By William David Higgs III
Seventy-two hours. That’s how long I had been awake. My downstairs neighbor blasted Korean soap operas at full volume. I would’ve told the asshole to turn it down, but the asshole was my landlord. Ms. Hwangbo. If her love of bad K-drama wasn’t enough, the hag was deafmute, which she compensated for by blasting the fuck out of whatever TV show she was watching at the moment.
I sat on the toilet and hummed along to the opening theme of Strong Girl Namsoon.
Super powers! Super duper! (boom-pow!)
I had a super power- atomic shitting! I strained. Veins bulged from my temples like purple vines. A rope of shit sploshed beneath me. I flushed.
Super powers! Let’s go!
“Son of a-!”
Water sprayed from the toilet, giving me an unwanted bidet.
“Goddamnit!” I screamed, leaping from the toilet. Water overflowed. Yellow droplets splattered on the mirror like a bloodstain. The turd clogged the narrow outlet, sputtering and gurgling like a drowning animal. The room reeked of shit, raw sewage, and, I sniffed the air, “is that Pine Sol?”
Green bile rushed to my mouth. My throat stang. I puked. Vomit and shit water mingled on the floor. The mixture, as I was about to learn the hard way, was slicker than microwaved K-Y jelly. I staggered to my feet and immediately slipped. My head thwacked the edge of the toilet bowl.
“That feels… cracked…”
I had to get the hell out of the apartment. Anywhere, just not there. I decided that I could go to the hospital or I could get drunk. I chose the responsible option. After all, I reasoned, I hadn’t drank since Friday.
”…and Saturday only comes once a week.”
I lifted myself from the floor, slipping on the supprant mixture around me like a drunken figure skater. I went to the living room and kicked through piles of laundry on the floor- crumpled turrets of boxer shorts, a t-shirt stained with week-old beer, easily the best smelling thing in the apartment, and a smoker’s jacket.
I tied a belt around my waist like the tassel of a prize boxer, opened the front door, stepped onto the concourse in sockfeet. The concrete was colder than a salamander’s ass in a frozen creek. I shifted my weight from foot to foot and locked the door and flew down the stairway.
Stones pressed into the cotton soles along the shoulder of Monsanto Avenue. I would’ve laughed at myself- half-naked, reeking of shit, shivering in the blue predawn. But I couldn’t laugh. I experienced what physicians call “concussive diminished affect.” Introducing one’s head to sharp edges and tile floors does that to a guy. The humor of my situation was clear to me. I just didn’t give a shit.
Time compressed, more of an accordion than a straight line. Crumpled. Uneven. Moments wrinkled like paper balled in a sweaty fist and thrown from a passing car. Much like the semi-truck speeding towards me as I…
“Get off the road, asshole!”
Sure as shit falls from a cow’s ass, I stood in the middle of the interstate. The horn blared. I jumped, less than half an inch away from thirty tons of steel, and landed ass-first on the shoulder of the road. I rolled down a grass escarpment into a vacant lot.
I dusted myself off and walked towards a building set against the rising sun. A squat, tin-roofed building, indistinguishable from the neighboring warehouses except for the EDM blasting loud enough to pop my eardrums. Oz Nightclub. Not the bar I wanted. But maybe, I thought, the bar I needed.
I was wrong.
I crept around back. The rear lot was a graveyard of booted cars. Yellow and pink tickets plastered their windshields. A milk crate propped open the back door. The smell of beer wafted into the night. I slipped inside.
The club was dark. Rows of blacklight shone from the walls, leaving pools of deep purple on the floor. Half naked bodies packed the club, painted up like circus freaks in neon paint. Colors swirled around me. I bumped into a few dancers, muttering apologies as I fought my way to the bar.
“Beer!” I shouted to the bartender.
He turned around. A glow-in-the-dark name tag read “Mickey” in bold, red letters. An alcoholic’s nose jutted from his face. Chipped buck teeth peaked over his bottom lip like a rat. He snapped the cap off a Guiness and slid it to me. The bottle clicked along the uneven surface of the bar. I palmed the bottle in one hand and reached in my pocket with the other.
“$8.”
“Ok.” I laid $10 on the table. “You got change?”
“Fuck you.”
I gripped the bottleneck tight enough to feel it give beneath my fingers. Any harder and I’d be playing go-fish for glass shards in a bathroom sink. I tightened my grip anyway. Harder. The edge of the bottleneck dimpled inward with a dull groan and imploded. Shattered glass clinked on the floor. Beer spilled onto the countertop, puddling around my hands. Blood trickled from my gashed fingers and sizzled in the beer.
“Be careful!”
“I asked for change…”
“Can’t do that. Club policy. Barkeep gets change as a tip, and I’m not giving your ass my tip.”
“Not even the tip?”
Mickey ignored me. He scanned the room for someone, looked back at me, scanned the room again. I recognized her. She was Ms. Hwangbo’s niece. Named Sue. Always seemed nice enough, although I had no idea what she might be doing at Oz. Or if her aunt knew she hung around places like this
I turned back to the bottles. But Mickey kept watching her. If I didn’t know better, I’d have taken the barkeep for a jealous ex.
I ordered another beer, then a Jack and Coke, then an indeterminable number of vodka shots. The alcohol cleared my sinuses. I took a deep breath for the first time in a week. I felt the phlegm in my chest break apart.
Getting drunk while concussed is among the more interesting things I’ve done. As the bass pulsed through the room, a serpentine demon slithering from the DJ booth, god of sound and fury and good times, alcohol exploded through the thin, liquid veil between blood and brain. I started to sing.
“Superpowers! Super duper!”
“Shut up,” Mickey growled.
I turned and looked at the barkeep and smiled. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve shut up. But I was concussed and drunk and on my third straight night without sleep. So I kept singing.
“Boom pow! Superpowers! Let’s go! Nan pogilan…”
Did I speak Korean? No. But who gave a shit? Not my drunk ass.
“I said shut up!”
Mickey’s nostrils flared. He slammed a bottle on the bar and stomped to where I leaned over the bar. I spat in his face.
“Motherfucker!”
I shrugged.
“Could I get another-”
Mickey punched me in the jaw. He stormed out from behind the bar and disappeared into the crowd. I ordered another round of shots, rubbing my nose and tasting blood in my mouth
I drank until I blacked out. I was walking on the riverside when I came to. Rain pelted my face, blearing the river through a thick curtain of murk. I found a piece of driftwood the size of a shopping cart and stooped for shelter. The branches did shit all to keep off the squall. I shivered.
Blood flushed my cheeks. I coughed and hacked green muck onto the mud, illuminated in the moonlight along with metal soda cans and broken glass. The tide lapped it up like a greedy tongue. I lost sight of it among plastic bags, bobbing in the brown water like jellyfish, soda cans. Flotsam gurgled to the surface like foam on cheap. Pieces of wood and mangled bits of plastic drifted along, carried southward to wash into the sea.
The water rippled. A woman’s corpse surfaced. Her skin was blue, oxygen starved blood congealed like oil sludge in frozen veins. She floated to the surface, as unthinking as the other trash in the water. I fished for her arm and pulled her ashore.
“Sue.” My guts knot up. “Oh Christ, Sue…”
Or what was left of her. I flipped her over. Her lower jaw had been torn away. Flayed tendons stuck out like frayed copper wire. A tongue wagged from the gore, forked like a serpent’s by a dull blade. Bite marks covered her from the chest down. I made out the imprint of large incisors, which had shorn through the skin like rat bites.
Mickey?
I rushed back to the apartment building. Whether the police pinned the death on me or not, she deserved to know what happened to Sue. Even if she was a cantankerous deaf bitch.
I passed Dead Creek. The water glowed like phosphor. Back in the 60s, the chemical plants dumped tons of perfluoroalkyls and foams into the water, turning the creek into a permanent funhouse attraction. I forded it. Water rose to my waste and I wondered if my kids would come out with three eyes or twelve toes.
“Who am I kidding,” I grumbled, “I’m not getting laid anytime soon.”
I came out the other side looking like I’d soaked my clothes in zinc sulfide. The glow from my smoker’s jacket lit up the gravel and weeds as I trekked along to the apartment complex. A few lights were on, shining through the windows like will-o-wisps. I could hear the goddamn TV in Ms. Hwangbo’s apartment from the far end of the parking lot.
Super powers! Let’s go!
Still watching fucking Strong Girl Namsoon. I knocked on the door.
“Hello?” I raised my voice over the TV. “Ms. Hwangbo! Are you home?”
The door opened. But it wasn’t the old lady.
“Well if it isn’t my favorite customer!”
Mickey smiled at me from the doorway. Blood stained his incisors, bits of gristle stuck between the rat teeth. His mouth was red-rimmed like he’d just won a pie eating competition. Grand fucking champ. A gun was in my face before I could back away.
“Come in.”
Mickey pulled me inside by the hem of my robe. Instantly the cloying scent of human meat filled my nostrils and I retched.
“Who that?!?” Hwangbo shouted.
She waddled in from the kitchen, a lit Virginia slim in one hand and a bloodied meat cleaver in the other. Blood dripped from the blade into a puddle on the floor. The puddle trailed off, a trickling creek of drained life, winding through cigarette butts and take out boxes to its source on the kitchen island- Sue’s severed head. Her eyelids had been cut out, plastering an expression of permanent surprise on her face. Pieces of limb and torso arranged semicircle around the head. Her splayed tongue had been stuck out and a lit candle placed on top of it.
“Nobody,” Mickey answered. “Just a friend of Sue.”
“Friend of Sue is friend of mine,” the old cannibal grinned. She walked to the table and picked up a hand and sunk her yellowed knubs of teeth into the flesh, squelching and tearing as she bit down, coagulated blood oozing around her mouth like black tar. She chewed. She stretched the severed hand out to me. “You want a bite?”
“No thanks. I ate earlier.”
That seemed to tickle the bitch sillier than an Evening at the fucking Apollo. Her gown rippled as she threw her head back in laughter. Silk print flowers bent at the blood-stained stems, their petals curling as if blown by coplanar winds woven into the fabric. Pretty fucking trippy, especially with the multiple head injuries working their magic. Mickey pressed the gun between my shoulders.
“Sit.”
“I’d rather stand.”
Visions of heaven exploded in my eyes. Mickey cracked the gun across my head and I stumbled to the futon.
“On second thought,” I groaned and sat down. I rubbed my head.
“You wonder why I do this to my niece?” Hwangbo asked. “You wouldn’t understand. She was very bad girl. Always out partying. Always drink. Always,” she slipped a withered arm around Mickey’s waist, “bring home bad men.”
“She was a slut,” Mickey chimed in. “And a cheating slut at that. Auntie clued me in that she was a hooker. So I figured the best way to get back at her…”
“… was to keep it in the family.”
Hwangbo wrapped her pruned body around Mickey like some kind of horny, geriatric octopus. I looked at my feet.
“Hey!” Mickey barked. “You keep your eyes up here, motherfucker!”
“Easy, easy,” Hwangbo cooed. “He won’t be problem much longer.”
She slank to the couch and sat beside me and rested the edge of the cleaver against my throat.
“Niece get in the way of me and Mickey. I tell him, ‘there a way to save her soul and be together.’”
“What can I say?” The rat-toother fuck laughed. “I’m a spiritual guy. Old lady tells me she is a… what did you call it, babe?”
“Manyeo. I musok lady. I talk to spirit. Spirit said to me, ‘Hwangbo, you must punish niece. Remove impurity from her soul.’”
“She comes to me asking, ‘you ever eat a whore?’ Shit! I have,” Mickey picked a painted fingernail from his teeth and held it up, a prize from his disgusting meal. “But not like this!”
The cannibals laugh. I heard that eating people gets you giddy and stupid, like being loaded or drunk off your ass. And the lovely couple sitting beside me were more slap happy than a pair of punchdrunk turtle doves. They started to make-out, a disgusting chorus of slobber and squishing, blood and spittle mixing in thick strands that smelled like the bathroom of a convention center. Mickey slipped up and sat the gun down. With reflexes fast enough to surprise myself, I grabbed the gun and fired a shot into his gut.
“Hey…” he touched his stomach and pulled back a hand covered in blood. Hwangbo leaned in and licked his palm.
“Salty, baby. Salty!”
She bit him. He screamed and punched her, the old lady careening backward into the couch cushions like she’d been kicked by a mule, and stumbled to his feet. I pressed the barrel into his chest and fired point blank.
Mickey stumbled backward. He fell through the coffee table and turned and looked at Sue.
“I’m sorry… baby…”
I looked over at Hwangbo. Her eyes were opened as wide as her niece’s. I shoot her through the jaw and kick her ass off the couch and stagger to my feet. I step over to the kitchen, averting my eyes from the rotting centerpiece on the island. I pick up an old landline and dial 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“Three bodies.”
I drop the phone, leaving it hanging by the chord like a futuristic tamarind.
“Sir, are you there? I’m dispatching police to your location. Sir? Sir?”
The voice receded as I walked out of the apartment and up the stairs. My door is still unlocked. There were already sirens in the distance as I waded through the shit ridden water pooled on the floor. I reached my bed and threw myself face first into the pillow.
And I slept.
Bio: William Higgs III is a writer based in the Midwest. He writes crime, horror, and bizarro fiction. In addition to writing, William experiments with sound design and multimedia art. He has written a book called, “Scanlon’s Overpass” it can be purchased below or in our Bookstore.
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