Apeshit (4 page)

their shirts and roll up the windows.

“There’s probably some reasonable explanation for

it,” Desdemona says.

“Like what?” Jason says.

“Because of the variety of animals, I bet it has to

do with taxidermy,” Des replies. “Probably some taxider-

mist that lives up here drove down this bumpy road with his

pickup truck filled with dead animals he planned to stuff. He

probably didn’t secure them properly and they spilled out of

the back of his truck.”

“Bullshit,” Jason says.

“It sounds reasonable to me,” Crystal says.

But the farther up they drive, the less they believe

Desdemona’s explanation. Because up ahead, the animals

are bigger. They pass a few dead deer, a dead cow, and a

dead black bear.

“He could have had a big truck . . .” Desdemona

says.

“No way,” Jason says. “This is something far more

fucked up.”

Desdemona says, “Well, it’s obvious that these things

didn’t all die here. Somebody either put them here on pur-

pose or dropped them here by accident. Perhaps some hunter

without a permit dumped them here and—”

Des stops talking when she sees the hunter. There

is a man with a rifle in a hunting outfit, lying twisted in

the dirt on the side of the road. He is not moving and is

covered in blood.

They keep their shirts over their noses as they step

out of the van and approach the body. Stephanie and Rick

stay in their seats. Rick is too nervous and Stephanie is too

sick. Steph is extremely sensitive to smells and is already

on the verge of throwing up. Her face is in her lap as she

focuses on holding back the vomit, gagging and drooling

a little. The others can’t stop themselves from checking it

out.

The dead man’s face is busted open. His nose is a

scabby pulp. His limbs are curled backwards. Chunks of

meat are threaded into his bushy black beard. It looks like

he was hit by a truck or beaten to death by a dozen baseball

bats. There are flies crawling across his face and something

squirming beneath his skin. It looks like he has been dead

for days.

“Jesus Christ,” Desdemona says.

“He’s fucked up,” Jason says.

“You think?” Desdemona says.

“What’s moving under his skin?” Kevin says from

behind them, casually drinking a beer and eating a pork rind.

“Are those maggots?”

When Stephanie hears the word maggots she opens

the door and pukes on the road. Kevin laughs at her, but

nobody else thinks it’s funny. They are all on the verge of

puking themselves.

“I’m going to call the cops,” Crystal says, pulling out

her cell phone and walking around to the other side of the

van.

“What do you think happened to him?” Jason asks.

“Same thing as these animals, I guess,” Desdemona

says.

Desdemona leans in for a closer look at his wounds.

She covers her nose as tightly as she can. Then she puts her

tennis shoe against the corpse and tries to flip him over onto

his back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jason cries. “This is

a fucking crime scene. Don’t move the body.”

She ignores Jason and continues to push on the body

until it flips over. Once it falls on its back, the smell in the air

becomes twice as pungent and the flies leap into a buzzing

whirlwind. There were more flies on him than they realized.

Jason backs away. He doesn’t want to be touched by any of

the flies that had been on the dead body.

There are two holes in the dead man’s torso.

“Are those bullet holes?” Kevin says.

“I told you,” Jason says. “There’s fucking crazy red-

necks out here. They probably shot him.”

Desdemona kneels down next to the body. “They’re

too wide and shallow to be bullet holes. They are also too

symmetrical.”

“What do you think happened?” Kevin asks. He

chugs the rest of his beer and then tosses the can at the dead

bear.

“I think he was just hit by a truck,” Desdemona

says.

“And those holes in his chest?” Jason asks.

“Probably from some kind of hood ornament,” she

replies. “Like bull horns.”

“What are you, an expert in forensics or something?”

Jason asks.

“She just thinks she is,” Kevin says. “She watches a

lot of cop shows.”

Desdemona turns and looks up at them. “I think I’d

be good in forensics. I totally want to do this kind of stuff

professionally.”

“You?” Jason says. “Professionals don’t kick the

bodies over.”

Kevin laughs.

Desdemona makes a pissy face at them and then

turns back to the corpse to examine it further. When she

looks down, she realizes that the corpse is no longer on its

back. It has propped itself up and is looking at Desdemona

with its smashed-in face. The dead man is still alive.

He moans at Desdemona and grabs her by the ankle,

squeezing as tight as he can with blood-crusted fingers. Des-

demona screams. She falls to the ground and crawls back-

wards, but the man won’t let go of her ankle.

“He’s still alive!” Desdemona cries. “He’s still

fucking alive!”

“Holy fuck!” Jason says, stepping away from them.

Kevin lunges at the half-dead hunter. He tries to sep-

arate the man’s fingers from Des’s ankle but the grip is too

tight. Flakes of skin come off in Kevin’s hand.

“Get off this land,” the hunter says with a dry, croak-

ing voice. “You don’t belong here.”

Maggots crawl on his tongue as he speaks. The smell

coming out of his mouth is so rancid that both Kevin and Des

have to turn away. The man crawls through the dirt, trying to

get closer.

Rick jumps out of the van. He doesn’t realize the

man assaulting Des is the same man who was lying there

dead earlier. He thinks some crazy person has come out of

the woods and attacked her. While running at the man, in-

stinct takes over in Rick. He is the star kicker on the football

team and envisions the crazy hunter’s head as a football.

The kick connects with such force that it knocks him

backwards, breaking his grasp on Des’s ankle. Dried blood

explodes from the man’s head on impact, showering Kevin’s

shaved head and Desdemona’s bare legs with scab dust.

The hunter lands in the dirt and lies there. For a min-

ute, they think that Rick has just killed the man, for real this

time. But the hunter gets back up. He pulls himself to his

feet.

“I’m warning you,” says the hunter with blackened

lips. “Get the hell out of here. Just go.”

Then he runs off into the woods.

Stephanie is in the van brushing her teeth. She al-

ways brushes her teeth whenever she’s nervous. She has

brushed her teeth five times today already. White foam is

drooling out of her mouth onto her knees. Her mind is in

another place.

There is a knock at the window. Stephanie snaps out

of it. She sees Crystal looking in at her, tapping on the win-

dow with her cell phone while she’s on hold with the cops.

Crystal says
are you okay?
with her eyebrows. Stephanie

nods her head and then spits toothpaste out into an empty

beer can. She looks out the other window to see if the oth-

ers are okay. Kevin and Rick are comforting Desdemona.

Stephanie can’t tell if Des is laughing or crying.

Jason comes around the side of the van just as Crys-

tal gets off the phone.

“Are they coming?” he asks.

“Not for awhile,” Crystal says. “They said we don’t

have to wait around and can keep going if we want. They said

they’d call my cell if they needed any extra information.”

“That’s kind of weird,” Jason says.

“The weird part is that the old woman on the phone

acted as if she knew all about the dead animals,” Crystal

says. “As if it happens all the time.”

“What about the dead guy?”

“That’s even weirder. When I told her there was a

dead guy on the side of the road, she didn’t seem to really

care that much. Once it turned out that the guy wasn’t dead,

the woman said
oh, that’s probably just Alan. He does that

all the time
.”

“What the fuck?” Jason says. “What does he do all

the time? Get hit by a truck and then lay on the side of the

road for hours?”

“I don’t know,” Crystal says. “She acted like it was

no big deal. I even described how messed up he was and she

just said,
yeah, he’s been needing to go to the hospital for a

long time now. I’ll send Roy out to pick him up later.
”

“Fucking
weird
rednecks,” Jason says.

“Tell me about it,” Crystal says.

“So are we going to have to go back home now?”

Jason asks Kevin as he approaches.

“Well,
yeah
,” Crystal says.

Kevin shrugs. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“Nobody’s going to want to go to the cabin after

that,” Crystal says. “Especially Des.”

“Des still wants to go,” Kevin says.

“Then we should still go,” Jason says.

“Fuck no,” Crystal says. “It’s not safe out here.”

“We’re still miles away from the cabin,” Jason says.

“That Alan guy ran in the opposite direction. Plus he’s half-

dead and I think his eyes were missing. We’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?” Crystal asks.