Feeders, p.1
Feeders, page 1
Feeders
Caleb Stephens
Timber Ghost Press
Feeders
Feeders is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Copyright © 2023, Caleb Stephens
Published by Timber Ghost Press
Printed in the United States of America
Edited by: Beverly Bernard
Cover Art and Design by: Greg Chapman
Interior Design: Timber Ghost Press
Print ISBN: 979-8-9855521-9-5
www.TimberGhostPress.com
For my parents, who always taught me to dream big.
Content Warning
While Feeders is a work of fiction there are some sensitive subjects within the story. Readers should be aware that drug abuse, kidnapping, attempted rape, and children in peril are contained inside this book. Read at your own discretion.
-Cody L.
Timber Ghost Press
Contents
1. Chapter One THE SHIRT
2. Chapter Two THE VAN
3. Chapter Three TRUCK STOP
4. Chapter Four MEMORY LANE
5. Chapter Five ROAD TRIP
6. Chapter Six HELLO OFFICER
7. Chapter Seven HOMECOMING
8. Chapter Eight BLACKOUT
9. Chapter Nine E-DAY
10. Chapter Ten GET IN!
11. Chapter Eleven THE TANK
12. Chapter Twelve DETOX
13. Chapter Thirteen DRUG STORE COWBOY
14. Chapter Fourteen A CHANGE OF PLANS
15. Chapter Fifteen A DETOUR
16. Chapter Sixteen THE VET
17. Chapter Seventeen HORSES
18. Chapter Eighteen TRAPS
19. Chapter Nineteen HIGHWAY TO HELL
20. Chapter Twenty DEAD END
21. Chapter Twenty-One SPLIT
22. Chapter Twenty-Two LOST
23. Chapter Twenty-Three ALL APOLOGIES
24. Chapter Twenty-Four TICK TOCK
25. Chapter Twenty-Five HUMANS AND ANIMALS
26. Chapter Twenty-Six FAMILY REUNION
27. Chapter Twenty-Seven JUDAS
28. Chapter Twenty-Eight SKIN AND BONES
29. Chapter Twenty-Nine BURN, BABY, BURN
30. Chapter Thirty A STRANGER
31. Chapter Thirty-One PITSTOP
32. Chapter Thirty-Two MIND GAMES
33. Chapter Thirty-Three HUNTING
34. Chapter Thirty-Four THE CABIN
35. Chapter Thirty-Five BAIT
36. Chapter Thirty-Six A DISH SERVED COLD
37. Chapter Thirty-Seven ERUPTION
38. Chapter Thirty-Eight THE CAVE
39. Chapter Thirty-Nine FOOD
40. Chapter Forty SHELTER
41. Chapter Forty-One A FRESH START
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note from Timber Ghost Press
Chapter One
THE SHIRT
It’s raining as I step outside and lock the door to the Ink Tank. October rain. Texas rain. Dark and black. A nasty, piss-warm spray smelling of ozone and motor oil and slaughterhouse shit. I drive past the place every day on the way to work: dusty parking lots and semis bloated with cattle, a jungle of corrugated steel and rusted iron. Sometimes I play out the horrors in my head. Dull-eyed cows trudging slack-jawed through a maze of concrete chutes. Men in flannel shirts waiting impatiently to kill them, bolt pistols in hand, lips stuffed with chew. Fat men. Men who drink too much and go home to their high school sweethearts at night. The Tammys and Brendas and Tinas of the world. Ancient Texas prom queens with chemically damaged hair and axes to grind.
Angry women not so different than myself.
Tank pulls up beside me in his gun-metal black El Camino, a cigarette blossoming red between his lips as he rolls down the window and squints against the drizzle. “Looks like this one might get bad. You want a ride?”
“Nah, I’m fine,” I reply. “I like the rain.”
I hate the rain. But not as much as I hate smelling like an ashtray. The smell brings back bad, shag-carpet memories drenched in smoke and despair; my clothes ever-tinged with nicotine. All those years spent avoiding my aunt Vivian’s pack-a-day habit and her barely concealed contempt at having to raise Mac and me. I used to steal her dryer sheets and rub them over my clothes on the way to school. Poor kid perfume—trailer park chic.
“Oh, come on. You really gonna do this?” Tank asks. “Make me sit here and beg like an asshole? Even after I gave you that sweet necklace?”
I absentmindedly brush a finger against the onyx spider pendant. “No worries. I’m good. Really.”
“Suit yourself,” he says, rolling his window back up, pausing halfway. “Hey, Brynn…”
“Yeah?”
“You should tone it down on the Blues some. Let your body recalibrate a bit, know what I mean?”
“Whatever,” I mumble, staring down at the black and white swallow lacing up my forearm, the feathers so real, I sometimes wonder if it will fly away. The tattoo Tank gave me three years ago when I’d first conned my way into a job at the Ink Tank with a short skirt and a hastily drawn skull. It wasn’t my best work, but good enough.
“Seriously,” he continues, “that shit’ll mess you up. You remember Cathy’s dip-shit kid, what’s his name, Andy or whatever? The one who got that stupid Nike tattoo a few months back.”
I nod.
“Well, I hear he’s in the ICU down in San Antonio.” He shakes his head and mutters something. “Kid OD’d the other day. Mixed a few Bars with some Vikes. Bad news that. From what I hear, he was jumping off the walls one minute, completely brain-dead the next. Guess he just keeled over and stopped breathing.”
I give him a blank stare. I’ve heard this story a million times. Well, not this story, exactly, but ones just like it. The tragic cases. All the kids turned to vegetables. The teenagers strapped to life support machines. The devastated families. The tearful obituaries blaming the opioid epidemic, like it’s this evil thing running around, shoving pills in peoples’ mouths like they don’t have a choice, which is bullshit, really. Everyone has a choice. I made mine. I know what can happen. I don’t need the daily reminder, thank you very much.
“Never mind,” Tank says. “Look, I’m just saying take it easy is all. Believe it or not, I kind of like having you around.”
The irony of this coming from the pill king of Texas is ridiculous. Tank’s as bad as me, probably worse. Even though he tries to hide it, the guy’s balls-deep high most shifts, his eyes all irises, his pupils pinprick stains. I think about the fresh bottle of Roxicodone in my jacket pocket, the one he just sold me ten minutes ago, and stifle a laugh. “Maybe you should stop dealing to me, then.”
A grin splits his stubbled jaw, his eyes glittering beneath carefully spiked rows of peroxide hair that look sharp enough to cut. “Nah, I know you. You’ll just get it somewhere else. Probably buy some of that gray death shit or something.”
“Yeah, probably. You remember that.”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re impossible. So, see you tomorrow or what?”
“Where else would I go?”
“All right then. Get a move on before this storm lets loose.”
I straighten and give him a mock salute. “Sir, yes sir.”
He expels a cloud of smoke and shakes his head. “I don’t know why I put up with you sometimes.”
“Beats me,” I say with a shrug. “Night, Tank.”
“Night, B.”
With that he’s gone, the El Camino muffler-less and growling as he tears out of the parking lot. I watch him go with a smile. Truth is, I love the guy and I’ll work as many shifts as he’ll let me. Yeah, the money’s okay. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s decent looking, but that’s just a perk. The real reason I drag my ass to work every day is simple. Tattooing is the only thing that stops the thoughts. The sticky-wet ones that creep up on me when things get too quiet. The ones always simmering in my brain, waiting to boil over if I let them.
With a deep breath, I step from the safety of the awning and into the night. The pills clink their sweet song as I cross the parking lot and make my way across Wilson Avenue toward Tony’s Chicken ‘N Ribs and my shit-bag car parked somewhere in the back. Tank doesn’t let me park in front of his shop, says he needs the spots for his “customers.” The other pill heads. Translation: Don’t fuck with my income stream, B. You know the druggies are too lazy to walk.
Sad thing is, he’s right.
I pause at the shack steps and breathe in the pecan smoke wafting through the door. It’s nearly enough to pull me inside for some brisket. Maybe a beer or two. But that means seeing Tony, and I’m not up for any of his bullshit stories tonight, listening to him blab on and on about whoever he’s banging or whatever motorcycle he’s into this week. That, or his old army-hero medic tales about him and Tank in Iraq. I don’t get why Tank loves the guy so much. All he wants to talk about is himself, but he makes one hell of a barbecue brisket sandwich and kicks me an extra parking spot in the back, so I tolerate him.
Stomach protesting, I head for the sidewalk and seize to a s
I reach the alley and spot my car: a late-nineties Honda Accord with the H on the front long since sacrificed to a pothole and an abundance of Moscow Mules. I vaguely remember the night: sloppy sex with some college kid, the preppy-rich type with his collar flipped up like he was fresh from the eighties. A real, Hey, Bro, frat type. I didn’t care. I’d wanted someone to fuck, to use, which I did. Then I stole his Rolex and pawned it for two grand the next day. Yay, free pills for a month—lucky me.
The sky cracks open, and I slide into my car just as the rain starts to hammer down. I grab a dirty towel and run it over my arms, my face, careful to avoid the mirror. There’s no reason to look. I know what I’ll see: mascara trailing down the sides of my snub nose. A baby’s nose. I hate it. It’s like I haven’t quite grown up, like I’m still waiting for puberty to strike.
And my hair? Short and black—matted above a set of too-small, round kitten eyes. Your basic brown, nothing special. I have delicate cheekbones and rosebud lips that give me the appearance of something fragile, something to be coddled, one of those starlets from the fifties who prance around town uttering breathy quotes while smoothing her dress: Oh, golly gee. If I could just meet the right boy, things would sure be peachy.
I don’t mind. I let people think what they want. It’s good camouflage. Piss me off enough, and I’ll rip your heart out through your throat.
I fumble the keys from my pocket and fire up the engine, the rain promising a first-class, white-knuckle joyride back to my boxed-in apartment: Pineview Suites. No pine. No suites. Just a hastily thrown-up piece of suburbia with a nice view of the dumpster and the empty lot behind it. Oh, and lots of plastic grocery sacks. I have no idea how they got there in the bushes, in the trees, strewn all over the rusted chain-link fence like broken white birds. It makes no sense; there isn’t even a grocery store nearby.
I flip on the headlights, the wipers… and stop. Something—A shirt? A towel?—is wrapped around the far blade. It thumps a monotonous whump-click, whump-click over the windshield. I squint at it. It’s a hoodie, and a dirty one at that—all grease-stained and torn. It smears a rainbow of oily film over the windshield with each pass, one that the rain fights, and fails, to clear. Probably the work of some drunk fuck inside of Tony’s with nothing better to do than screw up my night.
With a groan, I shove my way back out into the downpour and am instantly drenched, the drops fat and heavy as I round the hood and take hold of the shirt, giving it a sharp yank. The blade comes with it, slapping back to the glass an instant later. That’s when I notice the knots. They’re thick and full of purpose. The work of a special kind of asshole. I run my hands over my jeans and try to wick off some of the moisture. Fail.
“Shit!” I mutter to myself as I try again.
A hot sting pierces my neck.
I hiss and jerk forward, try to scream. A massive palm clamps over my mouth before I can. I thrash and bite down. Hard. Taste dirty-salt skin. A growl erupts from behind me. A man’s growl. A large one.
Oh, God.
The grip weakens enough for me to rip free and scramble around the hood, a thought flaring—Tony’s! I’ve got to get inside! Suddenly, it’s the only thing that matters. The most important thing I’ve ever done.
I bolt for the red steel door I’ve stumbled through drunk as shit a thousand times. I don’t bother to look back. I know the man is there. I can hear him smacking through the puddles after me.
Get inside, Brynn! Do it or you’re dead!
I know it’s true. I’ve seen way too much TV murder porn about women who were taken. Women who never fought back. Women who became corpses.
Reach the door!
My legs slosh left… right. I order them to behave, to move faster, but something is wrong. They aren’t working right. Nothing is. A sick slug of adrenaline greases my stomach, and I paw at my eyes. I can barely see the door. It looks like it’s melting, the paint running down in gluey waves. And my lungs—I can’t breathe.
The steps draw closer.
I push forward. Eight feet to the door.
My left foot goes numb.
Six feet.
Everything spinning.
Four.
I slam to the mud.
Panic shreds my chest, and I try to scramble up again. A hand grabs at my shoulder, my arm. I kick out and claw forward, my fingers digging desperate trenches through the muck. I can’t move. Why is it so hard to move? The rain hisses down around me like gunfire, everything so loud. Too loud.
I’m burning up.
Fingers search and prod. A steel band of pressure wraps around my waist. I cry out and kick back again, and this time my foot connects with something, but it’s a baby kick, the fingers only loosening for a moment before tightening once more.
My vision glosses over. “Please… no,” I whisper. A thin stream of halogen bleeds down at me through the rain as I float upward—up, up, up—impossibly high, before I’m slung over a broad shoulder.
“Stop… don’t… do… th-this… please…” My tongue works over my gums, cavity thick.
No response comes but that of a throaty grunt as I’m carried away from the door, a final thought blazing up at me as I black out.
I am so fucked.
Chapter Two
THE VAN
I wake slow and sticky.
Wax coats my tongue and a nasty headache buzzes at the base of my skull. The air is acrid with cigarette smoke. I try to open my eyelids and fail, try again. Everything is a blur, like my eyes are smeared with Vaseline. I can’t focus. I blink once. Twice. Try to clear the haze. A ceiling appears through the fog—the dim glow of dashboard lights.
Moving.
I am moving. I roll my head toward a window where a fly bangs senselessly off the glass. The hiss of wet rubber on pavement stings my ears. In the distance, I catch a flicker of downtown Austin hulking beneath a sky of fine, gray mist.
I need to wake up. I need to—
My eyes snap open.
Outside, the sun roars down over the road in glittering fragments. The clouds have migrated south, replaced by gritty, dry plains for as far as I can see. Vast fields of empty dust and rock speckled with wind turbines. A memory fires.
The alley.
The sharp sting in my neck.
A needle. Oh, God. A needle filled with…something.
Crawling through the mud and slop.
Thick sausage fingers around my mouth, my throat.
