33
By now, the McEejits had worked their way through three of the four cave-ins, Merideth bitching and swearing the entire way. Some of the holes Joe had pulled in or knocked through hadn’t been as easy or effective as the first.
Joe helped his mother through yet another hole and she flailed the Rolling Pin of Death around as she struggled, catching Joe here and there. He bled all over by now, but she didn’t care.
“Serves you right with this stupid fuckin’ idea,” she said, out of breath.
She fell out onto the cave floor with an abruptly-curtailed “Fuck!” and Joe helped her to her feet.
“Asshole,” she said. “Help me over to the wall, I need a minute or two. Catch my breath.”
“Sorry—” Joe assisted her to where she wanted to be and was about to apologize for the fortieth time when Merideth shhhhed him . . . they heard voices.
“Did you . . . ?” Merideth began. “Did you hear that someone’s about to get DPed? Is someone about to be double penetrated in this cave?”
“Double-penetrated?” Joe shrugged. It seemed unlikely, but any answer would likely get him smacked again.
“What the fuck?” she said. She moved to get going again, but stopped, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “No, I need a minute. Go ahead and see if there’s anymore of this shit to get through.”
Joe took the flashlight and walked ahead, leaving his mother wheezing in the pitch black of the cave. He thought to leave her there altogether and just go back the way they came, but he saw that the cave tunnel turned into a Y-shape, the passage off to the right narrower than the left, an offshoot of the main system.
Curious, Joe turned down the right passage and after a short way he saw what looked like a poorly-installed door—like a cheap bathroom door for the home, thin and hollow, with a simple twist lock. He put his ear to the door, but didn’t hear much, so he tried it—it was unlocked. Behind the door was a manmade, dug-out room full of twenty or thirty withdrawing Meth- and Crackheads. The smell suggested that it may as well have been full of Efunibi’s carcass lab shrines—their appearance was also not far off. None said anything, but stood slowly and staggered past him out the door and down the passage into the darkness, like a horde of non-flesh-eating zombies who simply wanted their fix.
Joe wondered how long they’d been in here—it was hard to tell because they were usually so thin to begin with. He followed them out, not thinking too much of it—surely they’d find their way through the openings he’d made and to freedom. So, he turned up the left in the Y and found another cave in.
“Damn,” he said to himself. Then he found a big stone that jutted out enough and sat down. He was pretty tired. This had been a bad idea, but that wasn’t entirely his fault. He didn’t watch the news.
After a few minutes, he had almost dozed off, so he got up, stretched, took a deep breath, and headed back down to retrieve his mother, when his mother yowled in what sounded like both fear and anger.
The Tweakers. Joe ran.
As he arrived with the sole light source, he found his mother wide-eyed standing like a barbarian with her Rolling Pin of Death locked in her fists before her—it was pretty bloody. On the floor lay a few Tweakers who were probably better off having been put out of their misery. The rest, some injured, felt their way around the pile of rubble. One was already climbing through the opening.
Joe wished he could lead the poor buggers out to safety, but—
“Who the fuck are these people, Joe?” Merideth screeched.
“It’s okay, mom. They’re just some Geekers I found locked up down a passage. Well, not locked. . . . They’re going to migrate out and into the community.”
Merideth was still pretty frazzled.
“Well,” she said, panting. “Is there anymore shit to get through?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Damn it!”
“But it’s got to be the last. I mean, we heard voices, right?”
She grabbed the flashlight from Joe. “We heard something. Come on. We gotta be close.” Joe followed.
34
Fulva—wide-eyed and veins popping—had lost her shit altogether and chased Rupert around the lab again, this time swinging her Derek Peterson flail, screaming about DPing everyone, and occasionally having a go at him with the weapon. Jesus tried his best to stop her, but the vacillating Peterson flail was too much of a deterrent. The fact was, it was highly unlikely that she could kill anyone with it, but if she caught someone with a corner—there looked to be a couple of hardcovers in the book stack—that could be pretty painful, so no one wanted to make contact. Also, if she managed to knock anyone out with it, the presence of MeeMaw’s double-ended Whackin’ Dick made the threats of DPing a little too feasible for anyone’s sense of comfort, so Rupert kept running and avoiding, and Jesus kept looking for a way to incapacitate Fulva.
But she handled the Peterson flail like a warrior—a thin, croaking, Little Girl yoga-pants-wearing, bloody, pink-haired warrior. Bill had begun to come back to life, the whacks of the dildo perhaps getting too much for even his catatonic state to ignore. He covered his head and rolled around under the lab table, seeking to dodge MeeMaw’s ghostly dildo wrath while Fulva hoarse-screamed at him to help her—neither of these things could have been very stimulating to Bill’s self-esteem.
And then, the entire cavern started to shake, building into what felt like an earthquake, but if Rupert’s memory of the Virginia show cave tour served, earthquakes wouldn’t translate with as much strength, if at all, this far underground. Besides, Florida wasn’t known for its earthquakes. Other off-putting things, yes, but not earthquakes. As everything rumbled and wobbled, everyone became—somehow—more confused than they had already been, overloading their systems and halting their festival of flail-swinging and dildo-whacking. Then the first stalactite hit the ground, breaking into pieces, and then another larger one, then several small ones.
Everyone screamed and ran, this time seeking shelter from the falling, stony death from above. While Fulva dove under the flimsy and collapsible table with Bill—which perhaps wasn’t the greatest idea—Rupert and Jesus fled to the perimeter and pushed empty barrels out of the way to press their backs to the walls. Through the falling stalactites and accumulating debris in the air, it was difficult for Rupert to see what went on and where everyone was. But he heard a cry and moved along the wall, kicking each barrel out of the way as he did, so he could at least see what he’d be dealing with next. Three final barrels away, he could see that a large hole had been knocked through from the other side of the cavern wall.
Rupert didn’t even know there was another side.
Before he had a moment to consider what it could be, a massive aloe-like tentacle flopped through and squirmed forward into the lab area, searching. In an instant, he recognized the black ridges and knew it was the Plant with No Name, but now it was immense—Rupert wondered if someone had slipped it some more embalming fluid. Instinctively, Rupert knew the giant aloe plant meant him no harm. The rumbling stopped, the pointy death rocks stopped falling, and the throbbing tentacle lay there.
Silence descended over the cavern and everything settled. Jesus found Rupert near the tentacle and looked at him. Then, as if both remembering at the same time, they swung around to the interior of the lab, looking through the dusty haze in the air for Fulva. Or Bill. Or even MeeMaw.
But there was nothing. Looking around, Rupert saw that a large stalactite had fallen directly onto the double-sided pink dildo, no longer glowing, and had split it in two.
That must have been the scream, Rupert thought. MeeMaw was nowhere to be seen and he breathed a small sigh of relief, if not for himself, then for the sake of the poor, long-suffering Bildo.
Then a noise did catch their attention—a strange whimpering and what sounded like paper ripping. Exchanging another look that determined the need to investigate, Rupert and Jesus searched under tables until they found Bill. And Fulva.
They had not been crushed by falling stalactite. Fulva looked to have had her face smashed in with a smaller stalactite, but not from having fallen from overhead. Bill still grasped it in his hand like a club, mumbling and crying, and his face was covered with fresh, non-ostrich blood spatter. With his free hand, he tore pages out of Derek Peterson’s Bareback Militia, crumpled them up, and shoved them into what was left of Fulva’s mouth, utilizing the pointy end of the stalactite to push them down her throat.
Somewhere in Bill’s incoherent blathering, Rupert made out something about “who’s getting DPed now?”
“Whoa,” Jesus said quietly. “That’s bleak.”
“Yeah,” Rupert replied. “Wasn’t expecting that.”
“I was, sort of, but not in this context.”
“It’s . . . a bit much, eh?” Rupert said.
“Overkill,” Jesus responded. “Unnecessarily gruesome.”
“I guess it makes some sense.”
With that, they backed away, back toward the pulsating tentacle—its end curled and uncurled, as if beckoning them.
“We don’t know what happened to everyone else,” Rupert said. “I mean, Bananas and Bucket were sinking in a country club pond. Last I saw Joe and Merideth, Joe was non-responsive, and she was . . . ” He stopped, deciding it best not to reveal that he might have murdered an old woman with a kid’s bike, not even to Jesus. “Um, they could still be on the way.”
“Truth.”
“I think we need to get through this hole here,” Rupert said.
Jesus looked at him.
“Seriously, I don’t think the plant will attack. It’s been pretty non-aggressive since I’ve known it. Kind of an asshole and perhaps emotionally abusive, but definitely not physically aggressive.”
Jesus took a deep breath and moved toward the hole and tentacle.
“I gotta get my bag and papers,” Rupert said. “Be right behind you.”
Jesus replied something that sounded affirmative and then disappeared through the hole. Rupert stuffed all of his lab notes and blueprints into his cross-body bag, and as he slung the strap over his shoulder and approached the hole, the giant tentacle released a gas right into his face.
“Come on . . . ” Rupert wheezed.
Sock it to me...