Dark & Angry: Five Hard-Hitting Horrors

Dark & Angry

Five hard-hitting horrors

Mike Zimmerman

Smashwords Edition.

Copyright ©2011 by Mike Zimmerman.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Introduction

So these are some angry ones. Sick humor tales are in Dark & Looney, tortured stuff is in Dark & Twisted. Dark & Angry? Self-explanatory. One common trait throughout these tales is youth. Is anger reserved for the young? Maybe. An angry old man is never called that. He’s called bitter. Anger ruins you that way. I won’t give away any details here about whether the characters in these stories are ruined by their anger. I just hope you enjoy yourself while finding out …

--Mike Zimmerman

Saliva, Sunburn, and the Scum of the Earth

The woman in the surf cried CRAB! and started to hop and splash. She was a tomato, a real looker in a flowered bikini, and her yelps and bounces were most welcome to me. But her face wore pain and that frantic fear you get when something in the murky undertow is chewing your body and you can't see it. Tyrannosaurus sea monsters, or great white sharks in three feet of water, ten feet from the shore.

She barked crab! crab! into shallow waves as her buff beau laughed and grabbed her arm. It's still got me! she said, holding her beau's shoulder for balance. Her foot cleared the water. The crab was an algae-snot colored syringe sticking out from between her big and second toes.

Some onlookers simultaneously screamed. Acidic sunbeams hit my shoulders as I made my way out of the water just when the woman began to vomit into it.

#

That happened in late May. Me, Travis, I first came to the beach in April. Unemployed, washed up at twenty-four. I didn't really know how I ended up there. Perhaps it was all those kids I knew who disappeared with their families for weeks, saying only, we're going to the beach with a generous amount of me-and-not-you hurrah. So it became something. The beach. The boardwalk. What a glorious sight for me — even in the relative deadness of April — when I arrived at the bus station, last cash in my pocket. The heavy-traffic smoothness of the boards. The stale popcorn and pizza sauce mixing with the sweet warmth of cut plywood and ozone power tools as vendors prepared for the season. Such a welcome and giddy smell. It couldn't get any better, couldn't promise more, couldn't get me farther away from the wide open desolation of the dead crops and scurvied cows. The poisonous blue piles of dung, alive and wormy … that's what the beach was, it was away. Away from so much. From poisonous dirt. From everything bad that was hollowing me out like a medical school cadaver. Tasting me, liking me, then finishing me.

The salt air filled my lungs that day in April, and I smiled. Young, free, light shoulders. I immediately blew ten bucks on skeeball. Winning that bouncing green superball was better than masturbation.

#

The job seemed like gravy to me even though money was as harsh a reality as the memory of the decayed animals. I rented a room above a trendy bar called Sunburn's. The hardwood place was on the boardwalk right in the middle of the pier amusements. Prime real estate popular with the trimmed young ones on summer break listening to the latest Chili Pepper offering. Sunburn's was owned by Sonny Burns, thus the clever name. Sonny was fifty, still blond, getting portly, and had over a dozen sources of income up and down the boards — the bar and the rooms on the second and third floors just a sampling. A week after renting to me, he stopped me outside the bar as the sun was setting.

You been wandering around here like a phantom, kid. You need a job?

I stared. The words were goofy in my ears.

Well? Sonny was staring.

I shrugged at him like it was a weapon. I guess I do.

Right, Sonny nodded. Can you talk?

I nodded.

Then let me hear you.

I can talk.

Sonny smirked. Okay then.

#

Sonny put me behind the counter of one of his amusement stands, the one where people threw darts at balloons for plastic baseball team beer mugs. The Phils, O's, and Yanks are real popular, said Sonny. Kids love 'em. Get drunk at Sunburn's, throw darts, then go out onto the pier and throw darts so they have a bigger mug to get more drunk. Beautiful. Just beautiful. I love fucking college boys.

I didn't flinch at the wordplay, but Sonny drew several stares from passersby. I looked at his tan knobby knees and had a flash of a cow sidestepping on rickety legs and falling in the mud. Dead. Moo.

I was employed.

By late May, when the woman pulled the syringe out of the surf and closed the water for a month, the boardwalk was hopping and I was a very busy man after dark.

#

Her name was Carly. She worked the stand next to mine where people threw footballs through plywood for stuffed animals. Carly was cuteness beyond third dimension, blond hair smooth as pristine motor oil, brown eyes out of nude pictures, paste up body parts under white t-shirts and nylon shorts. Never tights, like some of the other tomatoes walking the boards with beaus. She alternately put her hair in a tail, or let it hang, or braided it down the back. Innocence, sultriness, depending on her mood, her day, her beauty. We talked when things were slow. We became friends. She was living at the beach for the summer with three of her friends. I came to want her. I fingered darts when jocks holding their privates tried to sink footballs and win, tried to pick her up and put her youth through their motel walls with their hips.

You're so old, she told me one night soon after we met. She sat injun style towards me, and I leaned cool-like and smiled. But you don't act it, she said.

I guess I don't know how, I replied.

She laughed. We paused in each other's eyes.

How old are you? I asked.

Eighteen. Her voice was soft, softer than the bleats and growls and hayseed bitchings I was used to. Her eyes were a chocolate amusement park.

Eighteen, I repeated.

Legal, she said with eyebrow wiggles.

#

On my meal break one random night I went for fries as I always do — good, good French fries on the boardwalk. Fries, vinegar, aftertaste. All I ate. Ever.

Then, out of the crowd came a nigger flying into people like a surprise scream.

"Motherfucker!" he roared, regaining balance and driving back the way he came on legs like truck cylinders. The crowd simultaneously parted and coagulated into a circle for the show. The black's fists were already mashing the face of a white jock, not unlike the scum who tried to pick up Carly all the time. Blood roped up each time the black's fist swung. Then two more white jocks jumped the black, one pulling