[Ambrose]

Four | The Source of the Smell

When Karen woke, she was wet. It took her a moment to figure out why. When she finally did, she wished very much so that she hadn’t. Cowboy was standing over her with an empty metal pale, the contents of which were now soaked in her clothes and on her skin. The contents looked and smelled disconcertingly like blood.

Then she remembered Carolyn and opened her mouth to say something. Something along the lines of what the fuck did you do to her you sick sonofabitch? But there was literally no saliva there and her throat felt like a dusty old catcher’s mitt that had long since made a noteworthy play. What she did instead was cough and this made her throat hurt even more.

“I could lube that for ya, Stacey Baby,” Cowboy leered. “Or would you prefer this?” He dangled a leathery orange canteen in front of her face. There was probably blood in that too, or maybe he’d finally brought out the skunk piss. She tried to grab it from him anyway but he just yanked it from her reach at the last second and cackled in that scratchy, high-pitched, nails-on-a-chalkboard laugh of his. She killed him a thousand times over with her eyes.

“Oohee, I like that look ya got darlin’.” He uncapped the canteen and took a generous swig, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Maybe I’ll leave that part of your face just as it is. Whaddya think?” But Cowboy didn’t care what Karen thought because he had capped the canteen, picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder like she was little more than a paper weight and it was then she began to wonder just how strong this lunatic was. In her feeble and dehydrated state, she could do nothing to discourage her being carried so she remained limp and let herself fold over his shoulder like a wet towel.

Cowboy carried her inside one of the rotten smelling shacks that was neither the “dining room” nor the chilled one with the butcher’s block. She didn’t think he was ready to cut her up just yet. He’d continue to torture her by torturing Carolyn. But what if Carolyn was dead? What if, God forbid it, that was Carolyn’s blood she’d been bathed in? What if he’d whipped her up into human pâté, and she was dessert? She tried to will Other Karen to come back, to laugh and howl at whatever Paco had in store for her. But Other Karen had gone off like a firecracker, and had been a very quick show indeed. Now she was back to her panicky old self. She willed herself to be strong, but the thought of being cut, having her flesh lacerated before her eyes, itched in the front of her mind like a bad mosquito bite. And now that Cowboy had had her, at least in the sense that he probably liked, he would be hungering for whatever might come next and that meant washing his hands of the present company, or in the present company.

When he set her down, he did so forcefully and she landed hard on the dirt floor, her head flopping to the ground. She got dirt on her lips and face and in her hair. She licked what she could clean, trying to steel herself for what came next. Unable to fight the apprehension any longer, she voiced her worry as though it were over the result of a little league game and not her life. She said, “What’s next in the itinerary Paco? Don’t know that one, huh? I-t-i-n-e-r-a-r-y?”

Cowboy spit loudly and grunted. “Bet you’d die of shock if I could spell Mississippi backwards. But don’t worry, you’re not getting off that easy.” He exited the shack and was gone for several seconds when the thought of running off into the desert heat, however foolish, became as tempting as early retirement. Then when she heard the sound that came shortly from outside the shack, that retirement suddenly seemed to come with a hefty pension. For what she heard was the sound of dogs growling and seething and soon she was given sight of two adult Dobermans which Cowboy held fast only by their collars. If there was anything that scared her more than a pair of Dobermans, she couldn’t think of it, and these two looked as though they’d waited their entire canine lives to sink their callous jaws into her arm or neck. And then it dawned on her why Cowboy had covered her with blood. She was now that cat on the other side of the fence and the fence was about to become immaterial.

She grabbed the nearest weapon she could find–a ramshackle old rake half buried beneath a veil of cobwebs from the corner. It felt hugely inadequate given the opposition. Just as effective might have been to sit down, lift her head and point an index finger at her jugular.

“Hey now,” Cowboy jeered. “That’s no way to treat a man’s best friend.” He paused, realizing the accidental irony, and then flashed a self-satisfied smile. “I’m sure they’d be a woman’s too with a little persuasion.” He let the dogs have their say too, and they did so by barking their heads off and snapping their teeth together. Karen felt her bladder, which couldn’t have held much at this point, squeeze down to the size of a baseball. Now she had a mitt and a ball and soon she’d be running the bases for her life.

She was just about to say that if the dogs killed her, he’d miss out on his fun. But right then, either he let go of their collars or they had snapped clean off because two very murderous Dobermans were bounding the short distance across the shack toward her. She had just enough time to swing the rake and swipe one of them across the snout to which it howled and spit and leapt a shorter distance backward. The other, it seemed, was more blood thirsty and before she could fully prepare herself for the bite it had seized her right ankle in its jaws and she was treated to a whole new world of pain.

Later she wondered if it was the inability of her dry throat to produce a proper scream that brought Other Karen back in full color. Suddenly she became a boxer who’d just been told that the guy in other corner who’d been giving her the beat down was directly responsible for murdering her entire family. The rules had gone out the door, and all that mattered was exacting sweet revenge on her pain giver. With a ferocity she had not known she possessed, she grabbed the Doberman that was biting her leg by the head, swung her body over it, and with a single determined twist, snapped its neck. The animal loosed a short guttural noise and then fell over dead, leaving only several freely bleeding gouges in her right ankle to let her know that it had been there.

The other Doberman, still apprehensive from being hit with the rake, stood at what it deemed a safe distance away from her and barked itself into a frenzied storm. Then it lost its restrain and pounced. Moving agilely, with no thought as to the fact that she was now spurting droplets of blood onto the warm dirt at the edge of the open shack, she clamped one arm around the animal’s head, got it into a headlock, and gave it several hard smacks on the nose. When it finally wrenched itself away, and turned to flee, she landed a good hard kick on its backside which sent it momentarily slipping on all fours and then it was gone into another shack, howling its surrender.

After the battle had been made, Karen slumped to the ground, limbs becoming weak, covered in blood, bleeding her own, and breathing heavily. She felt Cowboy’s eyes on her.

“Killed my dog.” He said simply. “That ain’t right. What do you have to say for yourself, huh?”

Karen felt the sudden urge to reach down Cowboy’s throat and rip out his vocal chords. “I have to say, I would have rather enjoyed breaking your neck instead.” The words were agony on her throat but worth it just the same.

Cowboy moved towards her, holding something long and pale and silver at the end in his hand, and it was then she realized this was her only chance. He’d had his fun, one of his dogs now lay dead, and the show was over. Now he’d be directing the encore with a meat cleaver and her drugged out and in all likelihood naked and sprawled atop the butcher’s block. And that wasn’t, in any stretch of the imagination, what she had in mind.

Summoning her remaining strength, she sprang to her feet as quickly as she could and bolted out into the courtyard with the solitary well and the muddy truck a little ways beyond. The thought occurred to steal the truck but with no keys and Cowboy in hot pursuit, a slight detour was in order. So she veered into one of the other shacks and was quickly caught up in a game of cat and mouse. Fortunately, the shack she’d chosen was bigger than the others and had multiple rooms. She ducked into one of the rooms at the far back and hid behind a motorcycle and a tandem bicycle that happened to be parked in the middle of the room. Along with the bike and the motorcycle, there was a jogging trailer, a cooler, several boxes of clothes, and a surfboard with two of its tail fins broken off. Whether out on a jog with the pram or coming back from a California vacation, Cowboy had found them and treated them to his own special brand of Southern hospitality.

Her heart, which had already found a good speed from going knuckle-to-paw with the devil dogs, was now cranked to full gear. She was also breathing quite loudly, despite her better efforts. If Cowboy walked by the room, he’d likely hear her. Thinking fast, she found a dusty sneaker inside one of the boxes, which she discovered with some disgust had a good deal of dried blood on it, took aim at the window in the adjacent room across the hallway, and flung it as hard as she could. The shoe flew true to its mark, breaking the glass. Somewhere nearby, Cowboy made a sound like the agitated squeak of a rat who’s just had his tail stepped on. There was a crash of things being pushed recklessly out of the way, followed by boots stomping down the hall, but before her pursuer had a chance to inspect her handiwork, she was already climbing out the window on the other side of the shack.

Karen made her way back to the dining room, going through the neighboring shack as quietly as she could manage while still satisfying her ever growing desire to get the fuck out of there. When she tripped over something stiff and sour-smelling, she had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming. Smelling a dead body, even knowing that it was lurking somewhere nearby, and seeing a dead body, were too entirely different things. It was a woman, or what had once been a woman, the face of which could now best be described as moldy macaroni, her nude body clutching its skeletal frame, and looking at her made Karen deeply squeamish. Her breath caught in her chest when she thought that it might be Carolyn, but this was merely fear talking, because this body was obviously days, maybe even weeks old.

Quickly, she moved past, finding several more bodies scattered throughout the shack, all women, all nude, all dead. And all of them stunk to high heaven. Then she came to the shack with the dining room, now eerily deserted, and began to look around. There was a small kitchen and in it, still stewing over a crackling fire, a large black pot that likely contained the late Molly Walker. She walked past this to the fridge, where she found a jug of clean water that she gulped down like air. Then she started to look for a weapon; there were some kitchen knives in a drawer, a screwdriver, the hammer still lying on the dining table beside a bloody nail, but the gun was nowhere to be seen. She was thinking Cowboy still had it on him when she heard something (apart from the cries and gaddamits of Cowboy throwing a fit somewhere nearby). It was coming from what she guessed was a tool shed in the far corner of the kitchen. There was a hook-and-eye latch on the door, and she proceeded to remove it gingerly, should she have the misfortune of discovering that Cowboy had a third Doberman, and when she opened it and saw what was inside her heart felt a good deal lighter. Carolyn was sitting against a wall with her knees pressed to her chest, whimpering quietly. Her hand had been crudely bandaged, no doubt to prolong her misery. When she looked up and saw Karen, she made an equally alarmed and excited Mmm noise. Karen shot her finger to her lips. Carolyn nodded, and was on her feet. The two of them crept as quiet as church mice from the kitchen to the back of the shack where a little ways beyond the hot trailer stood, giving off the threatening vibe of future confinement.

Cowboy was, to their benefit, making enough noise at this point to let them know precisely or at least to within a good deal of precision where he was searching for one of them. Curses popped and sizzled like grease in a frying pan, and Karen knew then that Cowboy was truly cookin’. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if he found them. They needed to disappear. About fifty meters from the trailer and where they stood was a large red cliff face overlooking the shacks. Vaguely marked in the sand beneath it was a path which wound its way up the slope of the cliff base to a craggy dark mouse hole in the rock–the entrance to a cave. Just then, they heard Cowboy enter the kitchen which they had left only a moment ago, heard him scream like a psychotic chimpanzee upon opening the tool shed and finding it empty, and just then they started to run.

Karen raced for the cave with Carolyn in tow, her right leg giving fierce protest. Now that the adrenaline was fading, the bite on her ankle felt like a bear trap wound. Pain spiked up that leg every time she put her weight on it, making her breathe in sharply and falter her course. Carolyn, realizing this, did what she could to help Karen along and threw her arm over her rescuer’s shoulder. By the time they reached the cave entrance, Karen was sure to look back and see a wild-eyed Cowboy charging up the slope after them.

And sure enough… he was.

“Fuck.” Karen blurted. And then, “Quick… into the cave.”

Going into the cave was probably a bad idea. No, it was a horrible idea. But Karen couldn’t think of a single good idea or option available to them. Indeed, all the ideas at this point served only the purpose of putting as much distance between themselves and that unholy collection of shacks as was humanly possible. And if it meant she’d have to run blindly into a dark cave, trip over a stalagmite and break her neck, then God was indeed merciful.

In the dark, Karen was sweating and panting and cursing. Her ankle now felt like it had been jammed full of porcupine quivers and drenched in liquid fire. She wanted to collapse both from exhaustion and pain. Carolyn had fully taken over the role of navigator and was now forcing her deeper into the cave. At some point, both of them forgot their fear for a moment to become fully aware of the smell. Karen, who’s stomach already had every right to be queasy, yielded once more to the tsunami of discomfort and spilled the rest of her long-ago breakfast onto the cave floor. Carolyn began to cough and gag beside her. After a moment, she said, “What is that?”

The smell was both sour and sweet and Karen recognized it immediately as the smell of the macaroni woman. Only it couldn’t have just been one macaroni woman, but dozens of them, trapped and rotting away at the bottom of the cave. This is where he takes them, Karen thought in dawning horror, this is where he finally buries them.

Suddenly she felt an immediate revulsion at the thought of treading over more bodies, their feet crunching through rotted flesh and bone. But then she heard a husky growl, turned to see Cowboy’s large silhouette at the entrance to the cave, and there was no question: they’d run until they reached a dead end.

And run is exactly what they did, though in Karen’s case, it was really more of a hobble. And when, after several heart pounding minutes of moving haphazardly over uneven ground, during the course of which Karen kept imagining Cowboy’s hand reaching up out of the darkness and grabbing her from behind, the cave finally opened up into what, in the glimmer of torch light, would have been an expansive cavern, extending over a pile of skeletal forms, the two women had at least enough of their wits about them to do what they had originally intended to do and hid.

Karen found herself behind the pile of skeletal forms which had the decency, if a pile of skeletal forms can have decency in the first place, of looking only like an amorphous black mass, with Carolyn clutching at her side. When they heard Cowboy enter the cavern, they both ceased breathing entirely, which wasn’t all that hard to do seeing as the air down here possessed more death and decay than a leper camp. There came shortly a crunching noise. Boots tramping over something brittle. Then a raspy, squeaky voice. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Heavy breathing, more crunching.

Silence.

It was like, Karen thought spookily, playing hide and go seek with the boogeyman. Then she realized it wasn’t like playing with the boogeyman at all, it was playing with the boogeyman. Right about that time the hair on her arms pricked up and she was treated to a delicate dance of pins and needles on the nape of her neck. A cold sweat rolled down her face. Still holding her breath, she felt as though she couldn’t breathe even if she’d wanted to. Her lungs had vanished entirely. She might have been able to endure Cowboy’s wickedness in broad daylight, but in the depths of the cave his evil seemed to pour out of him, surround them, as though it had become the dark itself.

There was a movement behind them. Karen gave a start and swiveled her head, squinting uselessly into the gloom. Carolyn’s hand, which previously had been resting lightly on her arm, now clamped down like a vice. There was a whimper like a candle flame, first flickering, and then going out completely.

It was time to go. Karen could just make out the faint glimmer of light surrounding what had now become an exit. She was just about to stand up when Carolyn started screaming next to her, her voice echoing off the walls, magnifying itself. Then a rough hand did grab Karen from behind, and she felt a hot, terrible breath on the back of her neck and heard that raspy, squeaky voice in her ear.

“Boo.”