Girls Weekend

The farther they got from the carnival the softer the sounds became. The high pitched bells and whistles from the games and the screams from the rides and the off-key jangling of the local band on the stage faded and blended together until it was all just a wash of distant buzzing. The sounds that rose up in their stead were much lighter and easier. The steady crashing of the waves on the beach. The whistling wind in their ears. The crunch of sand and shells under their shoes. All sounds soothing enough, and quiet enough, that they were absolutely covered over by the sound of their own off key drunken caterwauling.

“That’s not how it goes,” Peony yelled, as though Mel could not hear her from six inches away.

“That’s how it goes up your butt.”

They fell out laughing, peals and shrieks reaching to the sky. If they hadn’t already been holding each other up they would have fallen and probably scratched themselves on the glasses and bottles of wine they carried. ‘Up your butt’ had been the pinnacle of humor for close to two decades.

They veered south down the beach, stopping only to take their shoes off. A usually quick task that now, after each of them had already worked their way through an entire tray of wine slushies back at O’Houlihans, had turned into a dexterity and agility check they might not pass.

“Oof,” Mel said, falling backwards with her wedge sandal halfway off. “Ow, my ass.”

Peony had been doing a better job at standing but fell anyway, in solidarity.

“Soft fall,” she said, and reached around to slap her back pocket. “I’ve got plenty of ass for the cushion.”

“And I bet Roy loves it,” Mel said, nearly breaking a nail trying to get the knot on her shoelace out.

“Where’d all that ass come from, anyway?” Peony asked, staring and patting. “It wasn’t there and then it was. What happened?”

“I’unno ‘boutchu,” Mel said. She gave up on the knots and began pushing on the back of one sneaker with the other. “Mine’s all chocolate cake and…finally…margaritas.”

With grunts and creaking bones the two women found their way back to standing position, and worked on carrying their shoes and the wine and the glasses.

“Getting fat sucks,” Peony said.

“Getting old sucks.”

“Nah. Debt. Starting a career. Fucking…caring…about things. Who wants to be twenty?”

“Fucking teenagers, that’s who. Idiots.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Hold on, we’re almost there.”

The little dock was far enough down the beach that the sounds of the carnival could be drowned out entirely by the waves. There were no hotels here, no beach houses, no bars. Just a two lane road that led to a twelve car parking lot that closed every day at sundown. Humanity was behind them, north up the shore. The only light was the waxing moon coming through the thin clouds racing on the wind.

They’d been coming to this little dock, once a year, for as long as they’d known each other. Someone besides them gave a shit about it. Every year they showed up expecting to see it torn down or just broken from a hurricane and never fixed. But the dock was always in excellent shape with new boards, and hardly even creaked as they stepped carefully down to the end. What was the point of this dock? It was too short for the ocean, it belonged in a lake. You could launch a canoe or a kayak off it. Did they do that during the day? People knew. Mel and Peony were not those people. They dropped their shoes off where the wood met the sand, used extra care putting the bottles and glasses down near the end, and then finally sat at the end of the dock, aching feet in the water.

Barely had they gotten themselves settled when light splashing began not far out in the water. Mel and Peony, who had been giggling about nothing, stopped themselves and held their breath. Something was moving in the water. By the moonlight they could barely make out two dark shadows moving under the water. Fast. Toward them. Peony burped. Mel slapped her arm. They both stared until the shadows were at their feet.

The shadows swelled and burst out of the water, revealing the busts of two women. One had long hair, floating on the water’s surface behind her. The other’s hair was in a short bob. The moon came from behind the clouds to illuminate their faces, cold, pale, with large light eyes. Behind them, fins slapped lightly at the water’s surface.

Mermaids.

Mel screamed.

Peony clapped her hands before raising them above her head.

“Girls weekend!”

“Girls weekend!” the other three shouted, and then they were all talking over one another.

“Sesha, you cut your hair!”

“Mel, baby, how’s the kids?”

“Was it a tough flight?”

“Was the swim in rough?”

“Did you lose weight? You look good.”

“Tell me you brought that fruit wine again.”

Peony leaned back a little so she could free the corkscrew from her the small pocket of her clam digger shorts and began working on the first bottle. Mel inspected each plastic wine glass against the moonlight and swept out any sand that had gotten inside before lining them up on the dock for Peony to pour.

“So, how’s land life?” Sesha asked.

“Dry,” Peony said. “How’s ocean life?”

“Wet.”

Laughter swept up into the sky like bubbles. Another joke that had not gotten any less funny after nineteen years. Peony finally finished pouring out the bottle and handed out the glasses to everyone. Paz lifted her glass and cleared her throat for their favorite toast.

“Fuck ‘em,” she said.

“Fuck em!” the others returned, just as they had since college.

Emails!

Broken Hearts

The Biddies and Broken Hearts

The little town of Broken Hearts in the mountains of Colorado looked very pretty. All of the lights were off, of course, and there were no cars parked along the side of Main Street. But the street and the sidewalks had been shoveled and salted. The trees that lined the street had been trimmed. Most of the windows of the shops and cafes and the bank weren’t just intact, they were clean and decorated for Christmas. The few windows that had been broken had been neatly replaced with large sheets of plywood. It looked like a charming, functional hamlet, and the man walking down the middle of Main didn’t know no one lived there at all.

From her perch in the mountains Birdie examined the man through her binoculars. Thin, nearly haggard. Pale. Despite the late winter cold he was shirtless, rubbing his arms with his hands. Unkempt red hair fell into his face, making it impossible to figure out age from this distance. He walked down Main Street slowly, staring straight ahead at the ground. His steps were wobbly, and every second he didn’t fall on his face Birdie was impressed. With horror, she realized he was barefoot.

The walkie-talkie next to her squawked. She let go of the binoculars with her left hand, and as she searched for the little radio she continued to watch the man.

“Birdie,” said the walkie-talkie, helping her find it. “You seeing this?”

She got it up to her mouth below the binoculars. “Yeah, I see him.”

“This dude is looking rough,” Nico said, almost sounding impressed.

Birdie grunted. “Too rough. No way he made it up the mountain like that. He’s got to be a pitypot.”

“Agreed,” Nico said. But they’d been on duty together too long for Birdie to miss the tone.

“You think we should go down there anyway,” she said.

“If he’s not a pitypot, he’s going to keel over from exposure before he even hits Grant.”

Birdie stared at the man harder, as though she could read his mind if she just drilled her eyes into his forehead. They’d seen this three times before, and none of the other decoys had ever looked as awful as this. They’d only fallen for the first one, and only because they hadn’t seen the play before. Stare at them long enough you’d spot a seam. Gun tucked in the waistband. Perfectly full face on someone claiming to be starving. The last one had been screaming as they came in, full throated screams no one in his condition should have been capable of making. And all of them had been fully clothed and booted. As she and Nico watched, this man tripped over nothing and barely caught himself before his face found the pavement. He sat up and stayed there, still rubbing his arms.

“Birdie.”

“Yeah, okay, fine,” she said. “I’ll get dressed and check it out.”

Someone with less confidence would probably balk at having to be bait. But Birdie knew that that’s just what the situation called for. You couldn’t solve every problem with guns and violence. Sometimes you just had to look weak and bat your eyelashes until you knew what’s what. Then you could start with the violence.

The wooden chest on the other side of the old fire watch tower was there for precisely this reason. Well, among a bunch of other reasons, anyway. She quickly switched out her heavy workman’s jacket for the long woman’s coat that cinched in the middle, and her thick gloves for the thin fingerless ones. For some reason they always fell for the fingerless gloves. Nobody was really wearing makeup anymore so there was no reason to put on a face, but she undid her crown braids and let her brown hair fall around her face and shoulders.

It was a quick path down the slope through the woods, and then she was darting down the side street like a rabbit. Eyes and ears open, but she only heard her own footsteps, and saw no prints in the snow. They only kept Main street clear for reasons just like this. As she let herself into the back of the music shop she could only hope no one had seen her.

As she leaned out the front door, she hoped whoever was out there was seeing her. The bells on the door chimed, and when she called to the man half a block away she tried to strike the right balance of pretending to be quiet without actually managing it.

“Hey. Hey, you.”

He was on his feet again but hadn’t gone very far from where he had been sitting. Birdie’s voice bounced off the buildings up the street, and his head darted from side to side, following, looking very much like he had gone mad. She had to give it up to this guy, he was doing a great job. Maybe he’d been an actor before everything had fallen apart.

“Down here,” she called. Still he didn’t seem to be getting it. He’d started wandering up the street again, away from her. Grumbling, Birdie left the music shop doorway, hustling after him. If there were others, they’d see her now. She stopped a few feet away from him and slowly circled around, not wanting to startle him.

“Hey, you shouldn’t be out here…all…holy shit.”

If the man had looked like a mess through the binoculars, he looked like a trash fire up close. His torso and arms were covered in bruises and what looked like cigarette burns. The tips of his fingers and toes were blue, as were his lips. He was dirty all over. Now she could see his face, and the look in his eyes wasn’t just confused. It was blank. Gone away and no one home.

For a full five seconds, Birdie believed the man wasn’t a pitypot and began unbuttoning her coat to put on his shoulders.

“Stop.”

Birdie saw the guns first. A shotgun belonging to a tall man with a shaved round face. And a pistol in the hand of a short man next to him in a cowboy hat. Both were pointed at her. These two were the seam in the act. Full faces, warm clothes, and the smug smiles only assholes wore when they had won.

“Hands up, little lady,” the short man said.

Birdie stepped away and put her hands up, as requested. “Who are you calling ‘little,’ junior?”

The anger was instant, and the short man was aggressively pointing the pistol at her face. Birdie winced but held her ground. With a calm, slow hand the other man lowered the pistol until it was pointing at the ground, then went back to having his shotgun at the ready.

“Relax, Eric,” he said. Only when he was sure Eric wasn’t going to lift the gun again did he speak to Birdie. “We don’t want trouble, we just want supplies.”

Birdie focused on keeping her face soft. “We can give you some water and rations to get up the mountain, if that’s where you’re headed.”

“You can give us everything you got,” Eric said. He pointed the gun at her midsection. “You take us to your stores and you give us everything we can carry, or we will blow you away!”

He yelled that last part, eyes scanning the second and third stories of the buildings lining Main. Where he thought the rest of her people were hiding. Birdie made a show of wincing at the volume.

“You don’t have to yell, mister. And you could just ask. We can give you something.”

The big man chuckled. “Nobody’s going to give us what we want just from asking. He wasn’t exaggerating. We want everything you and yours have. Now-”

He lifted the shotgun, pointed it straight at her chest.

“Take us to your supplies, or your people get to watch you grow a hole in your chest.”

“That’s not going to happen,” came from the alley across the way.

Birdie breathed in relief. She was starting to think the others weren’t coming. The big nameless man and Eric spun in place, trying to see everyone at once. Carlos and Nico were behind her, she knew. Coming out of the alley to the south were Frannie and John. The four of them circled up until the three interlopers were surrounded.

“Toss her the guns,” John said in his booming voice. And, when they hesitated, “Now!”

The big man and Eric glanced at each other and then reluctantly did as they were told. Birdie picked up the guns at her feet, tucking the pistol into the waistband of her jeans and checking to make sure the shotgun was actually loaded. The guns no longer taking up all of her attention, she turned back to the first man. Birdie was sure that far-gone look would have disappeared, he would be standing up straighter and looking as put out as these two.

She was wrong. The man looked no different. He hadn’t seemed to notice his friends had shown up, nor hers. Something else felt off, and it took her a few seconds to figure it out. Coats. The man’s supposed ‘friends’ hadn’t brought him a coat, or boots, or anything warm.

“Don’t suppose it’s too late to ask for that water,” the big man asked in his drawl.

John spit. “You’re lucky we’re letting you leave at all. Start walking, and don’t stop until you can’t feel our guns pointed at you anymore. Then maybe walk a little farther.”

Still, Eric looked ready for a fight, eyeing Birdie like he would tackle her. Birdie held the shotgun up to his face.

“Try me, junior.”

The big man put a hand on Eric’s shoulder, physically turned him around, and started pushing him back east down Main.

“Come on, June,” Eric barked. The first man, June, jumped, the first spark of situational awareness Birdie had seen yet blossoming in his eyes. Then they were dull again, and he started shuffling after the other two.

“Wait,” Birdie said. They stopped and turned to look at her. Birdie cut her eyes to June and back to them. “He stays here.”

“No fucking way,” Eric said, coming for her. He stopped just shy of the end of the shotgun, as the others on her side closed ranks.

“What are you doing, B?” John asked softly, standing next to her.

“Look at him. He’s not acting. They’re keeping him like that.”

From the corner of her eye Birdie could see John really examining the man.

“Hey, mister,” he said. “Mister, I’m talking to you. Are you okay with these two?”

The man didn’t respond, only swayed and looked towards the others.

“He’s our brother,” the big man said. “We ain’t leaving him.”

“Not much in the way of family resemblance,” Nico said from behind her.

“Half brother,” Eric said. “And he ain’t right. We need to take care of him.”

“This is taking care of him?” John asked. “I’m getting the feeling you just don’t want to lose your pitypot.”

Keeping the shotgun trained on Eric, Birdie turned to face the man in question.

“Hey, June? It’s June, right?”

The man looked up at her. Impossible to tell how much he was actually understanding, but at least he was making eye contact.

“You can stay here with us. We’ll fix you up and get you warm, get you some food. Would you like that?”

The man only stood there, staring at her. His mouth moved ever so slightly. Repeating what she said, maybe. Talking to himself. Maybe not making words at all.

“I told you,” the big man said. “He ain’t right. He won’t-”

In shambling steps, June walked away from the other two men. The group watched in silence as June walked slowly toward Birdie, and then past her, only stopping when he had positioned Birdie completely between him and the other two men.

“That settles it,” John said. “You two. Start walking.”

“Fine, keep him. At least give us our guns back.”

“Move. Frannie, Nico, make sure they find their way out.”

With plenty of glaring and muttering, Eric and the big guys made their way down Main, hands still in the air and Frannie and Nico trailing behind. Birdie handed the shotgun to John and started taking off her coat again.

“You want to lecture me about taking in strays?” she asked.

John looked at the shivering mess of a man with pity and disgust.

“Not this time.”

Next

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Let’s Talk About the Spanish Flu

Shall we? You know, because I want to. For no other reason. At all.

It didn’t start in Spain. No one’s really sure where it started, but the first reported case was at a military base in Kansas. ‘Spanish Flu’ and ‘Florida Man’ actually have very similar origin stories: freedom of the press. The same way the Sunshine Laws in Florida allow every little detail about every crime to be reported where in other states they wouldn’t, Spain was the only major country attempting to stay neutral in the First World War, and thus could report on whatever they wanted. Including all these people getting sick out of nowhere.

There was a first wave in the spring of 1918, and a second deadlier wave in the fall. What made that second wave deadlier also related to the war. Troops on the front line who only got the mild version of the flu were kept in local infirmaries then put back to the front line once they were better. Troops with the deadlier strain who presented as far more dire were sent home, where they of course brought the flu with them as some kind of ugly souvenir.

There was a third wave in 1919. Everybody today knows about the second wave, keeps going on and on about the second wave, and, gee, I wonder why that is? But no one seems to know there was a third wave of the same deadly strain featured in the second wave that didn’t kill nearly as many only because social situations had changed, aka the war had ended.

All together the global pandemic of the Spanish Flu is said to have lasted two years.

Oh, months? Did I somehow mean months?

No. Two years. Two fucking years. Twenty-four months, one hundred and four weeks, seven hundred and thirty days. Give or take.

Hey, let’s talk about San Francisco! Great city, right? With the steep hills and the fog and that pretty bridge. Colder than you’d think, right? Expensive, too expensive to live there, but fun to visit! Unless you’re a time traveler going back to 1919. San Francisco got their first case in October 1918 and just fucking slammed the brakes on the city to get it into control. Everything was cancelled, nobody could gather anywhere, and everyone had to wear masks all the time. And they did such a great job, by the end of November, they decided they were done! They had licked it (figuratively, of course) and everybody could take off their masks and gather together and lick trolley cars to their heart’s content.

45,000 people in San Francisco caught the flu. 3,000 people died.

Oh, and Pittsburgh is nice, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t think so, but that’s because one of my ex-boyfriends was OBSESSED with Pittsburgh in an incredibly weird, intense way. But, you know, there’s a river. And it sure is steep there, too, eh? Talk about cities I wouldn’t want to drive stick in. Also cities that have a bad history of public health responses. Pennsylvania started shutting shit down in early October but Pittsburgh went, ‘WHY THERE’S NOTHING WRONG NOTHING’S HAPPENING I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF ALL THESE FACTORIES.’ They pretended nothing was going on, and continued to pretend nothing was going on, even as 1,221 were killed in a single week in October. Other cities fluctuated in transmissions and deaths, but Pittsburgh was pretty much a straight killing machine for months on end. But if you don’t want it to be happening, you can just pretend it’s not and everything will be fine.

Somewhere between 4,500 and 6,000 people died in Pittsburgh by the time it was over.

The Spanish Flu killed a lot of young, healthy people, more so than other strains of the flu, and scientists still don’t know why. They have guesses. Good guesses. One of these guesses is that young people were actually being killed ‘cytokine storms,’ which basically amounts to your immune system going so HAM against the virus that it ends up killing you, too. When I say young I don’t mean kids. A normal flu kills the youngest, the oldest, and the immunocompromised. This flu was killing twenty and thirty year olds by making them choke on their own immune response. We think.

Because here’s a fun fact your doctor doesn’t want you to think about: medical science is almost entirely trial-and-error. You know how you can predict an eclipse several thousand years in the future but you can’t predict the weather for next Tuesday? It’s because of variables. There’s, like, three variables for heavenly bodies positions and several hundred for the weather. Well, there’s about several million to consider in medical science, so a lot of medical progress is just scientists hucking shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. And even when something does stick, they don’t know why. Or don’t know what kind of insidious damage it’s doing until it’s too late. So they scrap it and go back to square one. And you can’t be mad at them, because that’s the best practice we have right now. Make an educated guess, try it out, keep it if it works and get rid of it if it doesn’t. Try something else.

Or, medical science thinks it understands something, and then it mutates into something new and kills fifty million people at least. What was once semi-dangerous but mostly-survivable disease best treated with rest and hydration suddenly turns into something killing people in ways we didn’t previously think possible. Medical science gets details in drips and drops. People are choking on their own immune response. It’s attacking kidneys. It’s potentially making its victims start throwing clots as a side hobby and giving them heart attacks and strokes. It’s potentially crossing the goddamned blood brain barrier and causing neurological deficits. Some people get it and never even know they had it. Other entirely fit and active people in their thirties end up vented in an ICU or have a case that lingers for literal months. And all of this is new to medical science and no one is sure which symptoms are real or what to even do it about it.

Oh, sorry. That last paragraph stopped being about the Spanish Flu.

Wear a fucking mask.

Why the Second Wave of the Spanish Flu Was So Deadly

1918 Pandemic Influenza: Three Waves

San Francisco Had the 1918 Flu Under Control

When the Spanish Flu Swept In, Pittsburgh Failed the Test

Pittsburgh Didn’t Confront the 1918 Epidemic in Time

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Deals With Strange Men

“Those are my terms,” the man said. Theo couldn’t remember if he’d gotten his name or not. “The terms are quite generous, if I do say so myself. A handshake, if you please, and your path will be forged with happier days.”

The man’s fingers were as pale and thin as his face. He waited patiently, his elbow on the little table and outstretched hand hovering above their drinks. Theo’s was empty. The strange man’s full.

“Wait.”

That – and the sound of another chair being pulled up to their cramped table – made Theo jump and pull back. His own hand had been inches away from the man’s, he’d been about to shake. Had he wanted to? Did he want to? He couldn’t remember.

The strange man looked at the new person at the table with a sneer. He rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

“You have no business here, heatherheart,” the strange man said.

“By the stupid laws of your guild, I do and you know it.”

The woman who sat down between them was copper skinned with a handsome face. She sat like a man, legs wide, like she owned the table. From the way the strange man leaned away as he stared at her, it was clear they knew each other. And hated each other. She picked up the strange man’s untouched beer, sniffed at it, and then took a large sip.

“I was planning on drinking that,” he muttered.

“Oh. Sorry,” the woman said. She held it out to him and didn’t try to hide her amusement when he only looked at the glass with disgust.

“I’m sorry,” Theo said, putting his elbows on the table. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

“Name’s Esther. And I’m here to stop this.”

The strange man took off his thin glasses to clean them with a cloth that he seemed to pull from thin air. “Not necessarily. Go on. Make your case. See if it’s any better than mine.”

With that the strange man leaned back. He had a pipe in his hand. Theo didn’t know where the pipe came from. With a lit match that also was not there one second, there the next, the man lit the pipe and puffed on it a few times. Then he sat back and gestured at Esther.

“How gracious of you,” she said before turning to Theo. “What’s your name?”

“Theo.”

“Hi, Theo. Do you know who you’re talking to?”

Theo looked across the table at the strange man, who tipped his pipe at him. Theo didn’t know who this was at all. Meeting him was rather hazy. He had been sitting here, by himself, participating in that time honored tradition of staring into his beer and trying to find answers. And then the man was there. Theo couldn’t even remember the man sitting down. Certainly not introducing himself. It was like time had skipped ahead a bit, to where they were already deep in conversation.

“Um…”

Esther nodded as though this was exactly what she had expected. She took another sip of the beer she had stolen. Or had she? When had that beer shown up, exactly? And whose was it?

“This man you’re talking to is a shadow man, and he deals with the devil,” Esther said.

The strange man snorted. “The devil. Like there’s only one.”

“I get to speak my piece,” she said sharply, glaring at him from the corner of her eye. The man, pipe in mouth, held his hands up in surrender. She looked back at Theo, eyes soft now.

“He deals in the bad kind of magic. The stuff of devils, and hell, and evil, and darkness. Whatever terms he gave you aren’t worth it. Nothing is worth taking anything from him, or his kind.”

Theo stared at her, for the first time in however long it had been (Theo honestly still didn’t have the best grasp on the finer points of reality) he started to feel something besides bland confusion. At first, he wasn’t sure what it was. Slowly its nebulous form took a hard shape.

Anger.

“Lady, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.”

Her lips parted slightly, and the space between her eyebrows formed a crease. “His price-”

“You don’t even know what I’m getting out of this,” he said.

“I’m telling you it doesn’t matter. Nothing is worth your soul.” She glanced behind her, at the rest of the bar, but they were in the corner and away from the others. “Whatever it is he promised you, you’ll get it. Followed by an eternity in hell. Do you know how hard it is to actually get into hell otherwise? Much harder than any church folk would make you think.”

Hell. It wasn’t something he ever believed in. And, sitting there, staring at a strange man and an equally strange woman, it still wasn’t something he could really picture. What he could picture was what the man had promised. And the years he would have to figure it out. Surely he could come up with some way out of it, before his time was up.

“The terms,” Theo said slowly, “are actually very generous.”

Esther stared at him the way you stare at the man raving about spies on the subway.

“Generous? Generous? It’s a few decades of what you want, and then an eternity of what he wants. Which, in case I haven’t made clear, is literally hell. Fire. Physical pain. The music you hate the most. Forever. Literally forever. An actual eternity of pain and suffering so demons can feast on your soul. For a few decades of…what did he promise you?”

Theo didn’t see how that was any of her business. He didn’t see how any of this was her business. Hell, if it was real, was decades away. What he wanted now, could be his. Now.

He looked at the strange man, who had been waiting very patiently, and held out his hand.

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Just Wedding Things

Simon had never been a fan of the fame part of acting. He’d said as much in many, many interviews. Not that it had really been an issue in the early part of his career, when he was mostly getting hired to do low budget indie or lower budget sci-fi movies. The occasional times he’d been recognized, the fans were either art students who thought they were above making a scene about an actor and instead set about asking him all sorts of questions about the industry he was in no way qualified to answer, or they were that unsocialized kind of nerd who might blurt out a few unrelated syllables but mostly just widened their eyes in fear before running off. It wasn’t a bad way of living.

Everything had changed last summer. He’d only taken the role in Space Punks to finally make a little money. Just buy a bigger place. A nicer car, maybe. Take the roles he wanted to take without worrying about bills for a while. It wasn’t even the starring role. No one could have predicted his character, Sandy Dunes, was going to be a fan favorite. Now they were talking about increasing his screen time in the sequel, and there was some discussion of a spin-off. Not precisely what he wanted, but he wasn’t going to turn it down. It wasn’t his fault he was so charming on screen.

He got recognized everywhere. Out on dates. Shopping. Just walking down the street. He’d taken so many pictures with fans he’d perfected his selfie-face. He was getting so much fan mail he had to start directing it to his agent. Paparazzi had even started following him around downtown. It was…terrible. Just terrible. And now, he couldn’t even be at his cousin’s wedding without having people approach him at the reception. He’d told his cousin he could just skip it, afraid of taking the spotlight away, but Corinne had just laughed. She didn’t know how bad it had gotten. The family he’d known all his life hadn’t really seemed to care, but friends of Corinne and her new husband had all found the time to sidle up to him and it had barely been half an hour.

So, Simon had picked a corner of the bar and hid there, his back to the crowd and Corinne’s brother Freddy standing next to him, leaning against the bar, almost acting like a bouncer just for him.

“It’s not like everyone formed a line to see you,” Freddy said, taking a sip of his beer.

“I’m still taking attention away from Corinne,” Simon said.

Freddy snorted. “If she didn’t want you here, she would have said so. Corinne’s doesn’t exactly pussyfoot around what she wants, you know?”

Before Simon could argue he heard the distinct sound of high heels clicking across parquet in quick steps. Coming directly toward them. He hunched down and put his face in his highball.

“Have you seen him yet?” asked a voice.

Simon inwardly groaned. Whoever she was, she was looking for him. Asking for him. Not realizing that he was right there. She was going to be embarrassed when she found out. Might as well rip that band-aid off quick like. He threw back the rest of his drink and turned around.

Standing a couple feet from Freddy was a woman about their age with black hair in an updo and a pale yellow dress that washed out her complexion. She was still looking around for him, not realizing he was sitting right in front of her. He cleared his throat.

“Hi,” he said.

She looked at him and blinked. “Hi.”

And then she turned her attention back to Freddy. “So, have you seen him?”

“I saw him during the ceremony. I know he’s still here, he wouldn’t bounce.”

Simon tried to hide his confusion. Of course Freddy knew where he was. He was right here. Apparently he didn’t keep his face blank enough, as Freddy took one look at him and nodded.

“Sorry. Simon, this is my friend Janet. Janet, this is my cousin Simon.”

Janet stopped her frantic searching to look at him again. Then did a double take. Finally, Simon thought. Then tried to pretend he didn’t think that.

“Oh, yeah, you’re that actor. Freddy’s mentioned you a couple of times. I liked you in that thing.”

“Thanks, I-”

But Janet had already turned back to the crowd. “If he left I’m going to kill him.”

“He didn’t leave, he’s probably outside. Looking for you.” Freddy nudged Simon. “Her and this other dude we know, Leon, have been dancing around each other for months now.”

“Every wedding we’ve been to we keep getting closer to it. Small talk, then flirting, then dancing, then finally making out in Chris and Kylie’s photo booth.”

Simon looked between the two of them. “How many weddings have there been?”

Freddy shrugged. “Eh, I’ve lost count.”

Janet turned back to them, hands on her hips. “Five since January. Three more this year. Everybody’s getting married.”

“And you want to get in line?” Simon asked.

Janet wrinkled her nose. “Ew, no. Leon and I have, like, nothing in common. It’s just this weird wedding thing we’ve developed. And today, we’re going to finish it. Actually, Corinne is going to be tossing the bouquet soon, I was kind of hoping to be ‘finishing it’ while that happened.”

“Jesus, Janet,” Freddy said.

“I’m going to check outside. Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” Simon said. But she was already walking away, heels clicking again, head turning furiously to look at every face she passed. “She didn’t care about me at all, huh?”

“She doesn’t even care about Corinne. Today, she’s only got eyes for Leon. But, that’s what you wanted, right?”

“Huh? Oh. Right. Of course.”

If he tried really hard, he could tell himself he meant it.

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Double Disney Marathon

I started running in high school because I suck at sports and the cross country team didn’t make cuts. A few years later I ran the Disney Marathon for the first time, and did it nearly every year for over a decade. Why? There’s no why. There’s no reason in long distance running beyond a primal urge to just keep putting one foot in front of the other until the animal you’re chasing gives up or until a half-interested volunteer drapes a medal you won’t know what to do with around your neck before pushing your half-dead body in the direction of the biggest pile of Powerades you’ve ever seen in your life. You sign up for one race, and that didn’t kill you, so you sign up for another, longer race, and then another, and then you’re signed up for races you don’t even remember hearing about until you see the reminder email to go down to the local sneaker shop to get your bib and scratchy t-shirt, and then suddenly you’re thirty-two years old and using two extra thick mats to do yoga on because your knees have mostly been replaced with ground glass.

There’s another famous/infamous marathon at Disney World, one Disney doesn’t promote but doesn’t discourage, either: The International Pub Crawl at the Epcot Center. The World Showcase side of the park opens daily at eleven and starts selling alcohol immediately, giving you practically an entire day to casually drink in eleven different countries while wearing cargo shorts and fighting other families for spaces of shade. I’ve done both, but there was only one year I did them back to back.

You’re thinking now I ran the foot race in the morning and drank the beer race in the afternoon. You fool. You bulbous cretin. Do you have any idea how big Epcot is? It’s literally a mile from the back of the park to the front. Do you think I want to walk around that much after having already been in motion for twenty-six miles? Of course not. After twenty-six miles the only things I ever want to do is get in a hot tub and die. We did the only logical thing, and drank the day before the race.

We were not pussy-footing the drinking that day, either, oh fuck no. We were not sticking to beers and we were not splitting. For whatever reason that day we decided we were doing the whole thing on Friends of Bill Mode. We probably would have spent the day using our free hands to punch our livers if the force of the impacts wouldn’t make our drinks spill. We started off with beers in Canada, where they are Not Fucking Around with ABV, then it was off to England to get Guinness and make a mockery of ourselves in front of Mary Poppins.

Things started going sideways in France. France isn’t exactly known for their beers, and while some of the group were willing to chew their way through a Stella Artois I wanted something that didn’t have wood shavings in it. I don’t remember what I got except that it was hedonistically orange. Same thing happened in Italy, where instead of suffering through a Peroni I got a plastic wine glass of Chianti. So, you know, the mixing was going great. We did shots of Aquavit in Norway and then things get super hazy. The only concrete memory of the park I have after this is sitting in the tequila bar in Mexico and watching my uncle take a gentle sip of a tequila shot. I did my shot, called him a pussy, and drank his. I am a happy drunk.

The next thing I remember that doesn’t have Vaseline rubbed all over the memory is waking up at two-thirty because my brain was afraid I was dying and decided to crank up my heart rate to around 200 bpm. I was still drunk, so I thought, great! It’s almost time to get ready anyway!

See, the thing about the Disney marathon is, they still want to get as many regular people in the parks paying money that day as possible. So they start these things off at five in the morning and try to have it shut down by midday. Race day we’re waking up at three to just get there, fight the crowd to park, go through bag check, and walk the half a mile to the corrals before the starting gun. It was so early in the morning the hangover didn’t properly kick in until I had been running for three miles.

I was sweating alcohol. The rising sun hurt my eyes. My guts sounded like a creaking ship and I pitied anyone who needed to use the port-o-john after me. I was at every water station simultaneously, double fisting those little Dixie cups and screaming at the volunteers that I would tell them when I had had enough. Proud to say I never puked, but my stomach was also not accepting new submissions at this time unless it was water and nearly revolted the one time I accidentally grabbed a cup of Powerade. By the middle of the race I thought I’d gotten through the worst of it.

The 2oth mile marker is on this little stretch of highway leading to Hollywood Studios. You take a big, uneven overpass down onto this road and follow it up to this intersection where there’s a water station and a medical tent. I do these things so slow by the time I got to this point it was late morning. There was no shade. Mile 20 in the Boston Marathon is called ‘heartbreak hill,’ and I think as a tribute to that, all along this little stretch, squatting in the grass like musical toads, were huge speakers blaring “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond on repeat. Right as “Sweet Caroline” started up for the second time, my toes began to cramp. My stomach rejecting the Powerade meant I hadn’t gotten any salts or electrolytes all morning. With every step the cramps became deeper, and my toes hugged my feet tighter. By the time I had heard “Sweet Caroline” for the fourth time I was practically running on my toe nails. I almost stopped at the medical tent just to massage them, but I knew if I took off my sneakers I’d never put them back on.

There’s this mentality that kind of creeps up on you during long races like this. I had been training for months, spent many Sunday mornings going for runs as nearly as long as the actual marathon but without as many Disney characters or water breaks or things to distract me. No matter the pain, or the damage you think you’re doing to yourself, you put so much work into the race, you just think you’ll finish it and deal with it after and possibly never run again? But that’s fine, as long as you finish this race. My foot could have snapped at the ankle and I would have put it back on with duct tape and kept going. What was a little electrolyte imbalance among friends? What could it cause, a heart arrhythmia? Piss on that, my heart was already racing.

In another universe that race probably killed me. Here, it just taught me a very valuable lesson: foot race, then beer race.

My toes didn’t uncurl until around midnight.

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Infinite

As the sun had gone down the stars had come out, and soon the only thing Tisha could watch was the sky. She’d lived in LA her entire life, and a sky full of stars was just something her country bumpkin cousins in muddy boots and torn overalls would brag about to make themselves feel better about not living in civilization. But they had been right. She didn’t have any words for it, not for what it looked like or for what it made her feel. Every time she tried to count she’d get dizzy and giggle. The wine didn’t help. Or the way she turned in slow circles on the pool float shaped like an avocado.

From behind her came small splashes. Sammy getting into the water with the same kind of confidence she did everything with. Like if she just showed the water who was boss it wouldn’t be freezing. And why not? It worked for everything else. She had gotten the lifeguard job at the beach, the rent decreased on their apartment, and countless free drinks that way. She had gotten Tisha that way.

“You’re looking at the wrong thing.” Sammy’s voice was a low murmur right in Tisha’s ear. She had crossed the pool quicker than somebody who didn’t know Sammy would have thought possible and now had her arms on the edge of the float, holding herself up. Tisha could imagine the graceful way her legs must have looked under the water, toes pointed like a ballerina. She could feel the cold coming off her arms in waves.

“I’ve never seen stars like this before,” Tisha said, still looking up. “I guess my cousins were right, only jokes on them. I didn’t have to leave LA to see it.”

Sammy was quiet, and Tisha wished she could take it back. Sammy had had a wonderful idea, and Tisha’s big mouth was ruining it.

They had dreamed of living in one of these houses. Back in those middle days of dating, when they were calling each other girlfriend but still had no answers when people asked about their future, they would spend hours in the bookstore. They’d flip through all the magazines about Los Angeles and architecture, and if they found something on one of these houses – and they almost always did – they’d quietly rip out the pages and tuck them into Tisha’s big bag. They didn’t have the money to buy the magazines, especially not after the overpriced coffees. They’d take the pictures home and tell each other stories of living in those houses. Always the rectangular modern ones, with windows for all the walls and an infinity pool over the city.

At first, they had been evacuating the city to the north, with everyone else. It had been slow because no one had really known what they were supposed to be doing and everyone had been on edge, waiting for it to happen again. Then Sammy had gotten that look in her eye, and when Tisha had followed her gaze up the hill she knew what Sammy was thinking. It had been surprisingly easy to slip away from the crowd. The Guardsmen ushering them up the streets had looked as scared as everyone else, and Sammy had just done her thing. Arms around each other, they had ducked down a side street and walked away like they knew what they were doing. And, well, didn’t they?

All of the houses on the hill were empty by the time they’d gotten up there. Power was out, too, so they’d climbed over the security fence without fear, the only sound their laughter. All their talk of just riding it out here stopped at the first aftershock. These houses in the hills may look down on the city, but they were still a part of it, and everything shook just the same as it had at their one room apartment. The way the house had swayed, Sammy wasn’t sure it would last too much longer. Tisha wondered how far down the hill it would slide.

“Why ain’t the shaking stopped yet, you think?” Tisha asked.

Sammy shrugged her shoulders. “The scientists don’t know, you think I’ll have the answers?”

“I think you think you have the answers,” Tisha said.

“Oh, yeah?” Sammy leaned forward on the avocado float, making her side dip dangerously close to the water.

“Don’t you dunk me,” Tisha said, trying to pull back.

“Okay.”

The pressure on the float released as Sammy took her arms off. Tisha barely had a second to believe she was just going to swim away before the same side of the float was hoisted into the air. Flailing as though she could keep her balance and stay in the air, her arms and legs hit the water with individual smacks. Her half screamed ‘no!’ was cut off and then she was completely underwater, bubbles rising up from her still open mouth. They had floated to the shallow side of the pool, and her feet found the smooth surface quickly. She pushed with all her strength and rocketed to a standing position, gasping as her face found the air again. Instantly she was shivering, and she clutched her bare sides as she looked for the traitor.

“What the hell were-”

She stopped, although her teeth kept chattering. Sammy was just a couple feet away, standing easily like the water heater was still working. The infinite amount of stars above cast enough light to make the little diamond at the top of the ring Sammy was holding shine.

“What’s that?”

“You know what that is,” Sammy said. She glanced over her shoulder, at Los Angeles, and then back to Tisha. “I don’t know what happens next, Tisha. I don’t know where we’re going to go. The only thing I know is you.”

Tisha thought about saying something funny, like, you just don’t want me to kill you for flipping me. But is that how she wanted to remember the night the love of her life finally proposed? And anyway, she was a crying, teeth-chattering mess, and all she could do was nod her head and put her hand out so Sammy could slip the ring on. Sammy was shaking, too, and Tisha knew it wasn’t the water.

Later, when they were done with the crying and the kissing, they sat at the edge of the water and held each other. Tisha didn’t know where they’d get married, but she could picture the cream colored dress she’d wear down to the pattern of the lace. Sammy kicked at the water and stroked her hair, and below them the fires of Los Angeles twinkled like the endless stars above.

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Grasslands

They’d never find her here, because here there was nothing to find.

She was taking her break on the back porch of the diner, leaning against one of the white-painted wooden posts holding up the little roof. It was just past midday. The sun was somewhere above, and the roof cast a shadow across the top of her. Her legs were so warm she had begun to idly wish she hadn’t put stockings on that morning, but what little breeze there was chilled the back of her neck and made the little hairs stand up. The air would stagnate in front of her, filling with smoke from her cigarette, and the breeze would come and push it all away. Make room for more. She wished the cigarettes would kill her.

The front of the diner faced TR-15. A three lane highway bleached white in the sun, it stretched from one bit of nowhere to another. It was a connector, bridging two other highways that would actually bring you somewhere. It must have been busy back in the days before the trains, although she’d wager ‘busy’ was still generous. Nowadays the only people on the road were traveling salesmen, delivery drivers, and visitors to the few ranches still out this way. They all stopped at the diner because the diner was the only place to stop.

The back of the diner faced the wild nothing. From her perch on the porch, she could see miles and miles of Texas. Maybe right on into Oklahoma. Tall grasses, brown in the late summer, waved stiffly in hot breezes. She could watch the wind by watching these grasses, whose name she did not know. Cigarette smoke would pool around her in perfectly still air, and half a mile away she would see the grasses bob and bounce. Sometimes it would come right for her. Sometimes it would pass her by. Didn’t bother her either way.

There were barbed wire fences among the grass. One surrounded the diner, and if he was restless Mr. Larabee would walk it to check for breaks. Others marked territory in the distance, the sun glinting off them at the right time of day. She didn’t know who owned the fences. All her time standing on this porch, staring off into this distance, she had never seen a single person out there. She wondered what point the fences proved, and to who.

Above the barely-changing grasslands was the ever-changing sky. Even as she stood there it moved, painfully white clouds changing their shape against the sharp blue. The clouds had been fattening and multiplying all day, casting fast moving shadows on the grass and fences. It would storm later, she knew it for fact, and she didn’t need to hear it from that pipsqueak weatherman on the news with the cowlick and the acne. A coming storm felt the same everywhere, and it had only taken her three, maybe four centuries, to be able to feel it with confidence. The only question was where.

The storm might roll over them, the innocent white replaced with deep blue confidence and piled high with rage. The air, after spending hours growing restless and heavy, would halt its pacing and freeze. Goosebumps would rise on arms. The light would fade away so insidiously that if you were busy you might not notice how dark it had become until you were wondering how afternoon turned to dusk so quickly. Then the fat rain, slow at first but not for long, getting colder and colder until the inevitable. She’d wondered what the little pock marks were when she’d bought her silver trailer. Of course she had seen hail before, but never like this. Never so big, and never so furious. Her smoke break was still on the back porch during these times, but she stood well back from the edge against the wall. Still the rain and hail would find her, soaking her stockings and striking her shoes. Like everything else, she bore it patiently, knowing she would outlast it.

Sometimes the storm she felt coming would miss them, and she would watch it cross the horizon. Something that seemed so huge and world-changing when it passed overhead looked so small and pleasant from half a mile away. Just a single blue-black cloud being pushed over the plains, a long trail of rain under and behind it. From a distance it was almost peaceful. There was a life lesson there, but life had taught her every lesson it had already, and she was over it.

There were the times the cloudy sky would turn green, and even then she would stay on the porch. Green sky didn’t always mean twister, and when it did…well, the diner was about a thousand square feet and sitting in the middle of a hundred square miles. Usually there was a good distance between a twister and them. If the twister was behind the diner, the others inside might come out and join her, watch with nervous chatter as it wound its way across the grass. If the twister was in front of the diner, across the road, they’d go out to watch it from the parking lot. But she didn’t care for that side of the diner, so she’d stay inside, marrying ketchups as she listed to the alarm blare out of the radio.

This time last year a twister cruising along the back had made a sudden hard turn and started coming right for them. The others had stood with her and watched for a couple of minutes, the volume of their chatter growing, until they decided the twister wasn’t going to turn again. Then they were all running, taking their chatter with them, the patrons allowing themselves to be hustled down into the cellar by the cook. She’d stayed, of course, watching that wind demon come right for her, still smoking her cigarette. Never would have moved if Mr. Larabee hadn’t picked her up around the waist and hauled her inside. Mr. Larabee wasn’t a big man. His arms had ached for weeks after. The twister had, indeed, turned again, missing the diner by half a mile.

“Ain’t you got any sense, girl?” Mr. Larabee had asked as the sun had broken through the other side of the storm. He had been rubbing his arms, his face still milk-white.

Of course she had sense. She had the good sense not to tell him the truth. To tell him she was more like the grasses and the fences than she was like the sky. That even if that twister had hit her head on and tossed her a mile the worst that would happen is her hair would get mussed. Mr. Larabee would never believe it, of course. But he’d never look at her the same either.

“I froze,” was all she had said. And life had gone on.

Life, for her, would always go on.

From inside the diner she heard the bell over the front door. She dropped her cigarette butt in the bucket of sand Mr. Larabee had put out just for her and gave the wild nothing one last glance. It didn’t need to be long. It, and she, would be here tomorrow.

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ABP, Part 2

Part 1

Croak grinned wide, and for the first time he looked ugly, the fire putting weird shadows on his face.

“As you may know, Alpha Beta Rho has a proud, bitchin’ reputation. Party hard, then party harder. But we also have another rep, one that made us, like, totally paranoid. Alpha Beta Rhos always get their dream. And this is why.”

“I don’t…what?”

“Ritual sacrifice, bro,” Croak said through a wide, toothy grin. “We’ve done all the hard work, too. Prayer and chanting. You’ll get to do that next year for the new pledges. It’s sick, but it’s all in this dead language and it’s, like, a buzzkill to remember. And some of the sounds are hard to make. This year, all you have to do is take those-”

In the ground in front of the fire were three large butcher knives, more symbols carved into the handles.

“-and spill their blood. Right into the fire. College will be, like, whatever, a guaranteed degree. And by the time you’re old and thirty, you’ll have la vida awesemosa.”

The three of them stood, unsure, confused. There were questions. The wrong questions, mostly, although that could be forgiven as they didn’t have the experience to know the right ones. Eagle would later learn the only question that really mattered was ‘who the fuck are we sacrificing these girls to?’ Right then, though, that question never even occurred to him.

“We kill them-”

“Gotta be like this, bro,” Croak said, running a finger across his throat, “and the blood has to go into the fire.”

“And then we get whatever we want?”

Croak nodded. The fire was making him sweat, and he was shining. “Some of the boys found this book about fifteen years ago. Seemed legit. Figured it was worth a shot.”

“Who are these girls?” Logan asked, staring down one in particular.

“Pssht. Who cares? No one.”

Logan nodded, and that’s when Eagle realized Logan wasn’t as freaked out about this whole thing as he was. Logan had already made his decision, he was only making sure he wasn’t going to get caught.

On the other side of him, Scooter belched. No help there.

Croak motioned to the knives. “When you’re ready.”

Logan hardly hesitated, picking up a knife. Scooter, still believing he was in some sort of fever dream, followed suit, missing and almost plunging his hand and arm into the fire.

“Wait, no, wait,” Eagle said, holding an arm out. “This is fucked, man, this is way fucked.”

“Bruh, this is nothing more than a fair trade,” Croak said. “Their life for yours, and they’re lives are, like, whatever, man. You take it, you do something better with it, you know?”

Eagle stared at Croak in disbelief.

“They’re still people, Croak. They’re not just throwaways.”

“We’re not throwing them away, man,” Logan said, holding his knife up to the light. “We’re using them to make our lives better. A true sacrifice, right?”

Not right, not that Logan knew that. Or Croak, who was nodding and grinning and looking far more devilish with every passing moment. Those blue eyes didn’t even look blue anymore. Black.

“No!” Eagle said, stopping Logan as he walked around the fire. “We can’t do this, bro.”

“Scooter is fine with it,” Logan said. 

“Scooter might actively be dying,” Eagle said, looking him over.

“Nfinme,” Scooter said. He tried to go for the knife again and knocked it to the ground.

“Look, Eagle,” Croak said. “I’ll make this simple. Kill her, or I kill you. And then I kill her anyway.”

Eagle Carridin hated school and didn’t study and loudly made fun of people who did. He smoked and drank, often while driving or surfing. He’d slept with close to thirty girls, and more than a few of them had not been one hundred percent willing. He made petty theft a habit and liked hitting squirrels with his motorcycle.

But Eagle Carridin didn’t kill girls. He didn’t kill anyone. And he didn’t even pause to think after Croak’s ultimatum before launching himself at Croak and knocking him to the ground. He got a few good punches in while Croak was still too surprised to act before Logan pulled him back and Croak headbutted him. The girls began screaming and trying to pull the peg out of the ground. Scooter had attempted to get his knife again, missed, fallen to his knees, and was currently passed out and drooling, his head dangerously close to the fire.

This went on for some time before a single shot rang out. Which was weird, because Croak was pretty sure he hadn’t brought a gun and neither had the others.

Someone stepped into the clearing. She was old and thin and had a shotgun pointed at Croak’s face. Everyone in the clearing stared at her, confused. Except Scooter. He fell over, away from the fire, and started to snore heavily.

“Who the fuck are you?”

This was Collette King, Collie to her friends, the list of which had been slowly dwindling in the past decade or so, either through falling outs or deaths. She was fifty-seven the night she met Eagle, but with Collie age hardly seemed to matter. She had shrunk a little and her hair was now mostly gray with a few old chestnut brown locks still hiding underneath. Thin, but wiry, taller than average, or maybe she only seemed that way, she always wore the same type of dark blue jeans and had owned her leather jacket longer than some people own cars or houses. The younger ones called her old school while anyone her age just called her a functional alcoholic. Hair of the dog in the morning and whiskey for the rest of the day. When the rest of the world stopped smoking she only smoked more, yellowing her skin and teeth with nicotine, setting the smell of smoke into everything she owned, and scratching her voice like an old vinyl.

Alpha Beta Rho had gotten onto her radar the year before. She had been driving through town and was parched, found herself in a bar otherwise filled with college kids. Sitting in the middle of college kids was one of her favorite pastimes. They thought there was so much weight to their problems, talked about them like they shook the world, when really they were pebbles compared to her own weight, or even the weight they would have to carry in the future. She thought it was the funniest shit. And then one of the conversations she was eavesdropping on turned interesting.

“They found me out when I didn’t know how to play Asshole.” He was a clean looking kid, green, wearing slacks and a polo that fit neatly and a hangover that didn’t. “I’ve never even heard of Asshole.”

“How have you never heard of Asshole?”

“It never came up in my searches! Do you know how many drinking games there are? How was I supposed to get to every single one?”

“It’s for the best man,” the other one said, also clean looking. “It’s just not worth the liver damage.”

“Isn’t it? Four years getting stupid with Alpha Beta Rho and I’ve got guaranteed graduation and apparently my dream job.”

The other one was already shaking his head. “It’s a myth.”

“I’ve done my research, okay? I don’t know what they’re doing over there, but it’s not a myth.”

Intrigued, Collie had stuck around and did some research of her own, and came to the same conclusion. Fifteen years and every Alpha Beta Rho, despite having an active alcohol and drug life and usually being tremendously stupid, had graduated from Carson College. After a little more digging she had discovered the dream job part was completely true, too.

It took her a little bit longer to figure out what the hell they were doing to get such things. They were surprisingly good at covering their tracks and picking the right people. Of course it had to be virgins, and maybe virgins were just in short supply on the Carson College campus, but even that first year they hadn’t taken their victims from their own backyard. They must have been taking a few each year. Only a few had ever been reported missing. But they had been reported the same time each year, and they were around the same age, and it took an intuitive leap, but it was one Collie was comfortable with. She’d been back around Carson College since the beginning of the school year, waiting. She’d kept her eyes on the new pledges, figuring they would be the ones to do it this year, and so had missed the older frat boys collecting the girls. But she had been in her pickup truck across the street when Croak had marched them out of the house, and knew by the look on his face that tonight was the night.

“I will load you with buckshot if you speak again,” she said, her voice as grizzled as she was. She looked at Eagle.

“You. Blondie. Untie the girls. Get them out of here.”

“I don’t know who you are, bitch, but-”

These were the last immortal words of Croak Neilson. Collie was a woman of her word. Most of the buckshot found his face, and at close range, there wasn’t much face left once the bang floated off and the smoke disappeared. Croak Neilson fell face first into the flames.

The girls were screaming. Scooter had rolled over again, towards the fire, and Collie used one boot to roll him back. Logan was staring wide eyed at the charring corpse of his hero. Eagle was frozen except for his eyes, which were bouncing back and forth between Croak and Collie so fast he pulled something.

“Did you have to kill him?” he asked finally.

Collie lowered the shotgun and considered it briefly. “How many times has he done this already?”

Eagle thought about it, really thought about it, and came out with roughly the right math. He nodded.

“You’ve ruined everything,” Logan said. The grip on his knife tightened. “I finally had it. All the shit I put up with. The constant drinking, the hangovers, the loud music, the tramps. It was all going to be worth it.”

It occurred to Logan that, perhaps, it still could be worth it.

He took a step towards the girls.

Collie dropped her shotgun.

Eagle started to block Logan.

From her jacket pocket Collie pulled out a revolver.

Logan tried to go around Eagle.

Collie leveled the gun.

Eagle pulled the knife away from Logan hard to enough to break his wrist. Then he dropped Logan with a solid hit to the jaw.

“No,” he said, waving the knife at his unconscious body.. “Killing is wrong, you fucktard.”

He looked up at Collie, then, still holding the knife. She almost shot him in that second.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he asked.

Collie sighed and dropped the gun.

“Help me with the girls.”

That was the end of Alpha Beta Rho’s mysterious success, and the end of Eagle’s career at Carson College. The first to see Collie with her new partner was Bertie Bowie, and she didn’t believe it for a while. Nobody did. Collie never traveled with people. Collie kind of hated people. And here she was teaching the trade to some big dumb idiot who knew nothing about anything. Everyone had their guesses, and a few guessed correctly. Collie, while still a firecracker, was almost sixty. Hunting on her own just wasn’t safe anymore. She needed some extra muscle.

Eagle got credit for keeping Collie alive for an extra eight years. And in the end, it wasn’t the job that got her. Stomach cancer. Still smoked to the end. Eagle started smoking with her. There was really nothing else to do when you’re spending all of your time with a walking chimney. Once she died, though, he threw them away and quit cold turkey. Didn’t like what it was doing to his face, he told everybody. Like none of them were allowed to admit they loved anyone. They all knew the truth anyway.

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ABP, Part 1

While Eagle had always been a meathead, he hadn’t always been Eagle. Before that balmy September morning when he was eighteen and a freshman at Carson College, he had been Tyler. Not a single person would have expected him to go to college. He hadn’t been the type to really get work done, or even know the work existed. He didn’t play school sports or do music or anything that could get him some sort of scholarship. He mostly skipped school to go surfing, or came to school but skipped class to get high under the bleachers. Imagine the surprise on his guidance counselor’s face when Tyler came to his office early in his senior year and told him he wanted to go to college.

“You…want…to go to college?” he had asked, gripping his glasses and wondering if that heart attack his doctors were always warning him about was imminent.

“Yeah, of course,” Tyler had said, sounding confused about why this was even a question.

“But…why?” Maybe it was a stroke. Could he smell toast?

“Because that’s what comes next. First high school, then college, then a job. Duh.”

They had stared at each other for a few seconds, Tyler confused and Mr. Hart thinking about the twenty dollars he had just lost in the office pool. But because Mr. Hart was good at his job, he helped Tyler prepare application packets, all for local schools near the beach, as per Tyler’s request. All the rejections came in first, including from the notorious party school up the coast. Mr. Hart was getting ready to float the idea of doing literally anything else when the last letter came in from Carson College. Lo and behold, it was one of the big envelopes, filled with admission information. Mrs. Johns, the calculus teacher, had smirked at it over her coffee when Mr. Hart showed her.

“Maybe they were low on their Blond Meathead quota this year.”

(Mr. Hart would wonder about how Tyler had gotten into Carson on and off for years. Mostly it was just idle conjecture but sometimes it would keep him up to the wee hours of the night. The truth, that Mr. Hart and even Tyler himself would die not knowing, was that there had been a clerical error made by an overworked secretary named Janet Lawson. It was Friday evening and Janet wanted to leave to be on time for her daughter’s dance recital, and didn’t notice that of the two Tyler Carridins who had applied to the school, she was accepting the wrong one. It would, of course, change our Tyler Carridin’s life forever. The other Tyler had applied to Carson as a safety school. He had already been accepted to CalTech, and his life would march on exactly as he had meticulously planned until colon cancer would drop him in his fifties.)

While Tyler actually going to college was beyond the imaginative limits of man, Tyler pledging to a fraternity seemed just about right. Before he had even made a class schedule, Tyler put in the time and research to find the perfect fraternity for him. He had notebooks, and a little scorecard. He did more research on the fraternities of Carson College than he did for anything else during the entire four years of his high school career. And in the end, there was only one answer.

There are, of course, fraternities that defy stereotypes and produce responsible members of society. Fraternities that do charity work, focus on academics, produce decorated graduates who go on to hold top positions in good corporations. Fraternities filled with young gentlemen who are only looking for community and, well, fraternity. All of these fraternities at Carson College wished that Alpha Beta Rho would fall off the face of the earth.

Alpha Beta Rho wrote the stereotypes. Their parties were loud and their pledges were hazed. Their house was at the end of Greek Row, and it was a few window shutters away from being condemned by the city. Mushrooms grew from particularly old beer stains in windowless corners, and there were rumors that some of the food in the refrigerator had once walked off with a freshman coed. This rumor was ridiculous, of course, because the Alpha Beta Rho refrigerator never held anything more than bottles of beer. The rooms upstairs were an unholy abomination of clutter, piles of clothes, textbooks laid flat with their spines open. Bad enough that the mothers in a five mile radius would, in quiet moments, often shudder to themselves in horror, not knowing why exactly. The only thing that stayed relatively clean in the Alpha Beta Rho house were the sheets and blankets. The first Monday of every month the entire house would take all of their linens down to the coin laundry and spend the day there, drinking and washing every sheet, pillow case, and blanket. Had to keep up appearances for the ladies.

Despite being not so much a real fraternity, as much as some sort of embodiment of Hollywood’s fraternity, brought to life through the energies of millions of movie-going believers, it was extremely hard to be accepted into Alpha Beta Rho. They were the most exclusive on campus, and because they only accepted a handful of pledges a year, the smallest. There were some every year who tried to get into Alpha Beta Rho not for the parties, or the coeds, or the beer, or the drugs, or the near constant weekend surfing trips. Every year there were serious-minded folks willing to put on a pair of aviators and a muscle shirt for the first time and pretend to love keg stands and beer bongs, just to find out what the hell these airheaded functioning alcoholics were doing right.

Alpha Beta Rho had the highest graduation rate of all the fraternities in Carson College. Not the highest GPA, not by long drive and a bus ride, but that didn’t seem to matter. Most Alpha Beta Rho’s graduated college and stepped into their dream job. Paul Tanasky moved back to Portland and opened his own brewery, Ta-Nasty Beers. It was the main brand of beer Alpha Beta Rhos drank. Actually, it was the beer most fraternities drank on the west coast. That year Tyler pledged was Ta-Nasty’s fifth year, and they were successfully starting sales in Texas and Oklahoma. Another five years and Ta-Nasty would be a fraternal staple across the country. It was cheap, had variety, and the caps taught you how to curse in different languages. Paul Tanasky knew nothing about brewing beer. Or business, for that matter. He had graduated with a degree in Spanish.

Frank Beamon became the youngest man to own a professional sports team when he acquired the San Miguel Chargers when he was twenty-eight. Tommy Chen designed skateboards and surfboards. Jose Carlos owned a comic book shop in Los Angeles. Ricky Peterson was a Secret Service Agent. Some were rich, some were famous, some were neither. But all had their dream job before they had a turned thirty. Was it the beer? The surfing? The mushrooms in the corner? No one was sure, but some people were willing to put up with it for four years if it meant unconditional success.

Pledging to Alpha Beta Rho, then, had become something of an arduous task, and even the likes of Tyler Carridin found himself flagging halfway through Pledge Week. He hadn’t been remotely sober in three days, but had found himself surfing out in the Pacific, surfing in Carson’s big fountain, playing an aggressive game of tackle beer pong, scaling the walls of Carson College Library, falling from a third story window of Carson College Library, winning and then losing and then winning games of tackle kickball, and playing a game of Never Have I Ever where five shots taken meant a keg stand and then dead sprints across the football field. Of the thirty-three pledges that had started, there were only three left by Wednesday night, and the ‘I Never’ statements were almost wholly unintelligible. Somehow, Tyler found himself taking shots. A lot. The last thing he remembered before passing out was Croak Neiman pouring him another whiskey shot while wondering aloud how someone gets to eighteen without ever forcing vomiting for safety.

Tyler never would have seen Thursday morning – or any of Thursday, probably – if the football team didn’t need to practice. He woke up surrounded by the Carson College Hellcats doing burpees and screaming about it. He was on the forty yard line. Soaking wet, as the sprinkles had gone off three hours earlier. Face down, pants around his ankles, cheeks spread eagle-

“-with an American flag planted in his ass,” Croak Neiman said for the eleventh time that day. It was the celebration party half a week later. “In his ass! Nobody even knows who put it there! Probably Spread Eagle did himself, the crazy bastard! This crazy bastard!” Croak had his arm around Eagle’s neck as he told the story, shaking him at the end, spilling both of their beers.

Anyone else maybe would have felt shame in hearing this story retold over and over. Eagle only felt pride. After all, it had gotten him into Alpha Beta Rho. And it had gotten him a sweet nickname. And Croak Neiman wasn’t telling the story to embarrass him. Croak Neiman was just as proud of Eagle as Eagle was.

(Eagle would never tire of this story, always telling it in full detail to anyone who bothered to ask why he was called Eagle in the first place. “Jesus Christ, Eagle, maybe you need to stop telling that story,” Carmello had suggested once. Eagle hadn’t even batted an eye. “You need to be proud of your roots.”)

Croak Neiman was the president of Alpha Beta Rho. He was tall and muscular and ethnically confusing, his skin some tanned brown color and his hair black with light brown highlights and his eyes blue. He could pass for roughly 83% of heritages. Of course he would never answer if anyone just came out and asked what the hell he was, usually turning the question back on them, making them feel racist. It was one of his favorite jokes, actually, along with the blonde who walks into the bar carrying a wiener dog, and the classic finger pull. He was smarter than he looked, which was easy because he looked just about as stupid as they come, but then he was even smarter than that. All Alpha Beta Rho pledges got a background check before Pledge Week even began. The kids pledging for the success and not for the party had usually been pegged before a keg was even tapped. His look through Eagle’s files had told him that not only was Eagle not there just to fulfill his dreams, he probably didn’t have any beyond being in Alpha Beta Rho. This was exactly the kind of person they were looking for. Eagle was in before he became Eagle, but they couldn’t make it look that easy. Eagle and two others were the only ones to make it that year.

For seven weeks, everything was exactly as Eagle had imagined. His classes were easy, all gen eds that he was paying one of the honor students to take for him. His room at the Alpha Beta Rho house was shared with the two other pledges, Logan Rhett and Scooter McMinnis, who’s high school nickname had to be voted on to be kept by the house and survived by a bare margin. All three of them were undeclared and spoke many times of sitting down and deciding on something before moving on to far more appropriate conversations, such as babe of the month or who’s turn it was to buy toilet paper. The girls at Alpha Beta Rho’s sister sorority Theta Delta Theta were almost always DTF, and if none of them were around at a party there was always a girl or two who’d had a few too many and was ready to make questionable choices. Eagle had found himself in the life television and movies had promised him. Four or five years of partying, then he would buckle down, get a good job and a hot wife. Exactly how life was supposed to go.

Nothing seemed strange when Croak Neiman and a couple of the other seniors woke him and Logan and Scooter up at two in the morning by flashing the lights and screaming WAKE UP FRESH MEAT over and over until all three of them stood at sloppy attention in the middle of the room, Scooter the last to get himself up as, unknown even to Scooter, he had only been one vodka shot away from alcohol poisoning when he finally quit a few hours before. Croak looked them over, strange blue eyes swimming with beer and pride.

“Boys,” he said finally, his tone low and heavy. “It’s time to pay your fucking dues.”

They followed him out of the house, the rest of the members leaning out of doorways, pounding the walls, the floors, cheering. None of this seemed weird to Eagle. Just another event. He hoped there would be chicks.

Out of the house, across the campus, and then they were marching along through the woods to the north of campus. It was the middle of October but it was unseasonably warm and even a bit humid. Breezes made leaves whisper and occasional crashes from deeper in the woods made them jump. They were too close to the city and its lights, and the sky above them, while cloudless, gave no stars. They marched forward in abject silence, not having to be told to keep their mouths shut. Occasionally Scooter would start to veer off the path and into the bushes, and Logan, behind him, would pull him back straight by his collar and push him.

Eagle was the first to hear the new sounds, but thought nothing of them. He wasn’t familiar with these woods. He didn’t know what sounds were supposed to be there and what sounds were telling him to run and never look back. There was a light ahead, he could see that about the same time he started hearing the sounds. When he figured out what the sounds were, his first thought was, Yes. Chicks.

The light was from a campfire in a good sized clearing that seemed to get a lot of use, although they hadn’t been walking on any sort of the path the entire way there, forging their own through underbrush for twenty minutes at least. Some kind of design was carved into the ground around the fire. Candles were placed around the fire, which seemed stupid to Eagle because, hey, there’s a fire there, fuckfaces. Symbols carved from wood, stuff he’d never seen before and wouldn’t be able to accurately describe after, hung from the trees above the candles.

All this secret society bullshit was exactly what you were supposed to find with fraternities. They loved all that Greek lettering stuff. No, it wasn’t until he looked across the fire and saw the three girls that Eagle finally started to think that maybe this wasn’t entirely on a level he was comfortable or familiar with.

Alpha Beta Rho let in a lot of local high school girls trying to pass for college girls. No way they would have let these girls in. There was no way they could have defended themselves with ‘they said they were nineteen.’ They didn’t look nineteen. They didn’t look fifteen. They also didn’t look like they went to any high school. No high school girl would wear those clothes or let their hair get like that. These were runaways, homeless kids who had more important things to worry about than the brand of jeans they wore or whether their football player boyfriend was cheating on her, which of course he was.

Also, they were hogtied with gags in their mouth. Abject terror bloomed on their faces when the frat boys entered the light, and the three of them tried to scoot away. They were tied to a peg in the ground, though. They weren’t going anywhere.

Logan was silent and watching. Scooter was silent, too, trying not to vomit and most definitely not understanding anything that was happening.

Eagle opened his mouth. Closed it. Held up a hand. Put it down. Tried to think. Gave up.

“What?” he asked.

Part 2