Aftertaste Page 9

  Sometimes heroism shows up in stupid ways. Zilch had never met this goofy-looking kid before in his life, but for reasons that elude even him, he jumps in the path of the slashing blade. He could even hear it whistling, as it cuts the air, angling for Chev—and he could really hear when the whistling stops, slicing Zilch from the bottom of his rib cage to his belt in one butter-smooth motion.

  “What the hell?” Zilch manages. But the attack goes unnoticed. He’s shoved aside, bleeding and making the WTF face, immediately forgotten. Apparently, the smell of blood kicks something primal awake in the young men; they crowd Chev, far outnumbering him, and he’s lost under a pile of hard hats and pit-stained tank tops.

  Meanwhile, Zilch stands off to the side, bleeding from a gash in his belly that’s deep enough he can see pink stuff inside. It’s vaguely pornographic and, like the sting of being caught by your mother indulging in some blue film, the slice hurts almost as bad.

  Blame the heat, blame the blood loss, but the mind ventures to weird places sometimes. Memories surface, and perhaps when you see your life flash before your eyes it starts with the freshest, most recent stuff. For Zilch: something he learned about Internet culture just yesterday morning. Did Galavance call it scarfing?

  It stings—he doesn’t have the means to numb himself up first, which he recalls correctly was part of the “challenge”—but he sinks a hand up to the wrist inside himself, and, well, who would ever expect guts to be so slippery?

  Beefy Ben turns, jaw dropping, chew spit dribbling down his chin.

  Blood swells behind the blade and dribbles out onto the ground, down the front of Zilch’s pants, dotting the street at his feet. He’s almost got the organic necklace ready for the runway.

  Every single young man before him has turned to a dead-eyed statue. One runs away and gets in his truck—but doesn’t drive off, just watches from behind the windshield holding the sides of his head. Darryl vomits. Chev’s eyes are saucers above the hand he’s clamped over his mouth.

  “Am I doing this right?” Zilch says, chin to chest.

  No one answers, but no one’s fighting anymore either.

  He curls a hand deeper into the wound—Wow, it’s really warm in here—and grabs the squiggly loose noodle of guts and …

  “Up and around like this and … ta-da! Scarfing!”

  Zilch has a good length of purple intestine out of his guts and looped it over his shoulders like a drag queen’s boa, a biological lei. He stands there, bleeding profusely, holding the knife in one hand, blood up to his elbow on the arm he used to dig inside himself with, a look on his face meant to ask: so, how do I look?

  One of the young men has his phone out and it takes Zilch a second to realize the man isn’t making a call, but is recording this display. Behind the lens of the camera phone, Darryl, puke on his shirt, has gone glassy-eyed.

  Zilch wears his guts and with one step forward, the entire crowd shatters apart, everyone scampering away from the man wearing his own guts like a necklace. Chev backpedals until he’s backed up against a truck and there’s nowhere left to go. “You Chev?” Zilch asks.

  Palms out. “Uh, yeah. Don’t hurt me, man.”

  Zilch realizes he still has the utility knife in his hand. He zips the blade down and tucks it into his back pocket. He raises his empty hands to show them all he means no harm, but it seems that wasn’t what was bothering Chev really. The flesh rope around his neck starts to slide and he catches it and nudges it back up into place. “So you saw the Lizard Man? Did I catch that right?”

  “He looked … more like a big toad to me, but … yeah … I seen it.”

  He turns back to the other guys. “Anyone else got anything to tell me? Any of you guys see any other weird shit that I should know about?”

  Darryl swallows before he speaks: “Besides you?”

  Zilch picks his shirt and suit coat up off the dirt with his clean hand and points to the canary yellow Honda Civic with the coffee can muffler. “That yours?” he asks Chev.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “I was about to go fishing with my buddy, actually, and …”

  “Has he seen the Lizard Man as well?”

  “Yeah, he’s like the local expert.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Tag along?”

  “You mentioned fishing.”

  “Oh, right. Sure, man. I guess.” Chev looks him up and down. “But you’re all bloody. I’m sorry, dude, but my car, she’s just been cleaned and …”

  Zilch sighs and unloops his intestine from his neck and starts to stuff it back into his abdominal cavity. As if on delay, another one of the construction guys vomits.

  It takes a few pushes to get it all packed back in. When he’s finished, Zilch reaches for a roll of duct tape left behind when everyone skedaddled. After wiping down his hands, he does some quick patchwork, then replaces the tape to the hook on his belt. “Thanks.”

  Zilch drops the bloody rag at Beefy Ben’s feet and throws his shirt back on and buttons it, then examines himself to make sure there’s nothing leaking through the white material. He puts his suit coat back on and buttons what remaining buttons can be buttoned. He looks up at Chev, who’s holding his key cars limply—his eyes at half-mast and his bottom lip white as fresh cement.

  Zilch gestures over his entire person with both arms. “No leaks. Happy?”

  “Say, man, if you wanna go by the mental health clinic, I know where it is. My sister, she’s a bit off her rocker—not saying you are, just that we all get weird sometimes—but I know where it is, if that’s where you might … wanna go.”

  “I just wanted to get away from those fucking rednecks,” Zilch says.

  “You and me both, man. Make my life a living hell, those shit-heads.” They speed down Kit Mitchell Road. Apparently everyone nowadays drives like they’re outrunning something.

  “So you had video of the Lizard Man, huh?”

  “Yeah, ripping the hell out of Darryl’s car. Is that what they were doing to you, messing with you because they thought you did it or something? I swear those dickheads would kill their own mothers if they thought someone had messed with their ride. I had that video, man, and then it was gone and now … of course, they don’t believe me.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “For getting me out of there? Hell, you don’t have to apologize for that. I was just there to get my toolbox from the site before heading up to the lake.”

  “No, I meant the video.”

  “Say what?”

  “Let’s say that I wasn’t directly involved, but I think I know who it was who erased it from your phone. If it caused you any trouble—on their behalf, I apologize.”

  “I don’t get it … you some kind of hacker or something?” Chev says. His eyes go wide. “You one of the men in black? Government guy? I swear to Baby Jesus that those movies I downloaded—I had no idea they were pirated. I like paying for my shit, man. Fair and square. Honest, I do. Ask anyone.”

  Zilch laughs, shakes his hand to brush away the confusion. “Go ahead and download as many movies about pirates as you want. I’m after the Lizard Man. Frog Man. Whatever. The icky thing with a pension for ripping up cars, apparently.”

  “Back there, how’d you do that? That shit looked so fuckin’ real.” This happens. People twist themselves into pretzels trying to rationalize the unrationalizable. I didn’t see that. I didn’t. And if I did, it wasn’t real. Haha, not real. Not real. Nope.

  Zilch takes the reflector he found last night in the driveway out of his pocket. With the sun streaking into Chev’s car, it creates geometric rainbows that dart around on the ceiling and across the console. Chev brings the car to a stop outside a gas station and before getting out to pump, he notices the lightshow and becomes mesmerized, eyeing his car’s ceiling with the same captivation a cat would give a laser pointer’s elusive red dot.

  “Trippy,” Chev says, playing his hands around in front of the reflec
tions, letting the shapes shift and swell and collapse on his palms. He seems kind of unaware that Zilch is the one making this happen. He puts it away, Chev blinks, and Zilch can see the young man’s brain click back on a moment later.

  “Was your buddy with you the night you got the video?” Zilch asks. He slides a finger between the buttons of his shirt to make sure the duct tape is holding fast. Be a shame to get some “fake blood” all over his new friend’s seats.

  “Naw. He was the reason I was taking it,” Chev says. “I knew he’d want to see something like that. He’d kill me if he knew I didn’t try. I was just out there at the house—you know, where I was about to throw down with Ben a minute ago?—and cleaning up for the night. And this thing just comes right up out of the swamp right there and starts going to town on Darryl’s tuner. Like, ripping the dubs right off and taking apart the hood. With its bare hands, like it was nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. Busted out the phone to take a video to show Jolby and—”

  “Wait. Your friend’s name is Jolby?” There couldn’t possibly be more than one idiot in the area with that same moronic name, could there?

  Chev brightened. “You know Jolby, dude?”

  “Through the grapevine.”

  “Huh,” Chev says. “Small world.”

  “Yeah,” Zilch agrees. It certainly fucking is.

  Chev gets out to fill the Civic’s tank and goes inside to pay. Zilch remains in the car and can actually feel the air warming up inside. Fighting with the uncooperative crank to lower the window, he notices his hand is shaking. Like he’s strapped to a malfunctioning mechanical bull. He did some meditation stuff back in school—a hippie chick named Namaste briefly owned his heart—and while some of the ohm-ing helps, the pain cannot be tamped down completely.

  Chev emerges from the gas station with a wildly colored can of energy drink and a prepackaged sandwich cradled against his barrel chest with one hand, while his other hand is holding a phone to his ear. He isn’t good at being nonchalant, and since he’s probably talking to Jolby about pot and a meeting place to get stoned, his eyes are darting around everywhere as if cops are going to rappel down from the gas station awning any second. He’s also paying a lot eye-time to Zilch, trying to be cool about it. Zilch gets the clear impression Chev is talking about him, to Jolby.

  Zilch wonders if Chev uses his Civic for a place to get high and perhaps, combining with the leftover bufotoxins and some marijuana fug permanently soaked into the Civic’s interior, if he’s not getting some kind of contact buzz by accident. He ignores it, and eventually Chev gets in and ends his call. The moment they drive out of the Texaco, the pain shifts from Zilch’s new belly-slit back to the neighborhood of his skull; the compass has turned back on, and loud. Its needle settles between Zilch’s eyes, dead ahead, pointing out over Chev’s hood, in the direction they’re heading at eighty-nine miles per hour.

  Despite having just disemboweled himself not even half an hour prior and survived a clash with a giant amphibian just the night before, Zilch is still holding on for dear life and watching the world zoom toward him. Tick by tick, the hurt in his head swells.

  They pass a wooden sign with inset letters painted yellow: Cardinal Park.

  Chev parks in the lot overlooking a muddy beach littered with twigs and fallen leaves. There are some other vehicles, of the tree-hugger’s variety—electric or hybrid with bike racks and dangling tie-downs for boats. Across the way, at the far end of the lot, is a shockingly green car that matches Chev’s modification for modification: the mammoth whale tail, hood scoop, fire extinguisher proudly displayed in the rear passenger window. Familiar. Very familiar. In fact, it wouldn’t look out of place parked in the garage of 1330 Whispering Pines Lane. The engine is running, exhaust seeping out of the tuba-sized exhaust pipe. For a moment Zilch can’t see, a rush hits him that makes the world whiten to nothing around him. Just noise. Kids on the beach down the way, a motorboat buzzing past. The pain defies words.

  “Over here, dude,” Chev says, calling out of the static of agony crushing Zilch’s brain.

  Recovering, Zilch approaches the car as Chev doubles over at the waist, dodges left to right, trying to peer through the glare bouncing off of the heavily-tinted windows. Zilch, cradling his screaming brains, comes up beside him and he can’t see if anyone is inside, either. Even when they’re right up on the car, all he can see is his and Chev’s reflections—side by side they look like the number 10.

  Chev knocks on the driver’s side window. “Anybody home?” The window zips down to reveal a young man with a shaggy head of hair plastered to his head. It suddenly smells like marijuana smoke mixed with peppermint car freshener.

  “Hey, man,” Jolby says, languidly. He smiles at Chev, nodding, as if some kind of unspoken inside joke had just been exchanged. He notices Zilch a half-beat later and his eyes dive down. There is a rustling of Ziploc bags, hollow glass, and the trademark clink of a Zippo lighter closing as Jolby scrambles to conceal his stash.

  “Don’t freak,” Chev says, “He’s cool, man. I told you about him. Remember?”

  Jolby’s eyes pinch to slits. “You didn’t say nothing about him looking like a fed.”

  Zilch steps forward. “Hey, Jolby. Your buddy Chev here says that you’re the go-to guy for anyone interested in the Lizard Man.” Don’t say anything about knowing his girlfriend, Zilch cautions himself, it might spook him more than you already have. “Maybe, if it’d be okay, I could ask you a few—”

  “Dude, show him that thing you can do,” Chev interjects. “Check this shit out, Jol, the dude’s some kind of FX dude. He can make it look like he’s scarfing. Do it, dude!”

  “Ah, maybe not here.” Zilch looks around. “There’s families with kids around.” There actually isn’t, but he’s not exactly into the idea of pulling his guts out twice in one day.

  “You already messed up the prosthetic or whatever you call it, just take the tape off and do it.”

  “What do I get?” Zilch asks.

  “Uh …” Chev stammers, ducks his head into the Accord, and confers with Jolby in a hushed murmur for a moment. When Chev pulls his head back out, he’s smiling.

  Jolby says: “You wanna know about the Lizard Man, man?”

  Zilch nods.

  “And you ain’t a fed?”

  Zilch shakes his head. He gets a tingle of something—paranoia, maybe. But this is the best lead he’s got and pushes it aside. “Do we have a deal?”

  “All right,” Jolby says from the driver’s seat window, “if you do whatever it is that Chev seems to think you can do and it’s cool as fuck, I’ll let you ask me anything you want.”

  “How much do you know?” Zilch asks.

  Jolby gives him a crooked smile that doesn’t make it to his eyes. “Quite a bit. Quite a bit.”

  “How about this?” Zilch asks. “You ever see this one?” He does the thumb-removing trick that used to get a real rise out of his nieces. “Whoa, look at that! I can pull my finger off! Now it’s back on. And off again! Come on, nothing?”

  Both guys chortle and wave a dismissive hand at him.

  “If you got some kind of movie special effects under there, let me see it,” Jolby says. “Quit clowning, dude.”

  Zilch sighs. “Fine.”

  He unbuttons his shirt and peels away the license plate-sized patch of duct tape. Underneath, the nanobugs have only gotten the two sides of the wound partly glued back together with tenuous strips of new pink muscle and flesh. He silently apologies for wrecking their work and takes a moment before shoving his hand through the fresh membrane in hopes that the nerve endings are still being ignored in favor of the wound and it won’t hurt too bad. His fingers slip through, and it stings. With a sound like stirring a bowl of mac and cheese, Zilch pushes his hand inside himself to the wrist. Jolby gasps and Chev chuckles half-heartedly, acting as if he wasn’t close to peeing his pants back at the house. Zilch’s pain flares up as he digs. He knows doing this will kill off who-knows
-how-many more scarabs, bugs he cannot spare, but if it buys him information, so be it. It has to be done.

  Again, he scarfs. With the hot rope of guts around his neck, he puts his arms out and asks, “Ta-da. Satisfied?”

  Jolby openly cackles like a braying donkey, shoving a balled fist to his mouth and howls with morbid delight. He swears, reclaims his dropped joint, and stares. Chev has seen this show before, but still watches with a smile, a soft toothless U on his face that says that he is really, really keeping his fingers crossed that the whole thing isn’t real.

  Jolby is now out of the car and extending his hand for Zilch to shake. He doesn’t mind that Zilch’s hand is smeared with blood, apparently, because he just takes it without even looking and gives it four solid snaps of the wrist. “That is fucking epic, man. Consider yourself part of the fucking crew from this point on, man. Jesus Christ. I’ve never seen anything like that.” With an index finger, he pokes the guts hanging from Zilch’s neck and Zilch, surprisingly, finds himself protective of it, as if Jolby had just prodded his bathing suit area. But he plays into it and allows Jolby to lean in close to examine the intestine, even going on to comment that it smells like what he’d imagine guts to smell like, like a deli.

  The two of them seemingly satisfied, Zilch unwraps his guts from his neck and tucks them away. He replaces his silver duct tape patch. It’s lost some of its tackiness and he has to really slap it on against his belly to get it to stick. He buttons up his shirt and coughs nastily into his fist. A final bubble of pain bursts.

  “Come on, let’s go take a cruise on the Bud Boat,” Jolby suggests buoyantly as he locks his car. He and Chev start heading down the trail to the lakefront beach and nearby dock. When Chev looks back, Zilch waves a hand, bent at the waist and breathing heavily. Things feel … tingly and itchy all of a sudden.

  “I’ll catch up to ya,” Zilch sputters. “Just need to reset the special effect blood pack thingy—just in case you guys make me do this again,” he says.

  Chev nods, reluctantly turns, and continues down the trail.