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spookyspaghettisundae · 10 months ago

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Only Echoes Remained

The dark of night was still hours away. Even so, the pine trees in these Appalachian woods conspired with a thick fog and gray skies to suffocate the light, coating their world in a gray mist.

Despite the wintry cold trapped inside the car, and the stench of cigarettes caked into every piece of fabric, Braylon Turner was sweating bullets. Leroy had told him to keep the old car’s lights off while they drove through the woods, up a meandering and narrow path into the dark heart of Bumfucksville, Nowhere.

Leroy was also sitting on the backseat with Jimmy “Changa” Chance, keeping the muzzle of a revolver jammed into the spot where Jimmy’s jawbone connected to his wiry neck.

Gun metal had scraped the skin raw there, turning it a deep and uncomfortable red. The skin around it glistened with sweat, just like Braylon’s creased forehead.

Whenever Braylon met Leroy’s gaze in the rearview mirror, Leroy looked cool. Cold as ice.

Grim in his expression, Leroy mostly stared ahead, as if he was driving the car himself, while he kept that gun close to Jimmy, keeping the smaller man in a one-armed bear hug. He not only lorded twice the body mass over their hostage, he had something Jimmy didn’t: Leroy used to work as a gun-thug for one of the local gangs.

Now, coal from the mines had turned the edges of his fingernails black. Like the fingernail on his index finger, curved around the pistol’s trigger with skill and grim certainty.

Certainty that he could squeeze that trigger, and certainty that he had no qualms of painting the backseats red with Jimmy’s insides, whatever consequences be damned.

Leroy carried all that in his aura. A darkness. He had shot and maimed and killed people before.

The car slowed. Its old brakes squealed as the vehicle stopped.

At a crossroads.

“Where to next?” Braylon asked.

“Right,” Jimmy squeezed out.

Braylon stepped on the gas and they continued on.

Jimmy started whining again. “Look, guys, you might not give a shit about how much trouble I’ll get in by doin’ this? But you don’t know who you’re fuckin’ with if you wanna go—”

“We know and we don’t give two shits, you lil’ rat-shit weasel,” said Leroy. “We better be there soon, like you said, or I’m about to give this lil’ gun a test drive on separating your brains from your brainpan.”

He gave a painful shove of the gun’s muzzle into Jimmy’s neck for emphasis.

“Okay! Okay! Jesus, fuck, calm down, man! You’ll get your money back, okay?”

Braylon flinched. He didn’t care about the money. He cared about the twitch in his fingers, the sickness in his stomach, and the yearning for his next fix.

The money had always only ever paved the way. The goal had always only ever been the sweet release of the soaring heights beyond that.

Leroy, on the other hand, fundamentally disagreed. He growled. The former gun-thug might have genuinely wanted to hurt Jimmy.

“Our money,” he growled. A strange way to put it, as it had been, at this point, Leroy’s money that Braylon had smoked. “You, what—you get your rocks off on squeezin’ some poor assholes for all their savings while they kill themselves?”

Jimmy protested much and pointed at the rearview mirror to accuse Braylon. “Look, man! Look! You tried to sell some o’ that product, like every other two-bit junkie, and here—”

Leroy jammed the gun into Jimmy’s neck again and sneered.

“Shut the fuck up, weasel. You gonna complain now about dogs be eatin’ dogs? You’re lucky if I let you walk outta all this alive. I put other shit-kickers six feet under for less.”

Braylon slowed. The curves of the dirt road were treacherous, the path littered with muddy ditches—one mistake, and they’d get the car stuck, stranding them in some backwater woods for days. According to Martha, there was a clan of cannibals living out there, too.

Dirt and grit from the coal mines marked Braylon’s fingernails just like Leroy’s. Shaky hands danced between the weathered old steering wheel and the stick shift as he switched gears, making the car snake more slowly through the forest.

Leroy hissed at him.

“Don’t fuckin’ slow down now, man. We got places to be.”

“Why’d you… why’d you d-do this, anyway?” Braylon stammered out.

Leroy didn’t answer. He glowered into the rearview mirror, meeting Braylon’s gaze.

“Keep your eyes on the road, man.”

Braylon knew better. He did as Leroy said.

Part of Leroy just wanted his money back, but they were friends. They had been digging coal together for the past two years, drinking together sometimes, and sharing their grievances and grief in all the quiet moments in between.

Leroy had given up on his old dreams of big money. Whatever he was doing now, with Jimmy in his iron grip, he was doing all this for him.

His meaty fist dwarfed the silvery pistol in his clutches, just like he dwarfed the spindly Jimmy in his grip on the backseat.

Braylon licked his salty lips, hungry for some kind of freedom, hungry for the impending release he envisioned to be awaiting him at the end of this road.

That’s why he did as Leroy said. He kept his eyes trained on the prize, on wherever the dirt road curved around the trees and frosty mounds. He pictured himself inhaling those poisonous clouds of smoke, and finding the release from his lousy life that it always brought him, however ephemeral, however temporary—however harsh the crash back into reality ever followed. Time bled from future into past.

He’d soon be doing that, sitting on a porch, inhaling toxic smoke. Flying high, on strange wings, all horrendous pain be damned.

And then, they were there.

A small, old cabin awaited them in these woods, separated from a smaller shed. A rusty old pickup truck stood parked in the driveway. Ice had turned old leaves and pine needles into spiky clumps of dirt all around.

Even the snow stayed away from these grounds.

A bald, old, and grizzled-looking man stepped onto the cabin’s porch, sporting a stained apron and foggy plastic goggles strapped over his eyes. His silvery beard looked unkempt, but long, and speaking volumes of a long life to boot.

His rubber-gloved hands held nothing. His whole posture portended a quiet power, a certainty to rival the grim reaper’s very own image. The old cook stood still like a statue, staring at their car as they arrived, pulling onto his sorry lot.

The goggles and his stony expression masked whatever the old cook might have been feeling or thinking while he watched the three men emerge from the car.

Braylon, a sweaty and haggard mess he had never seen before in his life.

Jimmy “Changa” Chance, another sweaty mess, whom Leroy had beaten bloody enough to not kill him outright, but just bloody enough to make a point. Was his nose broken? He had sure complained about it enough on the long ride over.

And Leroy, of course—a mountain of muscle and bad attitude, exuding a cosmically dark aura, yet dressed simply in a plaid jacket and dirty jeans, like he had just crawled out of the coal mines where he worked with Braylon.

“Jimmy,” said the old cook, drawling out the name with deliberate contempt. Slowly, deliberately, he started removing his rubber gloves. Even slower than that, he said, “Never a pleasure to see your dumb ass ‘round these parts. Now, to what do I owe this dishonor? Thought I had made myself clear about our… business arrangement.”

Jimmy scoffed. It almost surfaced as a laugh, cut short when Leroy shoved him, forcing him down onto his knees, where the frozen dirt crunched.

Leroy answered in his stead. “Listen up, and listen carefully. I don’t give a shit whatever the hell your old business arrangements were, ‘cause we’re here for a different kind o’ business. The business o’ gettin’ our money back, and the business o’ getting my good friend here some o’ the product he’s owed after this little rat-shit right here kept fleecin’ ‘im for the shirt on his back.”

The old cook lifted his goggles, revealing a steely, cold gaze. He studied Leroy. Then he scanned Braylon up and down, piercing his soul whenever they made eye contact, however brief.

The cook didn’t even spare Jimmy another glance.

He didn’t offer any words in answer.

Leroy squinted.

“You hear me, or are you hard o’ hearin’ in your venerable age?”

The old cook smirked, scoffed.

“Hear you loud an’ clear, stranger,” the old cook grumbled. “I can offer you product, but I can’t offer you money. Ain’t got nothin’ here. I put my money in the bank, just in case some yahoos like you show up, tryin’ to rob little ol’ me.”

Fear bubbled up in Braylon’s gut. His attention bounced back and forth between Leroy and the meth cook, losing hope in them winning whatever kind of match this was.

Leroy wiggled his nose and frowned. He shook his head.

“And by ‘bank’, you mean that mean son of a bitch over in that holler we passed on the way here, ain’t that right?”

The meth cook slowly nodded, eyes locked onto Leroy. He grunted in the affirmative.

“Tom, man, come on, man,” Jimmy started babbling. He slapped his hands together, and still being on his knees, looked like he was praying to Old Tom Reed, the meth cook, like he was praying to God alimighty. “Come on, man! Give ‘em somethin’! Give ‘em whatever they want, I’ll make it up to you, okay? You ever hear about what this guy here did? This is Leroy Morin, he—”

Leroy kicked Jimmy in the hollow of his back, sending him his knees down deeper, face-first into the dirt, where new streaks of blood soon seeped out of fresh scratches.

“Shut the fuck up, rat-shit, I ain’t in the mood. I’m only gonna say it one more time, then I’m sendin’ you to your maker.”

Leroy cocked the hammer of his revolver to underline his words.

Jimmy complied. He didn’t even dare to get up from his knees, staying there on the ground, with stray pine needles flaking with the dirt from his leather coat.

The cook slowly bunched his gloves together in a fist, pursed his lips, and nodded.

“Sure,” he said, yet he locked his gaze onto Braylon instead of the gun-toting man he was answering. “I don’t want no trouble, and I ain’t gonna seek no quarrel with y’all. My daddy ain’t raised me that way.”

It was like he could sense the disease in him. Not just the addiction, or the visible discomfort that rode in alongside the pestilent horseman of withdrawal. But the greater sickness, the one deep within, the creeping death…

Did he know?

Asked the cook, Tom Reed, with the gravity of an executioner, “You wanna sample my product, son?”

Braylon licked his lips.

Was the meth cook going to try anything funny?

It didn’t feel that way.

That stony gaze, that grave-like certainty. Tom Reed exuded a darkness even more misty and overwhelming than Leroy’s presence.

Braylon shot Leroy a glance. His friend returned a cold stare.

Leroy almost sang when he threatened the old cook. “No funny business, Tom. Give him his fix, and we talk shop. Ain’t nobody else need to get hurt today.”

Then it all happened so fast. Anticipation contracted all time, compacting it into a tiny cube. The addiction drove Braylon, carrying him atop the waves of his dreamy haze.

Agreements were made, though nobody shook hands. The tiny flame of the lighter was cold, so cold, but the smoke burned so good.

Before long, the smoke from the pipe rose to join the gray mists in the Appalachian woods, as Braylon sat on Tom Reed’s porch, inhaling his favored poison, and it began to cloud, and eclipse everything. The smoke and its poison ate away at the frayed edges of time, fraying them even further—

Twilight turned brighter, the voices of the men speaking turned sharper, clearer, and that clarity all spilled, washing over into Braylon’s consciousness.

The air out here had never been fresher. Why, why did he hate his home state so much? Even between the skeletal trees in winter, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by supposed cannibals, and backwater gun-thugs, Braylon now saw beauty in everything. A fleeting insight, but a powerful one nevertheless.

Another hit. He was soaring. His mind was soaring. He felt so alive, and all the shit in his life felt so far behind him, like it had never even mattered to begin with.

Braylon even embraced the beauty in the death awaiting him. The uncertainty of it entered his consciousness—how much had he spent on the meth when he could have saved up to have a doctor find out if he really had the cancer that haunted his nightmares?—yet his mind painted it all with beautiful strokes, vague and emotional, filled with love, and self-destruction in equal parts. Ethereal, spectral, human.

Sacred dirt. Frozen, crunching underfoot. Flying high. Men and insects were all alike under God’s vast sky, Braylon reckoned.

Another hit, and he was swimming. An ocean upon an ocean, floating on the waves above darkest depths, riding a high so high that he was inches away from touching God in the heavens with his very own fingertips.

Or his brain was bleeding on the inside.

Then the demons attacked.

Winged shadows, huge, swooping down from silver skies as shadowy streaks of death, cutting through the peaceful forests with their braying cries, and their tearing claws, and beaks shaped like swords of unholy judgment.

The men screamed, scrambling inside, and the unreality of Braylon’s trip admixed with the horrible reality of their situation.

They cowered inside Tom Reed’s cabin, hidden from those hell-beasts.

And whatever clarity Braylon had imagined to perceive from the others talking all around him, he now barely grasped whatever they were saying until a new panic gripped him—all his skin slick with sweat, and dripping with the stink of his terror—and Leroy’s meaty fist gripping him by the fabric on his shoulder, shaking a shred of sense back into him.

“What the fuck,” Jimmy blubbered. “W-w-what in the ever-loving fuck are those things?”

“Demons,” breathed Braylon, firm with belief. Harbingers of doom, arriving on their leathery wings to drag him to hell.

Drag him down for all he had done, to his wife and son, to his neighbors, and even, to some extent, to his only friend left, Leroy.

Had he said that all out loud, or just thought it?

“Shut up. You’re high as a fuckin’ kite,” growled his friend. Leroy added, “You got any guns in here?”

The question wasn’t meant for him.

Tom, the old cook, shook his head in response.

“Don’t need ‘em, don’t need more risks of blowin’ my place sky-high when I got—”

Leroy snarled, “You fuckin’ kidding me? I only got this six-shooter, I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to take down even one o’ those things. They are gargantuan!”

Tom Reed peered out a window, hiding in the shadow of the corner nearby.

The old man kept his voice down, but failed to mask any hint of irony when he said, “I’d say ‘gargantuan’ is an exaggeration, but each of ‘em is about as big as your car, I reckon.”

By contrast, there was no exaggeration in his description. One of the two beasts had pounced on Braylon’s old Dodge, crushing the metal and blowing all windows out of their frames. The creature unfurled its massive wings to a frightening span, creating a menacing silhouette perched upon the car’s wreckage.

The other beast screeched from atop the cabin’s roof. More dust rained down when it pounded against the wood, thumping around, seeking a way inside.

“No, seriously though, what the fuck are those things?” Jimmy asked again. His voice shook like someone stuck in a powerful earthquake. “Lemme go! We can make a run for it, lemme go!”

His cheek smooshed against the dirty floors of Tom’s cabin, as Leroy kept Jimmy buried underneath him with all his weight and mass, pinning him down with his gun still leveled at Jimmy’s neck—as if he had to fear Jimmy running away more than the terrible creatures outside.

Braylon himself, he couldn’t make any sense of it. He curled up into a fetal position underneath a table, as if that would help anybody.

“Christ, man,” Leroy snarled, “get a grip.”

Time had stopped contracting. Now, it expanded, stretching thin, reaching into a dark infinity. Was this death? A different death than he had always envisioned for himself, a quiet darkness instead of the beeping devices all around him while he rested on a hospital bed?

Even so, Braylon had not seen how Leroy got up, releasing Jimmy, or how they had argued, screaming at each other, while more dust rained from the ceiling, because the beast trampled upon the roof, flapping its furious wings.

When the tears had started streaming, and clouding Braylon’s vision, he would never be able to say with certainty, for he screwed his eyes shut more than once in despair, clouding his sight entirely, turning everything into the senseless blur and cosmic joke that reality had descended into.

Jimmy ran from the cabin’s front door after their screaming match, panting in panic as he ran towards the trees, hoping to evade the winged beasts by seeking other cover.

“Idiot,” Leroy had muttered, peering outside after his lost hostage, mere seconds before the carnage.

The beast that had trashed Braylon’s car pounced on Jimmy—he didn’t even make it halfway to the trees. Claws shredded him, and a long, blade-like beak picked away at his insides. Thrashing human limbs turned limp. Mighty wings flapped; once, twice, always beating like thunderclaps, as the flying monster lifted off again, carrying Jimmy’s mangled corpse into the misty air.

Blood still splattered to the ground with red chunks before the creature disappeared with him.

“That’s a dinosaur,” Tom Reed muttered, wagging a finger at the foggy window, and taking fearful steps back away from it.

“Bull-shit,” Leroy drawled out in a snarl.

His eyes flashed with horror. The horror of helplessness, of not knowing what to do, or how to escape their predicament. They were under siege by these two beasts.

The pistol in his hand never looked tinier.

His eyes also flashed with knowing, with recognition. A glance he shot Tom’s way only confirmed that he believed what the meth cook had just said, even if he claimed the opposite. Even if he repeated it.

Tom didn’t bother disagreeing. He kept his eyes on the space outside.

The stretch to his old pickup truck. Short enough to make the run, but so far away that the creature on the rooftop could snatch any of them like the other had taken Jimmy.

Then more dust rained from the ceiling, and the wood of it began to groan and crack. The silhouette of that sword-beaked beast painted itself against the gloomy gray sky where its claws tore open a hole to the outside, and it screeched—

A screech so blood-curdling, so high-pitched, it made Braylon’s blood boil. He burned with dread, and he grew wings, wings to carry him away.

The haze never helped him, it never truly had. Like all other addicts, it was more convenient to believe the contrary, though. He always ran from his troubles, soared higher above the highs that he inhaled from his meth pipe, thinking that those troubles all looked so small and insignificant from the loftiest of heights.

His wings, they carried him outside. The high made him feel faster, stronger, luckier. Happier. Maybe if he just believed hard enough, the imagination would become a truth.

He remembered his son’s smile as he ran from Tom’s cabin. Braylon ran despite Leroy’s shouts, despite his only friend trying to stop him from running out into the woods.

Alone.

Some part of Braylon understood everything, but the high eclipsed the low. It was almost like he could see himself from the outside, a little man, a loser running away, running for his life. Pathetic, yet capable of survival.

He ran like hell and he made it. Unlike that little rat Jimmy, Braylon made it to the trees. And beyond.

The last he saw of Tom’s cabin was a glimpse of that winged hell-beast, rampaging on the cabin’s rooftop, shredding wood and sending splinters flying in every direction. The firecracker’s clap of Leroy shooting at the beast from inside the cabin. And the creature, high on its own bloodlust, perhaps distracted by a bullet, didn’t even notice Braylon running away.

And the silhouette of the other, carrying Jimmy’s corpse into misty hell, was long gone. Had he imagined it? Was all of this just a nightmare he was about to wake up from?

Braylon’s lungs screamed at him.

How long had he been running? Moments, minutes, or hours? His sides hurt, his feet barked, and fresh blood coated his hands wherever he had scratched and scraped his leathery palms on the dry, cold wood of the infinity of trees around him.

The woods spun in endless circles, and dizziness set in.

Had he truly gotten away, or just slipped into another purgatory, descending ever closer to hell?

The high was gone. Reality kicked him in the back, and the stomach, and the teeth.

Braylon was hurting all over, and his lungs would not permit him to run any farther. Guilt gripped him, and wind cut like a knife against the cold sweat on his forehead, all squeezing him down to his heart—

He had abandoned his only friend. He had abandoned Leroy.

As much as the world spun around him, he spun around in the opposite direction, lost in the woods, recognizing nothing, oblivious as to where to go.

He wanted to run back, to Tom’s cabin, to find and help Leroy, so they could both get the hell out of there. Or was he just selfish again? Knowing he couldn’t make it on his own?

How the hell could he have left him behind like that? What kind of monster was he?

“The pathetic kind,” he muttered to himself, in the middle of nowhere, crashing down onto his knees, sorrier than ever before in his sorry life.

More moments or minutes passed, and clarity crystallized with the same cutting coldness as the wintry winds howling all around him.

That’s when the chittering and scuttling sounds began. The shuffling, the squeaking, the chirping.

Buzzing.

Wings, far tinier than those of the pterodactyls that had attacked Tom’s cabin.

Swarms of them.

The forest grounds teemed with strange life. Insects the size of dogs covered those frozen grounds, swarming, chittering, chirping, and closing in on Braylon. From every side.

They vaguely reminded him of locusts with their sleek green limbs, but also of wasps for their slender, and deadly-looking shapes. Sticking to the ground, they scuttled and swarmed towards him.

And in that moment, Braylon felt no more panic. Only resignation. He knew deep down his time had come.

Still dizzy, he spun around, seeking for another way to run, and quickly giving up, surrendering to the bleak reality of his situation. The inevitability of it engulfed him.

It was almost liberating. With no decisions left to make, he only tasted his own sickness, and accepted defeat. He still hurt all over, and there was no way he could fight and win against these… things. There were so many of them.

He would try— just like a final gasp escapes the dying lungs—he would thrash and fight back, powered by the same animal instinct that drives any creature under the sun to fight back in the face of their impending doom. Future and past melted into present, coalescing with growing clarity.

Before the inevitable fight to delay his death, he saw no escape. The swarm of these huge locusts was all around him, offering nowhere to run to, no possibility of getting past the living flood of buzzing wings and snapping mandibles.

They were so fast as they scuttled towards him. He never could have outrun them, not even in the wildest dreams that came with his highs.

“I’m so sorry,” was the last thing he managed to utter.

Braylon wasn’t even sure whom it was meant for.

Everybody, probably.

Then the swarm converged on him and buried him alive. Started eating him alive. Snapping mandibles tore at flesh. The buzzing drowned out everything but the screams.

His own screams eclipsed his every thought for the next few minutes until he could scream no longer, and only echoes remained, coupled with the burning sensations of pain that accompanied him in the final moments of his gruesome death.

Echoes through time.

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