Contents ( 64)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- INTERLUDE
- THREE
- FOUR
- INTERLUDE
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- INTERLUDE
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- INTERLUDE
- TWELVE
- PART TWO
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- INTERLUDE
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-ONE
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-TWO
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-THREE
- PART THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- INTERLUDE
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-ONE
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-TWO
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-THREE
- INTERLUDE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- INTERLUDE
- FORTY-ONE
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- CHUCK WENDIG in conversation with Adam Christopher
The crows caw. A baby cries.
• • • •
When Ashley wakes, he finds Miriam in the corner, soaked in sweat. She's sitting there, back against the two walls joining, and she's furiously scribbling in the notebook.
"What are you doing?" he croaks.
"Writing."
"I see that, Hemingway. Writing what?"
She looks up then. Mania glints in her eyes, and a mad smile plays.
"Wrote two pages, that's what. Only seven pages left." Then she goes back to scribbling.
EIGHTEEN
The Not-Quite-Revenge of Fat Dude
The trailer park reminds Harriet of a graveyard. Singlewides and doublewides. Gray and white boxes. All lined up, one after the next. They're like headstones, she thinks. Or rows of tombs, each marked with dead and dying flowers.
Frankie kicks a stone. It ricochets off a rusty watering can, pelts a dirty garden gnome in his mushroom hat. "This place is disgusting."
Harriet steps up and knocks on the door of a doublewide at the end of the row.
A human mountain – his flesh a tattooed landslide in midcollapse, answers the door.
Fat Dude. More specifically, naked Fat Dude. Two fingers splinted.
His frame fills the trailer door. A fire-breathing serpent, inked and linked with another serpent, encircles his belly button crater. The second serpent runs down to Fat Dude's mammoth thigh and coils inward so that –
Frankie blanches.
"Oh, c'mon," he mumbles, shielding his eyes.
"What?" Fat Dude asks, pissed.
Frankie wrinkles his nose. "Man. You got your dick inked?"
"You lookin' at my dick?"
"Well, it's right fuckin' there!" Frankie yells, pointing. "It's like a cucumber. A sea cucumber. I think it's looking at me, to be honest with you."
Fat Dude growls, "It'll spit in your mouth if you don't quit flappin' your lips."
"You sonofabitch–"
"We need to ask you a question," Harriet interrupts, holding back Frankie.
"I don't answer questions from dykes and dagos," Fat Dude says, proud of himself.
"Fuck you, fat-sauce!" Frankie says, stepping up.
Fat Dude reaches out with his left hand – the one with unsplinted fingers – as if to grab Frankie's lower jaw and rip it off his head. His hand never gets that far.
Harriet lets out a small sigh and darts in with a fast hand, pinching one of Fat Dude's testicles between her small fingers. She squeezes like she's trying to unscrew a sparrow's head. The mountainous man yelps like a kicked puppy and swings a meaty paw at Harriet's head. She leans backward, and Fat Dude's hand cracks into the moldering doorjamb of his own trailer. His index and middle finger bend backward in a way that's wholly not natural and crack like sticks breaking under a heavy foot. He howls.
Harriet finds this terribly satisfying. Two more broken fingers. Symmetry pleases her.
She lets go of Fat Dude's empurpled nut and shoulders him backward.
It's now possible to see the rest of the trailer – the mound of dirty dishes collecting flies, the couch with fabric so rough it could grate cheese, the bathroom door that's actually just a strip of accordion plastic pulled taut and latched with a rusty hook. A real palace.