Witches of Rascar Pablo: Part III

Chapter 11: The Mace

10:50 pm Friday, May 19, 1984 (PDT)
Grants Pass, Oregon

Benny and Rachel offered to go to town to get first-aid for Lucas’s wound, and a power converter for the mace. They bounded down the mountain in the old Volkswagen bus. Neither spoke a word for the first several minutes. Benny was taking sharp turns at fifty, and going seventy in-between.

“Please slow down,” said Rachel.

Benny huffed, glared, up-shifted, increased his speed.

“You can’t help Lucas if you’re dead,” she said.

Benny nearly collided head on with a black sedan speeding up the mountain with it’s brights on. They both hit the brakes and skidded right by each other.

“That was Paul,” exclaimed Rachel.

“In that car?” said Benny. “Are you sure?”

Benny went into reverse. So did Jon’s dad. They backed up until they were alongside each other.

Rachel got out of the van and stomped over to the black sedan to where Paul was sitting. “Where were you,” she shouted. She tried to open the door but Paul locked it just before she could. She pounded on the window, glared at him. He scooted back from the door, stared at her through his coke bottle lenses.

“Everyone is looking for you,” she shouted.

“Go talk to your sister so she stops banging on my car!” said Jon’s dad.

Paul got out. “Don’t ever do that!” she said, “If you’re not going to tell Mom or Dad where you are, at least tell me.” She hugged him.

“Did you find Lucas?” asked Jon.

“Yes,” said Benny. “About two-hundred feet to the left of the five-mile marker you’ll see an old A-frame. Lucas is there with Orion. He’s hurt. He got shot.”

“Many psychos coming up this mountain right now,” said Jon’s dad. “Be careful.”

“Yeah,” said Rachel, “we know.”

“We’re going to get some first-aid stuff for Lucas,” said Benny as he and Rachel climbed back into the van. “Wait for us at the A-frame, will you?”

Benny and Rachel continued down the mountain. They rounded another corner and slowed down when an elegantly dressed woman, and a man in dingy blue coveralls, came into view.

Rachel squinted, trying to get a better look at the approaching duo. “They both have sunglasses on,” she said. “And earplugs!”

Benny floored it. Dust and gravel kicked up behind them and they launched down the small stretch of road and smashed into the two. The woman was mangled under the chassis. The mechanic blasted off of the windshield and went into a series of backward airborne somersaults.

Rachel looked back at them. They both lay bloody and motionless in their tracks. “They aren’t moving,” she said.

The BLM road came to an end, and Benny turned onto the highway. There were small parties of sunglass-wearing, stick and stone-wielding pedestrians all over the place.

“Jesus Christ,” said Benny, “they’re everywhere!”

A shovel twirled out of one of the cliques and banged into the windshield, and hairline faults spider-webbed across it.

Benny handed Rachel the Glock he’d taken from Deezer. “If someone else throws something, shoot ’em.”

Rachel took the plastic handgun. “I’ve never shot a gun before,” she said. “How do I do it?”

Benny screwed up his face at her. “Just aim and pull the trigger!”

Rachel sat ready with the pistol. The deranged zealots continued wandering up the highway. No one else threw anything or gave them any trouble.

The hospital was desolate. There were few cars in the parking lot, and not a soul stirred.

“It looks closed,” said Benny.

“Hospitals don’t close,” said Rachel, stepping out of the bus.

“No. Wait in the car. And if any more lunatics in sunglasses come, shoot ’em.”

“No. We should stay together.”

“No.” Benny started toward the front entrance. “Stay here. Stay in the car.”

Almost immediately after he went in, a pair of giggling nurses, one blonde and the other black-haired, both looking in their twenties, walked out from the hospital onto the parking lot. They tripped a doctor who was on his way in. He fell to the ground, and they teased him by mimicking him. They weren’t wearing sunglasses, but they did seem bothered by the light – even though that part of the parking lot was well shaded. Rachel reluctantly got out of the van and went up to them from behind. Their giggles grew more wicked.

The man seemed ill. He crawled on all fours, permeating the stench of human feces.

“Oh, did the poor doctor shit his pants?” asked the blonde nurse.

“That’s okay, doc, we like when you shit your pants,” said the brunette.

“Like… totally,” said the blonde, “poop is the shit.”

They continued giggling, and the giggles warped into omnificent hackles that echoed around them. Rachel felt a stabbing sensation, lost her balance and dropped the pistol. It made a noise when it hit the ground and drew the nurses’ attention. Both nurses dashed toward it. Rachel dove and scooped it up just before they could get to it. The nurses started toward her. The blonde was smiling ecstatically.

“Stop!” said Rachel, backing away, and keeping the pistol trained.

They continued toward her.

Rachel took a deep breath. Pop! Pop! Two head shots. She looked down at the two twitching bodies, and the pools of blood expanding about their heads like crimson halos. She tried helping the doctor up but he swatted her hand away.

“Leave me alone,” he said. “When the police see what you did, you will be in big trouble!”

Translucent and violently vibrating tentacles protruded from the opened skull of one of the fallen nurses and began crawling toward the doctor, dragging the nurse’s twitching body along with it. It attached itself to the doctor’s leg, climbed all the way up his body toward his face. Rachel put the Glock to it and blew it clean out of the nurse’s skull, ripping it in two, and killing it. The two halves writhed and shriveled for a second on the pavement before going motionless.

The doctor looked dumbfounded at the partially transparent, squid-like tentacles.

Rachel’s hands and one of her legs shook uncontrollably for a few seconds as she processed what she’d just done. “You’re a doctor?” she asked, hyperventilating, and trying not to look at the huge hairy mole on his chin.

“I’m a cardiologist,” he said, standing in such a way that made it obvious he’d just soiled himself.

“My friend’s been shot in the leg. Can you help him?”

He was unable to take his eyes off the strange tentacled creature. “Not my problem,” he said.

“I just helped you.”

“I never asked you for help.” He glared at her. “I don’t owe you anything.” Carefully, so as to not worsen the mess in his drawers, he knelt down beside one of the halves of the tentacled creature, set his briefcase down, pulled a camera from it, and started taking pictures. Then he felt something hard press up against the back of his head.

“Get up,” said Rachel.

He stood up, looked at her. She banged him over the head with the plastic grip of the Glock. “Don’t look at me, dumbass,” she shouted. “Just walk!”

Her hands shook uncontrollably as she guided him at gunpoint to the van and opened the door to the passenger seat. “Get in.” He began to climb in. “Wait!” she said, covering her nose. “You stink like shit.” Without taking the pistol’s aim from him, she opened the side door, pulled some newspaper from the back seat and threw it at him. “Put this down first.” She climbed into the back passenger seat, not taking her eyes nor the pistol’s aim from him.

“You are making a mistake,” he said.

“I helped you,” she said. “Now you’re going to help me.”

Benny returned with gauze, a stitch kit, and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He climbed into the driver’s seat and screwed up his face on noticing the smell. “Is that shit?” he asked.

“I found a doctor,” said Rachel. “I think he can help Lucas.”

Benny looked at Rachel, and then at the man she had at gunpoint; he recognized him from the day before.

The doctor, huffed, and looked away.

Benny turned to Rachel, “I knew there was something special about you.”

“Well,” said Rachel, “I do think he shit his pants. Should we take him somewhere and let him get cleaned up? I mean… so we don’t have to drive all the way back with this smell?”

* * *

10:24 pm Friday, May 19, 1984 (PDT)
Grants Pass, Oregon

Carlos, resting his head in Harmony’s lap, strummed the tune to Midnight Rider on the now powerless Stratocaster while she sang the lyrics. Orion sat next to the shattered window, pacing, watching and smoking.

“Eh, señor brujo,” said Carlos, “this kid’s leg is… not looking so good – casi todo es negro.”

On examining the tourniquet Orion noticed that the remaining tadpole started jumping up and down in the dish. It jumped clear out of the dish onto the table. He took a large, rolled-up piece of canvas from a drawer, cleared off the coffee table, and unrolled it there. It was a map – maze-like – extremely detailed, deep and colorful, with labels and markers in Romance, and topographical denotations in burnt ink.

“It’s beautiful,” gushed Harmony. “What is it?”

“Map,” said Orion.

The only writing on the entire map which she could read was the signature in the corner. “Who’s Francisco? Is he like… an artist?”

Orion lifted the polliwog from the dish by the horse hair he’d threaded through its tail and flung it onto the map. He pulled more of the small mushrooms from his necklace pouch, chewed them, took of swig of water, swished it around his mouth, then spat it onto the polliwog, drenching the map along with it. The Polliwog slowly began to inch its way through the topographical maze and Orion watched it with great intensity.

Harmony heard voices coming from outside and she peered out through the broken window. A dirty flannel-wearing figure approached with a Molotov cocktail tied to a piece of rope. He swung it above his head like a lasso, about to loose it. Orion came to the window, saw the man, drew the revolver and shot him, dropping him in an instant. The Molotov cocktail burst open all over him as he fell, engulfing him in flames. Harmony saw the bodies of the eight-year-old girl and Deezer strewn out not too far from where he burned. She looked up at the sky and cried, “Oh God! Please help us!”

Strange voices, stones and other projectiles flew out from the brambles and bombarded the shack. Orion tried firing more rounds, but there were no more, and pulling the trigger just made a clicking sound as more deranged zealots wearing sunglasses approached. He released the bat and it flew right into the head of one oncomer’s swinging shovel, injuring it, and felling it to the ground where it remained motionless.

A black sedan suddenly roared into the enclave and skidded to a halt in front of the shack. When its brights went on the approaching rabble screamed in heinous mind-throttling synchrony. A hammer and a shovel and other projectiles twirled into the sedan. Jon’s dad stepped out, opened the trunk, pulled out a long rectangular case, and took cover behind the sedan. He emerged a moment later armed with a huge homemade nail gun. He blasted off dozens of nails, mowing down half the flock of oncomers within seconds – the rest flew back into the woods.

* * *

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Lucas continued his ascent. The walkway narrowed and darkened. The pink moon loomed over his shoulder, whispering universal truths of lunacy and trigonometry. He came to a tunnel that gaped and yawned and he entered it on all fours. It narrowed further forcing him to slither. He slithered nearly a hundred feet in the pitch black before coming to what felt like a junction. There he heard what sounded like the scuttle of something approaching from behind. Before he could make a decision regarding the junction, a train of rats came from behind forcing him into the left tunnel as they squeezed by him on all sides. They went by him for about another fifteen feet down the tunnel before surpassing him completely and disappearing into the darkness ahead.

He continued forward through several twists and turns before he could see light. The tunnel opened up onto the floor of a chasm where, as far as the eye could see, captives in chains and shackles banged on rocks with hammers and chisels. Strange, he thought. The tunnel must have bypassed the church. Some slaves were nude, some wore tattered rags – they all looked malnourished, and mumbled in intervals set by periodic nods to the pink moon. Guards with cleft palates, Habsburg jaws and other facial deformities, elegantly clad in linens and leathers walked among them carrying whips, accompanied by hounds on leashes. The walls of the chasm had been carved into a complex system of rooms with balconies and walkways running between them where finely dressed aristocrats observed the epic labor from above.

Lucas’s attention went to a majestic white-marble sculpture that sat a hundred feet tall in the middle of the gorge. Its head and torso were those of a bare-breasted woman, its arms and lower body were those of a lioness. It sat on its haunches with regal posture, amidst the clanking of hammers and chisels. He felt a sneeze coming on just as one of the huge hounds with a whip-wielding female in toe rounded a nearby corner and stalked in his direction. She was pale-skinned and wore a nun’s dress. Her face was horrendous – her nose seemed to spiral inward, and the left side of her face was lip-less and cheek-less, all the way back to her molars.

He ducked into a nearby cluster of granite boulders and tried to keep from sneezing. He could still see the marble gargoyle and, as he looked at it, felt something burning in his hand. A lump on the back of his right hand moved clockwise in a circle, blue strands of light suddenly crossed his vision, and his leg burned with pain. His palms emitted light, and as soon as he looked at them, he let out a sneeze. It immediately drew the hound’s attention and the huge canine led the female guard to the granite cluster where Lucas was hiding.

* * *

11:45 pm Friday, May 19, 1984 (PDT)
Grants Pass, Oregon

The bodies piled up and began to form a semi-circular ridge of carnage about the face of the shack where Jon’s dad was now running out of ammo. Jon and Paul entered the old A-frame. After gaping at the arcane herbal pharmacy for a second, and the coat-hanger-brandy-snifter contraption, they saw Lucas resting in the lap of some woman, strumming a powerless Stratocaster, singing “La Cucaracha” with an accent, and with his black-and-blue leg in a tourniquet.

“Hey… little homies,” said Carlos. “Bienvenidos a la fiesta!”

“Lucas?” came Jon.

“Lucas not here,” sang Carlos, deliriously, “Lucas went bye bye… la cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puedo cambiar!”

Paul whispered to Jon, “Something’s… like… wrong with him.”

Jon watched Orion, who was concentrating on a tadpole inching its way through an incredibly detailed maze drawn onto an old piece of canvas.

“What’s he doing?” asked Jon.

Paul was already distracted by the many jars containing insects on the shelf. He stood in front of it, nibbling at his finger nail, gazing into one in particular. “Sphex lucae! That’s my wasp!” He pulled the jar from the shelf, turned it over in his hands, and watched as the wicked red and black insect crawled up a twig toward the hole-punched lid. Then he noticed the label written onto masking tape. “Sphex lucae ungido?” he read out loud. He brought the jar to his face and squinted, trying to get a better look. He tapped his index finger against the glass.

“No!”’ said Orion, not wanting to turn his attention from the map. “No toques eso! Don’t touch that!”

Two Molotov cocktails broke onto the roof of the A-frame. Jon’s dad burst in. “Everyone in the car, now,” he shouted. A stone soared through the doorway and banged into the back of his head and he fell unconscious.

“Dad,” yelled Jon. He knelt over his motionless father.

Paul dropped the jar and it shattered onto the floor. The wasp took off from under a shard of glass and landed on his sleeve, and he wigged and flailed and it bit him on the hand and flew out the window. “Ouch!” He gripped his hand and winced at the mark it left between his thumb and index finger. A wave of warmth and euphoria rolled over him. He looked around the room. Everything moved in slow motion. Jon shouted something at him, but it was too slow and distorted to make out. His muscles burned and flexed involuntarily. He looked at Orion.

Orion looked up from the map, shot him a devious smile, and said in profoundly clear speech, “Don’t waste it.”

An arachnid whose thorax was the split-open head of some zealot, and whose abdomen was their twitching body being drug behind it, entered the shack and climbed onto Jon. It’s mostly transparent spider-like legs sent jarring electricity through Jon and he screamed and struggled to escape its grip. He managed to break free from it, but it latched onto his foot, causing him to fall down.

Orion was unfazed by all of the commotion and refused to divert his attention from the tadpole.

Paul pried the massive nail gun from the hands of Jon’s unconscious father. Harmony came to help him lift it, but he already had it off the ground and was taking aim, and she watched in awe as the lanky kid with seemingly unreal strength unloaded the remaining rounds into the arachnid, nailing it to the floor.

As flames further engulfed the shack’s exterior, some of the oddly-dispersed cliques of deranged zealots became excited and broke into spontaneous orgies and spats of bestial behavior.

Jon picked himself up. A final surge of remaining electricity arced and crackled audibly over his body and he coughed and wheezed. He looked around him, suddenly acutely aware of the environment and all that was in it. He saw every object, every organism, every event – how each was related to the next, like a terrifying causal web of cosmic energy.

More of the arachnid-dead-body hybrids approached the shack just as the old Volkswagen bus smashed through one of the cliques of zealots and crushed them under its tires where it skidded to halt. Benny and Rachel exploded out of it.

“Jesus,” cried Benny, when he saw the state of the A-frame and the number of oncomers attacking it. He pulled the cardiologist by the arm, led him into the burning shack while trying to avoid incoming stones and other airborne projectiles.

The doctor’s attention first went to Jon’s father who was strewn out motionless on the floor. He checked his vitals and, on discovering he was simply unconscious, went over to Lucas.

“Hey doc,” said Carlos, deliriously, “remember me?”

The doctor huffed and proceeded to remove the tourniquet as cinders and little pieces of flaming ceiling began to flutter down from overhead.

“Remember?… The defibrillator?”

“No, I don’t remember,” said the doctor, sarcastically.

“No?” Carlos laughed deliriously. “Not by the hairs on your chinny chin chin?” he said, jesting at the hairs on the man’s mole.

Jon and Paul stared in wonder at Lucas’s Mexican-accented, strange dialog with the doctor, and then they both began to cough as the room filled with smoke.

Benny burst out the door of the shack and looked around for something – anything – to smother the fire with. He took the leather jacket off a nearby corpse – some middle-aged woman – and threw it onto the flaming roof of the A-frame. It seemed to work and so he picked it up again repeated the action several times. The fire seemed to die down. He reentered the shack and was almost struck by an incoming metal pipe.

“Did you bring the converter?” asked Carlos.

“Shit!” cursed Benny. “I forgot.”

“Puta madre. We’re all going to die here!”

Jon picked up the broken converter. Still feeling slight tingles of electricity, he inspected the hole and embedded bullet, and he saw the entire chain of events that led to it – even the trajectory of the bullet seemed to manifest when he concentrated on it. “This thing can still work,” he said, not knowing himself how he knew. “Anyone have a key? Something sharp?”

Benny handed Harmony’s key ring to Jon. Jon used one of the keys to pry the bullet from the converter. He removed the plastic casing and looked at the muddle of wires and circuits. He understood, with inexplicable clarity, what needed to be done. Moving at incredible speed, he began crossing wires and messing with the exposed innards. He came to an impasse when he realized that the bullet had severed contact between two of the main conductors.

“Can you really fix it?” said Benny, excitedly, as a rock flew through the already broken window and struck the opposite wall.

“Crap,” said Jon, “maybe not.”

Paul had a ringing in his head and his hand throbbed where the wasp had stung him. He felt something burning in his pocket and he reached in to see what it was. It was one of his paperclips. He pulled it out and examined it.

Paul snatched it from his hand. “That’s perfect!”

“We can’t stay here,” cried Rachel.

Benny lifted Jon’s unconscious father over his shoulder. “Come on,” he shouted. “Get in the car!”

Two snarling, retching zealots climbed through the window and pounced on Rachel. Benny dropped Jon’s father to come to her aid. Harmony beat one of them with the butt end of the nail gun. Another came through the door and tackled Benny. Its eyes were clouded over by blood and cataracts and it growled out of its chewed-off lips and bloody gums.

Meanwhile Jon was working away. “I got it,” he shouted. He re-attached the mended converter to the amp and ran out the door with the extension cord.

“Wait,” cried Rachel.

The lights on the amp flashed and the crystal brandy-snifters began to hum. Carlos picked the strings with his surrogate fingers and fusion exploded from the amp and quaked through the enclave surrounding the shack. Cries of suffering, dying zealots sounded from all directions. The two grappling with Benny ceased and ran out screaming.

Orion went out to the front. Benny and Rachel followed. Zealots scattered in all directions. Each time Carlos strummed the mace, some of them fell, contributing to the ever-growing blanket of carnage. Orion, seemingly unbothered by the heinous commotion, walked over to where the bat lay black and motionless. He knelt down, took it into his hands, looked up to the sky and shouted, “Dios mio!” A gust of wind screamed through the enclave and created a window through which hundreds of warriors on standing horseback could be seen wherever they collided with the vibrations and the strums of the mace.

Benny and Rachel held onto each other in fright at the sudden transformation of the surroundings. Orion inhaled as much of the wind as he could and then blew it out onto the bat. It turned bright orange and flapped its wings. “Rascar Pablo, he shouted. “Ride! Warriors, ride! Ride to Katatòn!”

The bat took fight and the riders thundered away behind it, following it to the horizon, and to Katatòn.