Ad Nauseam

JACK AND JILL



Jack sat at the worn kitchen table, his hands buried in the guts of an ancient radio, tinkering with the parts in a vain attempt to fix the antique. He told the owner, Mrs. Jones, that he feared the radio was beyond fixing, but she insisted with a clear statement that she held complete faith in his abilities. He mentioned how cheap it’d cost to replace nowadays, but she liked that one and would hear nothing of the new fangled junk they peddled at the ritzy stores in town. In the end, he let himself be brow beaten by an eighty-four year old woman who stood a foot and a half shorter than himself.

Though he mainly worked as a handy man around town, word of mouth brought him some additional side jobs when people started to realize his proficiency with small household electronics. It was difficult to find steady work, being an ex-con, so he happily accepted whatever odd jobs came his way. This one, however, proved more work than the twenty-five dollar fee was worth.

A scraping sound from the room above the kitchen drew his attention from his task.

She was moving around up there again.

He sighed and lit another cigarette, dragging deeply and rubbing his eyes as he exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke.

Too soon. He had nearly been caught the last time.

He turned his attention back to the project at hand, hoping that if he pretended not to hear her, she’d return to sleep, or whatever else she did up there. He no longer went upstairs.

He could smell her sickly sweet odor long before he heard the moist slap of her bare feet on the linoleum behind him. Jack sat up straight in his chair and stared directly ahead at the fading rose-patterned wallpaper, keeping his breaths shallow through his mouth to avoid the stench of decay. Only one thought went through his mind over and over again, like a dog chasing its tail.

Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.

Her gravelly voice made the hair on his arms stand up. “I’m hungry,” she said.

“I know.”

***

It was hard for Jack to remember what she looked like when she’d still been beautiful. He lost track of how much time passed since the nightmare began. In his mind, he pictured her while he slept, dreamt about how perfect the days went at first and how the nights flew by after they first met, back when he loved her.

He’d been hitchhiking from town to town searching for work to put food in his belly. The pickings were slim then. As soon as he exhausted all his resources in one town, he hitched to the next.

In this current town, more jobs than average presented themselves to him and he made enough extra money that he felt he deserved a beer for his efforts . . . despite the fact his parole officer might throw him right back in the penitentiary if he got caught. Of course, they’d have to find him first.

He wandered into the local watering hole and found himself a seat in a dark corner. Fresh out of the joint, he wasn’t comfortable socializing with what he thought of as “regular” people.

Jack had been nursing the one beer he allowed himself—wishing it was Jack Daniels, though not quite trusting himself with whisky yet—when he noticed a pretty woman at the bar. She was staring in his direction.

He avoided eye contact, certain a woman that fine never intentionally looked at a man so average and unclean like himself. Yet when he dared a second glance, she hadn’t turned away. Instead she smiled—at him.

The woman stood and walked slowly to his table. His palms began to sweat and he thought he might just slide off the chair and die from a nerve-induced heart-attack. She was so lovely and graceful. He couldn’t pry his eyes loose from the sway of her hips.

Jack was hooked before she even spoke.

“What’s your name, stranger?” she asked.

Her voice was even prettier than he imagined, and terrifying in that she actually used it to speak to him. Years had passed since he’d been next to a woman, let alone one so stunning. All the spit in his mouth seemed to dry up at once, leaving his tongue a thick, foreign appendage no longer his own.

“Um, Jack,” he said, amazed he found the words at all.

She laughed, the look upon her face ripe with both mischief and promise. She held out her hand. “What a delightful coincidence. I’m Jill.”

Not much later, Jill took him to her house in the country. They made love most of the night. For Jack it was unbelievable, the first sex he’d had in too many years. For him, she became an instant addiction. He would do anything to stay between her thighs back then.

Of course, that was before he knew what she was.

Hell, he still didn’t know.

***

Jack stared out the windshield at the darkness of the highway, broken only by the glow of his headlights while he traveled south for the better part of two hours. His eyes felt full of grit. He’d gone too far already and decided to turn around at the next town to head for home.

Some nights proved successful; some, not. She’d make him go out again tomorrow. Absentmindedly, he fingered a deeply ridged scar on his left hand, a gift from Jill when he failed once before. He hoped she wouldn’t get too angry this time. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Now all of the rest stops were equipped with video surveillance.

After turning around to head north, Jack only drove about fifteen miles when his luck finally changed. Sometimes it went like that—once he was sure that the night’s foray would be a bust, someone strolled across his path that suited her needs perfectly.

At times, he wondered if maybe she held some sort of power that stretched out from that old farmhouse to bend a man’s will her way—but that was ridiculous, right?

The boy stood by the side of the road, his skinny shoulders covered by a lightweight jacket that was no match for the evening’s chill.

At the sight of Jack’s headlights, he stuck out his thumb, the universal sign for “How-about-a-ride, man?” Jack eased off the accelerator and gently braked to a stop half a block from the young man. He didn’t want to seem too eager to pick him up. After a short jog to meet the car, the boy opened the passenger door, squinting at the dome light.

“Hey, can I catch a lift with ya?”

“How far you headed?” Jack asked. He motioned for the kid to sit down and close the door, which he did, tucking a dirty backpack between his feet on the floorboard. His shaggy bangs obscured most of his face and he twitched in a way that might’ve been nerves, though Jack suspected the tick was from some sort of chemical dependency. He’d seen his fair share of junkies in prison.

“Anywhere is good. Anywhere you can drop me.” He rubbed his hands in front of the vent to warm them, though Jack thought it a ploy to hide how bad they shook. “Damn, its cold out there!”

Jack pulled onto the highway before he took the pack of smokes from his front pocket and lit one with a creased matchbook. The young man accepted one gratefully when it was offered and he settled a little more comfortably in his seat, opening the window a crack to ash.

In the back of his mind, Jack calculated when would be the best time to grab the chloroform from under his seat.

“Only going about seventy miles up the road,” he said through a cloud of bluish smoke. “There’s a little town close by. Drop you there, if it suits you.”

“Cool, man. Real cool.”

***

Jack remembered his last victim, a scrawny girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, definitely a prostitute. She had a certain hardness in her eyes that was uncommon in one so young. He recalled how nervous she immediately became upon entering the car and he wondered if maybe she smelled the slight chemical odor that always seemed to linger in the vehicle. Regardless of what initiated her unease, it didn’t take very long for her worry to blossom into a full blown panic.

She mentioned that she might have made a mistake asking for a ride, but he ignored her. Eventually she got the courage to tell him to pull over and let her out. When he still didn’t respond, she began to plead. She got so fidgety, he worried she might just open the door and jump out, regardless of the pavement racing by at sixty miles per hour, so he locked the doors.

And while he was debating what to do with her, that’s when he glanced in his mirror to see the flashing lights of a state trooper.

Jack slowly pulled to the gravel shoulder of the road.

Aw shit! The cop would search the vehicle and find the chloroform, find the rope. Finally coming to an end now. He saw himself again in the joint, maybe in a padded cell this time. This was it.

The odd part was how much the thought of prison seemed to calm him. Maybe going back wouldn’t be so bad. He was tired of this game. Probably time that he should get caught . . . but then what would happen to Jill?

The girl sat beside him with wide, apprehensive eyes. If she seemed nervous before, she was positively petrified now. Taking the opportunity to speak before the officer made it from the patrol car to Jack’s window, he leaned slightly toward the girl and spoke in a flat whisper near her ear. “It’s illegal to hitchhike in this state.”

The girl said nothing, just continued to stare at him with her wild blue eyes. He was gambling on the fact that the girl might be more afraid of the cops than of him.

As it turned out, the gamble paid off. She might have had an outstanding warrant for her arrest. She definitely carried some drugs. He found a little baggie of pot in her rear pocket when he disposed of her clothes later that evening. Whatever made her keep her mouth shut, he was thankful.

He had a short in one of his taillights, the cop told him. The pig gave him a fix-it ticket. And that was it . . . not noticing the odor of chloroform that Jack was sure poured out of the car; no interest in the girl in the passenger seat, other than to quickly pass the flashlight over her head and nod a greeting. Jack drove away with a grim smile on his face and stuffed the ticket in his glove box.

“Dude, you wouldn’t happen to have any weed on ya? Some pills? Anything, man. I’m in need of a little something right now. Help a brother out?”

The boy’s voice startled Jack out of his thoughts, banishing the scenario with the dead girl from his mind. Without looking at him, he nodded once.

Seconds later, he wasn’t terribly surprised to feel the boy’s hand creep into his lap.

He continued to drive without reaction but the young man shyly fumbled with his zipper until he slipped his hand into the front of Jack’s boxers.

Jack wasn’t gay, but in prison sometimes companionship became more important than gender. It’d be easy to just pull over, forget his original intent, and let himself be distracted by the friction of the kid’s warm, slightly damp hand on his own rising flesh.

It had been an awful long time since sex with Jill was an option. Oh, he was pretty sure it could still be done—plenty of gooey places existed on her body where he might stick it in. To do that, though, he’d probably have to look at her. Definitely have to touch her. Worse yet, she might actually touch him.

Jack shuddered slightly at the thought, and was surprised to realize that the kid actually got a reaction from him. He gently removed the boy’s hand from his crotch with more regret than he cared to admit. A time and place for everything in life, and this was neither. He had a job to do . . . a job that was nearly at an end.

“Not here.” Jack said. “We’ll be at my place soon. I have all kinds of good stuff there. It’ll be a real party.”

“Cool,” the kid said with a grin. Jack returned his smile. Maybe he wouldn’t need the chloroform at all this time.

***

When he pulled up to the long driveway, Jack felt a pang of conscience that was entirely alien to him. These acts never really bothered him before. The risk that the hunt posed did, but he’d never felt any sympathy for the young people he delivered to their deaths. He wasn’t the sort that wallowed in such a useless emotion as guilt.

Jack quickly tried to squash the feeling under what he felt was a valid excuse. The young man was obviously strung out on drugs. That road only ran in two directions: overdose or prison. He didn’t know how painful it felt to die with a needle in your arm, though he saw firsthand what the other inmates did with a tender young thing like his new friend—and that wasn’t a life worth living.

He did the kid a favor by bringing him here.

Jack opened the door and held it so the boy could enter first, then turned and locked it behind them. If the boy thought anything strange, he didn’t mention it, and only stepped aside while Jack headed to the end table where he stashed the drugs, parting gifts from former passengers.

“What the f*ck is that smell?” the boy asked. His voice finally showed a hint of anxiety.

Jack turned, meaning to make something up about a dead raccoon in the attic, but he stopped short when he saw the kid’s calculated smile. The boy held a gun, leveled at Jack’s face.

“Give me the drugs and all your money, you old pervert.” The kid’s tone became all business. This was definitely not his first rodeo. “I’ll be taking your piece of shit car, too.”

Jack stood stunned, unable to yet grasp the quick turnaround. This time he’d been the one set-up.

“I said give me the shit!” The young man shoved him hard with the heel of his free hand.

Jack fell onto the sofa. The boy was certainly stronger than he guessed. Of course, he wouldn’t be strong enough.

He heard Jill moving on the second floor. Jack had intended to do the young man a favor by getting him high before she came down, but it seemed Jill wasn’t in the mood to wait. For once he was gracious, though not thankful enough to want to catch sight of her.

Jack closed his eyes tight as he heard her moist tread on the stairs and smelled the full assault of the sweet, rank odor that preceded her. The boy made a face when he must’ve smelled her too, though he never comprehended what was coming until her hands found his neck.

After that there was only screaming. There must not have been any bullets in the boy’s gun, Jack thought, after waiting for the absent shots. Jack took the opportunity to head into the kitchen, his eyes cast upon the floor so he wouldn’t see more than her feet. They were bad enough—black and swollen, rivulets of yellowish fluid weeping from skin stretched so tight it looked shiny, about to burst.

Jack made it to the kitchen counter and stood there, his back to the door, his right hand automatically reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniels he kept there. He took a long pull, trying to block the horrible scene out, and his hands trembled while he lit a cigarette. The screaming he got used to easily enough, but not her smell . . . not her nauseating, pungent reek.

That, and the liquid sounds of her feeding.

He squeezed his eyes shut and chugged the whisky. His cigarette burned down to his fingers, but he barely noticed, dropping it in the sink without opening his eyes. He remained there, unwilling to move, through the entire horror, and when it was over, he stayed there still, until he was certain she went upstairs to settle into her cloying room. Only after he was absolutely sure she wouldn’t come back down did he move to survey the damage and start the gruesome task of cleaning up whatever bits and pieces Jill left behind.

***

Jack sat at the table again, the radio fixed and whole, ready to return to the spot on Mrs. Jones’s windowsill where she listened to it while washing her dishes. He stared at the radio without really seeing it, lost in his own mind, caught on too many questions that he couldn’t answer. Questions that scared the hell out of him.

Things were so much different than they’d been at first. Jill no longer came downstairs at all unless she needed him, though she seemed to need him more often every week. He always doubted that Jill was her real name and patted himself on the back for being quick enough to realize she probably chose the name just to be cute. Now he seriously wondered if she was even human.

Summer was coming; her smell would only get worse. No amount of air freshener held a chance in hell to mask it. He wondered how much longer she, they, could go on like this.

Maybe she was dying. Maybe she’d been dead when they met.

Jack took a shot of whiskey, this time from a shot glass rather than straight from the bottle, and glanced out the window, his eyes resting on the little shed outside. Inside sat an unused lawnmower, a weed whacker, gardening tools . . . a gas can. He was pretty sure it was still full.

He knew what he should do with that gas can, but he lit a smoke instead and stared out the window some more, trying to turn his thoughts elsewhere, into his fantasies.

Long-legged, nude beauties danced through his imagination while he kissed those young nymphs on all of their pink parts . . .

But that escape soured as well. Lately his fantasies grew darker until he didn’t want to dream anymore either.

Again he looked out at the shed.

He knew what he should do, what he needed to do. It wouldn’t even be that difficult. Take that gas can, splash it around, strike a match, and run like hell. Then go wherever he wanted. Never look back. Drink until he scoured the memories from his brain or damn well died trying.

He knew it’d never work that way. There would be an investigation. Someone would get curious. Maybe they’d poke through that unusual looking compost heap behind the shed, find the bones. He’d be hunted. They’d find him too, he never doubted that.

No, that wouldn’t be the way to do it. If he wanted out, there on the floor sat the boy’s empty gun. Before he lit the match, he’d buy a bullet, just one, because he knew exactly where to put it, and blow his brains out while the world burned around him.

Bang! All over for both of them—

The footsteps he’d missed while lost in his thoughts now stopped behind his chair. Jack heard what passed for breathing just over his shoulder.

If she touches me, I’ll do it! I swear to God I will!

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“I know.”





A life-long fan of all things horror, C.W. LaSart resides in the Midwest with her three kids and beloved, Lou. Making her publishing debut in Dark Moon Digest Issue 1, she has since been included in other Dark Moon Projects, SNM Horror Magazine and was one of 3 winners of the Cemetery Dance Amateur horror contest. Her first collection, Ad Nauseam : 13 Tales of Extreme Horror, will be released early in 2012 by Dark Moon Books. Find out more at CWLaSart.com.