NOVEL FROG 11: Loaded Up and Truckin'
The story of the drug operation hidden underneath Paw Paw’s Pickin’ Orchard was all over the news within hours. The fattest, pinkest cop in the Chattanooga Police Department went on TV and said that they had been scoping out the place for weeks and that they sent their best men in to clear the place out — no mention of slime or exploded corpses. Works for me. It’s no skin off my ass if they want to take all the credit. I sure as shit didn’t want it.
Still, it would have been stupid to stay in Chattanooga for much longer. I could never shake the feeling that Reverend Alec was close behind and closing in fast. He could be anywhere and could appear at any moment, so we had to keep moving.
We snatched some supplies from the compound before we left. I took the rack of ribs from the kitchen, a few cases of ammo, and a nice army-green canvas jacket off of one of the bodies. Mickey took an assault rifle and two kilos of meth.
Oh, and we grabbed an absolute fuck ton of cash.
The Futrells weren’t going to be using it, so we dug Freddy’s keys out of the pile of gore that used to be his body, opened up their vault, and stuffed as many bills as we could fit into our clothes. We stuffed them into our shoes; we tucked our pant legs into our socks and filled our pants up; I took a second jacket and used it as a sack, slinging it over my shoulder hobo-style. I don’t know how much we took, but it has to be in the six digits for each of us. Stepping out of that compound, we were the richest bums on earth.
We threw all of our supplies in the back of Freddy Futrell’s Escalade — we even had enough room to stuff the old shitmobile back there — and we rode west, the sunrise at our backs. It fucked with my head that it was still early in the morning. Had it really only been an hour or two since I went into the compound? Things had changed so much in such a short amount of time: I popped my murder hymen, I learned how to shoot bombs from my nose, I had entered into a temporary alliance with the man I was dead set on killing, and I got enough money to buy a house in the suburbs and still have enough left over to raise two shitty, middle-class children.
It seemed my life had completely changed, again. My goals were much loftier now. Instead of killing a single bum wizard, I was going to take on half an army, assuming Mickey did his fair share, and I had no idea what I was getting into. How many cult freaks were out there? How many of them were marked? How powerful was Alec, a man whose mark covered his entire body?
Now that I was really thinking about what we were up against, the notion that I had a chance to pull this off just because I had Mickey helping me felt unfathomably stupid. I looked at Mickey in the driver’s seat, humming a tune to himself, arm hanging out of the open window, and I had the urge to yank the steering wheel and kill us both. I wasn’t too keen on getting eaten by dirt dogs again. A car accident seemed like a better way to go. But I didn’t want to go. I wanted to sit in my tent with Beth, drinking shitty liquor and eating foraged berries. I just wanted things to go back to how they were before we drank that goddamn elixir.
“So, why did you choose the snot rockets? Was that really the best thing your mark offered you?” Mickey spoke up, breaking me out of my melancholic trance. I shook my head a little and snapped back to reality.
“I didn’t know that the other two blisters would disappear after I touched one, and I didn’t know what any of the symbols meant, so I just touched the first one on the left,” I said.
Mickey chuckled condescendingly. “You really need to start listening to your mark, dude. You keep choosing at random, you’ll probably get atomic farts or some shit next.”
”What do you mean, listen?” I said. “If there’s another voice in your head, it’s probably from that fuckin’ crank you’ve been snorting.”
He didn’t take the bait. “No, it doesn’t talk to me like that,” he said earnestly. “It just… sort of suggests things in the back of my mind. Thoughts pop into my head that didn’t come from me. I don’t know how to describe it, but it feels different. You can just tell the thoughts aren’t entirely your own, ya know? You haven’t felt anything like that?”
I thought about when I was on the road, scooting away from Alec, and the slime stopped coming out of me when I asked it to stop. I had talked to it, but it had never talked back to me.
“Sometimes, it gives me physical cues,” I said. “Pressure will build up in my hands when it wants me to shoot slime at something. I got a huge booger in my nose when it wanted to show me how the booger bombs worked. I also think it tried to talk to me once, right after the second progression, but I didn’t know that’s what was happening. It made me feel like I should feed it, give it what it wants so that I can become stronger.”
“Yeah, these fuckers have quite the appetite,” Mickey said. “I killed one man out in Bryson City when he tried to fight me just for snatching his girl’s purse, and that brought on the third progression. I killed twenty more men after that while working for the Futrells and it doesn’t seem to give a shit. I’ve just stayed at this level.”
I noticed an open pack of Marlboro Reds sitting in the cupholder. I took out a cigarette, lit it up with my Zippo, and took a long, slow drag. The nicotine helped clear my head.
“Maybe it doesn’t just reward senseless murder,” I said. “Maybe they need to be impressed. Killing a man who’s trying to stab you is more impressive than killing a cowering junky who didn’t pay up on time.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Wait, is that my lighter?” he said.
“Not anymore, bitch,” I said and put it in my pocket.
“Oh man, I can’t fucking wait until we snuff out this cult and I can pop your head like a goddamn grape,” he said.
“I can’t wait to see you try. I’m gonna pump so much grease up your ass you’re gonna turn into a human Gusher.”
A tense silence hung in the air — and not because of the unintentionally homoerotic imagery I had just conjured. He sounded like he was joking when he said he was going to kill me, but I wasn’t joking around with him. When this was all said and done, I was either going to kill him or I was going to die trying. I could tell that he was trying to act like my friend again, but we were way past that. We were barely friends before he ruined my life.
“Where are we going, anyway?” I said in order to break the silence.
“Little Rock. That’s where you said your parents live, right?” he said.
“Wait, what? Fuck no, we’re not visiting my parents!”
“What, don’t you think they’ll want to see what a rich, powerful young man you’ve become? Besides, your mom’s a P.I. isn’t she? I bet she’ll give us a family discount for her services.”
“There’s no fuckin way we’re going to see my paren—”
He interrupted me by stomping on the gas pedal and sending us flying down the highway. I tried to speak again, and he started singing loudly:
WESTBOUND AND DOWN, LOADED UP AND TRUCKIN.
WE’RE GONNA DO WHAT THEY SAY CAN’T BE DONE.
WE GOT A LONG WAY TO GO, AND A SHORT TIME TO GET THERE.
SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING WESTBOUND AND DOWN!