took a bad tumble. Smiley kept grinning with a mouth full of madness. The girl let out a squeak that for some reason picked up my heart rate. I was acting like an amateur and it was going to get me killed.

I elbowed him again in the same place and this time it got his attention. The noise in his rotund belly stopped and he snarled, “Dis ma kitchen!” I wasn’t about to argue. I stomped his foot and brought my fist down against the inside of his knee cap. I heard it snap and Smiley groaned but didn’t go down. I tried again and missed as he slid the saw up towards my neck and started to draw the blade away. I rolled my shoulder and ducked aside but not fast enough. A spurt of my blood splashed up against the edge of my jaw. It didn’t hurt so much as it filled me with a sickening heat.

I drove the thick part of my palm into Smiley’s mouth and heard all those fangs and contorted teeth crunch together. He spit out blood and infection and pieces of his black gums. He took a step back and raised the hatchet overhead. I dug into his belt and came up with the corkscrew. He made his noise again as he brought the hatchet down and I jammed the corkscrew deep into his Adam’s apple.

The girl shouted, “Yeah!” I had a fan. Smiley stumbled backwards but didn’t drop as he quivered and his eyes rolled. Those thick hands came up and he grasped the handle sticking out of his throat and tugged hard. A spray of blood and gobs of bile showered across his chest. The corkscrew came out about an inch and he pulled again and again until he tore out part of his own esophagus. The fucker kept right on laughing and that really pissed me off.

“Jesus Christ, Smiley, give up the ghost already!”

I nabbed the .32 off the floor, walked over, aimed away from the scar tissue and put another into his head. He took two more tottering steps back as he reeled away into Monty’s corpse. Monty’s arms almost hugged him as Smiley fell into the body. Their combined weight was enough to rip Monty off the hook, and they both fell into one big dead heap.

We’d made too much noise. Chuck would be around soon.

I used my tools and got the cell open in under a minute. It was coming back to me quick.

She said, “You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“I’m starting to get that feeling.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m okay.”

“No, it’s bad.”

Monty’s burning innards were smoking the place up. I reached into the cage and she took my hand and held it tightly between her huge tits and sort of fell against my chest. From what I could see, she was bruised but otherwise unharmed. In East Hollywood she would’ve been a video star. Monty would’ve loved the script: Cannibal Hippie Wasteland. I could imagine him framing shots all over the place, zoom-ins on the girl, icing down her nipples for the re-shoots.

I took off my jacket and helped her into it.

“My clothes are in the corner there,” she said.

I went and checked and found some ragged jean shorts and a torn halter top. The grill had erupted into a grease fire and I hoped it burned the whole goddamn town down. I turned and saw that she’d stepped over to Smiley and was giving him a few good kicks in the head. I went to the door, eased it open, and looked out. So far, no one was around yet.

“Come on, we’ve got to go.”

“Why do you have a gun?” she asked.

“To enforce proper civil conduct.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a soldier.”

“In the army?”

“In the Family. I’m an enforcer.”

She couldn’t puzzle it out so I just let it go. The Feds had come down and put my boss out of action, and instead of finding a new crew I’d just moped around and laid low and wrote scripts and plays. I was starting to have some second thoughts about my new life.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mary. I was hitchhiking and got lost on the highway. One of those hippie guys picked me up and brought me here. I thought it was a nice place at first.”

“At least you weren’t lunch.”

I started feeling light-headed and wondered if all the marijuana in the air was starting to affect me. I led her out of the building and the long way around town back to the car. We stuck to the dilapidated buildings beyond the compound and didn’t see anybody. Crazy Chuck was bound to be around. Little bastards like that didn’t just fade.

“Stay here,” I told her.

“Wait. Let me check your neck.” She tore off a piece of her halter and let those tits hang out against me and worked on trying to staunch the flow of blood. “Be careful.”

I got to the car and stood there for a second letting the sun pour over me. I scanned all the broken windows and rooftops and saw nobody. Then I raised the gun and put one through the windshield of the Mustang and said, “Hey Chuck, you want to get out of the back seat?”

It was just a guess but it worked. He opened the rear door and clambered out. He had Smiley’s meat cleaver in hand and leered through his beard and sort of fidgeted in the wind.

“You’re sweating now,” he said.

“Yeah well, it’s been a rough day.”

“It’s about to get worse for you.”

Rainbeaux moved out from behind the trough where she’d been hiding. She trained a 10-gauge on me and held it comfortably in the crook of her arm. She knew what she was doing. Goddamn it, never trust a chick whose name ends in ‘x.’

“And I thought we were friends,” I told her.

“Shut up. Drop the gun.”

I tossed it deep to my left, as far from Chuck as I could, so that the .32 bounced over the distant porch and skittered in the dust. If he went for it maybe I could make a run. I could get lucky and the shotgun spray might go wide.

“Move and I’ll blast your dick off,” Rainbeaux said.

I didn’t think that turning on my charming full-wattage smile was going to help me out here. “Sure,” I told her.

Chuck just stood there, jittering and brimming with so much unchecked energy that it bled out his eyes.

Third act finale.

I had nothing to lose so I asked, “You wanna tell me a little about what brought our relationship to this?”

Maybe he liked my attitude or maybe he just wanted to carve me up real slowly, but he stopped and took a deep breath and I knew I’d bought some time. Typical James Bond villain shit.

“Crops never did well in the area,” he told me, “but the community didn’t want to leave. Most of them were afraid that if we turned to the establishment for any kind of help we’d lose our freedom or be swallowed by conservatives. So we had to find another source of food.”

“I don’t suppose you considered just getting a job at Mickey D’s like everybody else.”

“Immensely poor grazing for miles around so the animals kept dying. We were forced to go to other towns and cities and raid their provisions. I didn’t want to be dependent on them forever. So an alternative was discovered.” So that was what he was calling it. “And how long has this been going on?”

“My father started it over thirty years ago.”

Son of a bitch. “Does he own a video chain in Malibu, too?”

“People like you locked him away long ago because he was a revolutionary.”

“I just bet. The rest of your clan doesn’t even know, do they? They don’t even know what you’re feeding them.”

“Some of them do. The most important members of our Family.”

Yes, I thought. The maniac cook would know. And Rainbeaux and perhaps a few others who’d have to act as bait out there on the highways. Catch the drivers in their broken-down cars and lead them off to their deaths.

Rainbeaux let out a low sexy chuckle that in other circumstances I would’ve enjoyed. She said, “I’m going to de-bone you myself.”

“Now you’re just being mean.”

She opened her mouth to answer but the only sound that dripped out was a small “erp.” She froze and her muscles locked so hard I heard her shoulders pop. The shotgun fell and went off, blasting the dirt.

Her hands trembled and drifted to her neck, but by the time they reached it Rainbeaux no longer had a head.

The decapitated body flopped in one direction and her pretty face tumbled in another. Behind her stood Mary, who didn’t look either pleased or disgusted by what she’d just done. She glanced at me and said, “Watch it.”

Chuck made a move for my .32. He was wiry and fast and chortled as he ran for it. All that wacky weed sure made these fuckers a goddamn giggly bunch.

For a short guy he had a loping gait. I tore ass and sprinted the twenty-five feet but the loss of blood was throwing me off. We got there at almost the same time, and he already had his hand on the gun.

I grabbed his wrist and was surprised at how strong the little bastard was. He nearly shrugged me off and we scuffled as the ghost town sighed and hissed and moaned around us. He knew some moves and worked at my ribs while I tried to get a hold of him. Skittering like a rat, Chuck could really slip and parry. He kicked the .32 aside and tried to swing the cleaver at me. I ducked aside and he chopped past my ear. I straight-armed him across his chest and the blade dropped. Chuck wheeled and went for the gun. I went for the cleaver.

This was it.

He spun and brought the .32 up towards my heart but he couldn’t pull the trigger. He stood there perfectly still, balanced on the balls of his feet and shivering slightly, with the cleaver bisecting his brain.

I’d slammed the blade down as hard as I could, and it had come to a stop directly between his eyes. He blinked once, and again, and the tip of his tongue jutted and flicked out across his bottom lip.

He was still standing when Mary and I got into the car. As I slowly drove off I kept looking in the rearview, waiting for him to drop, but he never did.

Almost an hour passed before either of us said anything.

“I lied before,” Mary told me. I tried not to be too distracted by her bare chest.

“About what?”

“I wasn’t a hitchhiker and they weren’t going to eat me. I was being punished.”

“Why?”

“For breaking the rules.”

“Which rules?”

“For saying I didn’t want to hurt your friend. I was hoping I could help him get his car started again and he could get me the hell out of here.”

It started to come together. “You were part of that Family. You were the bait.”

“Me and Rainbeaux. His car was dead though.”

“It was the fuel pump.”

“I’ve run away a couple of times but they always find me and bring me back. I’m sick of living out here, picking up stranded drivers and lost teenagers and turning them over to the Family. All this dust and those fuckin’ hippies playing the same damn songs on their guitars. You know they’re still protesting the Vietnam war. They don’t know any new tunes. They have nothing better to do.”

“Well, say goodbye to Masonville once and for all.”

She sat up straight as if I’d punched her in the belly. “Masonville?” She gave me an expression I couldn’t figure out, sad but sort of mocking too.

“It’s not Masonville. That sign at the start of town is all beat to crap. You misread it.”

“I did?”

“That’s Mansonville.”

Mansonville?

It stopped me. Chuck. Charles Jr. “You gotta be friggin’ kidding.”

Mary leaned back, beautiful and exquisite as we drove into the vanishing sun. She turned to look at me and my heart bucked again, and I thought this might work out all right. I’d met some of Monty’s backers and co-producers and I knew just what they were looking for.

“You ever wanted to be in pictures?” I asked.