Before Joe could answer, another shot rang out followed by another thought-scattering screech from the mountain. This time, Joe did wet himself. “I think someone is shooting over at the Leonards’ place!”
“Get me out of here, Joe, now!” Becky pleaded, holding the baby close to her.
“Come on, move!” Joe shouted as he rushed out of the trailer and into the darkness, the shotgun leveled and scanning the area for threats. In the deepest recesses of his mind, Joe suddenly knew they were in mortal danger, if not worse. Another shot rang out, followed by another.
Becky broke from the front door and rushed passed Joe, little Becky screaming in her arms. To Joe’s right, another trailer’s door slammed open, and Annabel stepped out. She was drenched in blood, more than Joe thought a single body could actually hold. It ran down her face, matted her hair, and made the logo on her tired t-shirt unreadable. Her eyes were wild, like that of a frightened animal, and in one hand, she held tightly a large chef’s knife.
“Shut that little shit ball up!” Annabel screamed.
Another shot rang out as Becky scrambled to get the door of the Chevy open.
“Annabel?” Joe said, hurt by the woman’s words, afraid of her appearance, and certain her husband no longer lived.
The woman took the single step to the ground and began to rush towards Becky. “I said shut that fucking brat of yours up!” Another shot rang out from the Leonards’ place, and the loud explosion seemed to have no effect on Annabel as she stalked forcefully towards Joe’s family.
“Annabel! Stop!” Joe shouted.
The screech came again, forcing the entire scene to a nightmarish level.
When the Chevy’s door slammed closed, Annabel stopped briefly then turned towards Joe. Another shot lit the scene briefly.
“You dog fucker!” she screeched as she sprinted toward him, the knife held high.
Joe fired at her, the lead slug catching her in the upper chest, tearing free her arm and shoulder, exploding her chest far enough back to add color to the rusting chrome of Annabel’s trailer. Becky screamed. In the distance, but somewhere within Blissful Acres, another gun barked repeatedly, rapidly.
Joe ripped the Chevy’s door open and leapt into the cab. Little Becky was still screaming, and Becky was weeping uncontrollably. He rolled the aging engine over and backed the car up. There, in front of him, suddenly stood Grandmother Leonard, a ridiculously large revolver in her hand. She pointed it directly at Joe and pulled the trigger.
The round pierced the windshield neatly, missed Joe by very little, and exploded the dirty back window into the bed of the pickup. Mother and child screamed at the same instant as Joe took a quick inventory of his face. He floored the gas pedal, and the Chevy spun down slowly, then lurched forward, striking Grandmother Leonard full on. She flew back and hit her family’s trailer where she slumped to the ground. Joe jerked the wheel over and smashed the gas pedal again. This time, the Chevy responded quickly, and the truck raced through Blissful Acres and toward the distant exit.
People were milling about everywhere, and Joe worked hard not run any of them over. They were all blood- splattered and armed with various things, from knives to guns, axes to baseball bats. The entire trailer park had gone mad, murderously mad, and Joe wanted nothing more than to get his family out of there.
They made the main strip and he turned right, still going at an alarming speed. He hoped the transmission could keep up with his need without vomiting pieces of itself on the dirt road.
“My mother’s is the other way, Joe,” Becky advised in a thin whinny voice.
“We are going to the trooper’s station down on McGee,” he stated, still not wholly the master of his own racing thoughts.
They sat in silence for some time, Joe contemplating his killing of two people, Becky trying to wrestle the torturous fear she had endeared that day. He slowed the truck as a fog began to lift around them, making the road a bit harder to see but not so much that he felt the need to stop. He rounded a bend and turned onto McGee, now just a few miles from the trooper station.
In the distance, a large and well-lit vehicle came into view through the fog. It was large, yellow, and carried before it a plow, and on top, a yellow strobe light screamed in two directions at once.
“Why the hell would Billy have the plow out now? It’s not snowing,” Joe wondered aloud.
The plow lifted a bit on the front of the truck, and it changed lanes to head right for them.
“Joe!” Becky screamed.
“Holy shit! Get down!” he shouted as he jerked the wheel over to the next lane.
The plow mirrored this lane change, again heading right for them.
“Joe! What’s going—?”
“Get down, on the floor, Becky!” Joe screamed as he pushed her down to the floorboard and cut the wheel once more. When he looked up, he saw the plow enter the windshield as the trucks collided bodily. The edge of it caught Joe in the teeth and removed the top portion of his head. The force of the impact sent his head rolling to the top of the plow and then back into the cab, salt, dirt, and sand stinging his eyes. Joe’s brain sputtered a moment and eventually ceased to think.
The dash of the old truck bent in and over Becky and the baby, trapping them neatly in a pinch of metal and fake leather trim. The shock of the collision had knocked the wind out of her, and the baby shot into the cushion of the bench seat and back into her mother’s body where she began to scream wildly. Becky felt and tasted blood covering her face and knew she was injured.
She tried to work herself out of the tight confines of the ruined dash to give the baby more room to move and breath. She forced her head passed the bench cushion, still unable to draw enough breath to scream for Joe, and saw Billy looking down at her.
His eyes were wild and mad, and his face bled freely from the numerous police badges that hung from the flesh of his face and neck.
“Hi there, Becky. Time for you to go!” he announced gleefully and forced the barrel of a police service revolver painfully into her eye. Before she could move, the gun fired, and Becky’s head burst across the remains of the dashboard. She no longer felt the pain that had racked her body, heard the screams of her little girl, or saw the second shot from the revolver, which brought the inside of the truck to a death’s silence.
Chapter 19
The deepening darkness brought no end to the nerve-grating howl. It had begun near dawn and continued throughout the day. There was no pattern, no repeated length or crescendo, just random nerve-ripping, spine- gripping, indescribable screeches. The constant tearing at Rich’s nerves had pushed him up to and then far beyond his threshold of tolerance. His senses, now swamped with an overbearing rage, were no longer his to control, and visions began to invade his sanity.
He had tried to reason with himself, to convince the voice in his head that being angry at some wild animal’s voice was unreasonable, but it simply prolonged his torturous slide toward insanity.
Julie had fared worse than he, she had always been a bit touchy and borderline enraged. When customers had come in, either to shop for their farming needs or to attempt escape of the mind-ravaging wail, she snapped at them, even threw old Ted Barton out for the color of his shirt or some such trivial thing. It was near closing then, but Rich could not afford a lost customer, especially a regular, and it set him off in a bad way.
“Julie! For the love of God!” he screamed at her, customers still milling along the isles, holding their hands to their ears, eyes clamped tight.
“Fuck you, Rich! You can just go to hell!” she screamed back, then threw an old metal stapler at him.
He ducked down in the isle to avoid the hurled stapler and found himself staring at the edge of a long- handled sickle, the Mike Hansel brand sickles he had just gotten in. His eyes fixed on the already sharpened edge, coated in some day-glow green rubber to keep the clumsy from cutting themselves. The rage that he had been able to hold at bay found a wicked beauty in the finely honed edge, and following the curved shape with his eyes seemed to lead his thoughts to a place where the unreasonable suddenly became reasonable…and now Julie most certainly needed to die.
