by Nick Mace
IT IS THEIR SECOND-TO-LAST SHOW in Texas, opening for Nekrocosm with a tight forty-minute set at Styx in east San Antonio before their overnight leg to El Paso. A divey venue and bar that’s by now a regular stop on the underground metal circuit, owned by a one-time manager of Immolation and which doubles as an unlicensed tattoo parlor run off a syndicate of Instagram accounts and a few of San Antonio’s bigger drug-dealing Telegram channels. The stage and floor area have been converted out of a garage that was formerly dedicated to some now-lost commercial purpose, a generous interior that echoes, now, every other weekend with the powerful cacophonies of palm-muted riffs, power chords, blast beats that count off in the cadences of belt-fed machine guns spitting into the mouths of trenches. By now, two-thirds of the way into their set, the crowd is deep into its gross, sweaty roil, moshers spinning in ferocious whirlwinds of fists and kicks and spearing each other in the chest with shoulder-led charges, deep into their obscure and recursive cycles of retribution for breaches of mosh etiquette. The band plays out the last minute of their song, a nasty breakdown section in which the slam riffs harmonize with shots of guitar feedback that shriek at you like the lunges of a long knife.
“This is motherfucking Gore Sorm from Houston, Texas,” as the guitars go quiet and Steve, lead guitarist, picks up the warm energy drink stowed near his feet. He takes his last pull on the long can and throws it into the crowd. A fight ensues over who takes it.
He burps into the microphone. “Houston, Texas. Home of Malignant Altar, Insect Warfare, Hatred Surge, most underrated fuckin’ metal scene in the country,” another lick on his guitar and a mean, aggrieved riff issuing from the phalanx of Marshall amps at the front of the stage. “This next song,” hand wiping his long brown hair from his sweaty forehead, “you’ve never heard this shit before. It’s the first time we’re playing it. This next song is about killing your parents and packing the bodies into a freezer.”
A roar from the crowd and a brief, thundering drum passage underscore the point.
“Comes off our next album White-On-White Violence, out next month on Maggot Casket Records, go preorder that shit right now. Y’all better blow up that fuckin’ pit—yeah—and really get down to this next one, make our shit uninsurable,” his hand sliding up and down the fretboard.
***
“How much we clear in merch?”
“Just under a grand.”
“Not bad. Seen worse.”
“At this point we won’t even break even on this shit. Couldn’t fit our shitty amps into this shitty van we had to buy. Do you know how fuckin’ long it took me to convince Mike to let us use theirs?” Steve asks from the front passenger seat. Bruce, their van driver and merch guy, takes a long pull from a bong while steadying the steering wheel with his knees, drifting a bit into the next lane before correcting with his bowl-hand. It’s a 75-mph zone.
“It’s fine man. Mike and the boys are cool with it. And those amps were fucking sick to play on.”
“A grand,” Steve says again. “If we can’t do a grand in San Antonio then we sure as shit aren’t gonna clear it in El Paso.”
“It’ll work out,” says Joey, the drummer, shirtless and smelling like a dead animal, ribs and bony shoulders sticky with dried sweat as he fumbles with his boots, seated on the big couch they’ve installed inside. “Make good-ass music and the money will follow. That’s what all the OGs say. Record sales will kill it.”
“You always fucking say that. Our last tape didn’t sell shit.”
“Shadow drop EP versus a whole record with a tour and tons of marketing on Insta, Maggot Casket blowing all the trumpets and working all the contacts. Different story. I’m not the one putting all our shit up on Bandcamp for free.”
“You can find it all on YouTube. Why not put it on a Bandcamp page where they can find merch and vinyls and shit too?”
“Just saying.”
“Why are there so many Mexicans at our shows?” Tanner, the bassist, asks to nobody in particular, eyes glassy and looking off into some indeterminate distance, dab rig in hand.
“Mexicans love riffs. We hit up Deftones in Houston and it was like, whole seas of Mexicans.”
“That’s different,” Tanner says, snapping to Joey and with a sudden sharpness in his eyes, an edge in his voice, “Deftones are Chicano royalty bro, they’re going to show out for that no matter what. I’m talking about, like, our shows. It’s tons of Mexicans.”
“Mexicans love riffs. It’s that simple.”
“It’s San Antonio. We lost that one a while ago.”
“It was like that in Houston too, though.”
“Yeah, well, Houston is next up on that chopping block.”
“I guess.”
“Slipknot last year outside of Austin, Circuit of the Americas, all white trash and Mexicans, Bud Light was like $9 a can. Took a haircut on those tickets. Not a good time honestly.”
“They buy lots of merch. And tapes. That’s what matters.”
“Facts.”
“I’m telling you bro, Mexicans love riffs, like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah I heard you.”
“Why though?”
“They got a crazy dark side to them. It’s whatever instinct made them do all that Aztec sacrificial shit, and makes them do all those totally gonzo cartel executions. A good nasty-ass riff just speaks to that part of them.”
Of the five, four of them nod in agreement. Tanner gives a contemplative, brooding rub of his chin, looking off again into the distance. “I’d buy that,” Joey says, unscrewing the top of his water bottle before taking a deep swig.
“What do you think, Lee?”
Lee shrugs.
“Pass me that shit, Tanner,” Joey says, reaching for the tank of Galaxy Gas at his feet.
They take an exit off the highway and turn into a Buc-ee’s, the crowded bay of pumps and trucks the only island of light along the long West Texas horizon that’s begun to swallow up all the light the deeper they go. They ask Bruce what he wants and make him stay to fill up the van and recount merch receipts. Inside now, rubbing elbows. Plate buckles, square-toe boots, jean shorts, Salt Life caps, And1 basketball shorts, whole roving squadrons of youth-league baseball jerseys.
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
“Crowded,” Joey says, still shirtless, before peeling off to go load up on the chopped-brisket sandwiches being prepared on the butcher’s blocks posted in middle of the store, like a moth to the warm and fragrant glow of the nurturing heat lamps. Tanner, almost as though he’d teleported there, swaggers up and down the rows of Buc-ee’s branded candies, boots treading softly over the waxed floor, thoughtfully mulling over the generously loaded bags of saltwater taffy and pretzels dipped in sugary yogurt. That leaves Steve and Lee, the youngest of them at seventeen and who’s increasingly proving himself something of a death metal Johnny B. Goode.
“What do you think? Fudge?” Steve asks. Lee smiles and nods.
They head over to the fudge counter and take stock, Lee following a touch behind. Great glossy blocks of fudge, layers cut into meaty squares and marbled with the streaks of fruity artificial colorings. Three full blocks of plain fudge with over a dozen more of the more exotic flavors: birthday cake, tres leches, banana pudding, chocolate pecan, chewy praline, dark chocolate salted caramel, lemon blueberry, strawberry cheesecake, the works. Lee’s eyes work all the way up and down the counter.
“See anything you like sweetheart?” asks the lady behind the counter, name tag CHERICE, hair fixed in a bun the color of brown sugar and covered over with a hairnet.
Lee looks at her, eyes wide.
“Well?”
“He’s mute, sorry,” Steve says.
“Oh.”
“Kid can shred though. How about a variety pack, buddy?”
Lee holds up two fingers.
Steve picks out two packs, eight squares each, and points out an extra caramel square to Cherice.
“Let’s go get Bruce’s kolaches,” he says as she cuts the piece off and wraps it in a bag.
“Those are some mighty powerful shirts y’all have on,” Cherice says, almost to herself, as she hands over the bag and takes a proper look at the full-color graphic print on Lee’s shirt. It depicts a woman’s head, eyes jumping from their sockets, being split down the middle by a thick axe coming in on the downswing and wielded by a muscular creep in an executioner’s mask, the blood spray flying up to form the band’s illegible scratch logo over the breast of the shirt.
“Thanks,” Steve says as they leave.
They regroup at the van’s open sliding door and look over their haul, parceling out the candy and fudge and cheese snacks and thick meaty sandwiches sweating with the mixed, runny juices of weep and barbecue sauce. Steve wraps around the van to go find Bruce, a bag of kolaches in hand.
“Jalapeño cheddar, just you like you asked.”
Bruce gently takes them. Standing at the pump, he looks at Steve, an unsteady posture, eyes glazed with worry.
“I don’t know if I should be driving, man,” he says, swaying in place, the whites of his eyes redder than fresh blood as they longingly eye the kolaches. “That pen got me fucked up.”
“What? You have to. Only you and Joey have licenses and Joey drives like a psycho.”
Bruce shaking his head, big lazy shakes of his head with glassy, regretful eyes. “I can’t, man, I was hitting that new pen I bought off the bartender at that show and that shit’s got me on the ropes right now.”
He drops the kolaches, one hand still firm around the gas pump, and puts his free forearm up the window of the van. He leans against it as he lets out a low, guttural groan. “I think I’m going to yak, too,” voice weighed with a sense of sound defeat.
Steve swings back around to find the rest of them sorting themselves for the long overnight drive through the dry desplobados of West Texas, hoping to sleep before their appointed arrival time of 9am, the earliest time at which their El Paso contact—a guy who replied to their Instagram story asking if any fans could put them up for a day—can let them into his dad’s home.
“Bruce can’t drive. Either Joey or one of us has to go it without a license.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Too fucked up.”
“Joey’s not driving.”
“What’s so bad about me driving?”
“You nearly put all of us in the hospital like five times last time we let you and that was in a twenty minute drive from the venue to a motel. You fucking dip.”
“That’s just what it looked like to you. I was in complete control the whole time.”
“What if we give Bruce like an hour? Hang out here, give him some coffee, let him sleep it off with a nap or something.”
“Just let me drive.”
“I don’t want to wait around here for an hour. We need to get on the road.”
“What’s an hour? It’s not like we’ve got a court date we need to make or something.”
“It’s almost eight hours to El Paso. Do you really want to wait around here another hour before getting on the road? Turn eight hours into nine for no reason?”
“One of us should just drive, man. What are the chances of actually getting pulled over?”
“If we get pulled over with all this shit in the car and any of us get booked then it fucks the whole tour up. We can’t spare a night in jail. The dates are all too tight.”
Lee studies them, his eyes quietly following the conversation.
“What the big fuckin’ deal with letting me drive? I have a license.”
“You drive like a psychopath and we can’t get pulled over with all this schwag in the car.”
“I’ll drive safe.”
“You’ve said that before. Didn’t happen. You’re genetically incapable of it or some shit.”
“Wait,” Tanner says, a bit of stopping power in his voice. Everyone looks to him. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah?”
“I think I actually know a dude with a ranch off of I-10, like three hours out of San Antonio. Through my mom. It’s I-10 to El Paso, right?”
“Yes. Whole way.”
“Then I could call him or something. Or, like, tell my mom it’s an emergency and that we need somewhere to stay.”
Steve stares at him, skeptical. Phone in his hand, he turns it up to his face and reads the time. “It’s fifteen after,” putting it down again. “You’re telling us this rando you barely know is going to let us crash at some ranch at three in the morning?”
He shrugs. “Not a rando. Dude was basically an uncle growing up. I know the code to open the front gate. Point is, it’s a property where we can park the van and crash for the night. Drive to El Paso in the morning. We don’t have to tell anyone anything. And if he learns later that we were there he won’t care.”
Steve looks around to gauge reactions. Joey is more focused on rolling his spliff, a pinch of feigned, indignant indifference to the conversation after having been ruled out as a driver. Lee gives a “why not” shrug. Bruce, bent over the trash can next to the pump, begins his loud, dry retching, trying to induce some vomiting, the sounds carrying loud and clear from the other side of the van.
“Three hours is still a long drive,” Steve says, looking back at Tanner.
“Three versus eight, that’s a whole world of difference my man. If we can make a three-hour leg, then Bruce can take us the rest of the way tomorrow morning, make our show by 7 without any problem. Just gotta figure out how to get there first. Not like we can pay for a motel.”
“Do you have the address?”
“Not the actual address, but let me take a look on maps. Give me like ten minutes and I can find the gate on street view or something. I know roughly where it is.”
“Alright,” Steve says, seemingly accepting the proposition. An odd one, maybe, but it sounds feasible, sounds doable. And better than spending on a hotel. “And we don’t know nobody in San Antonio we can shack with?”
“It’s too late to crash anything now. And we’d have to double back, lose that time.”
“Alright,” he says again. “Look it up on maps. See if you can find it.”
“Knows a dude with a ranch,” Joey says softly, mockingly, “such rich kid bullshit.”
***
Back on the road again, Steve at the wheel this time with Joey close at his side, ready to switch into his seat and produce a driver’s license if they get pulled over. Eyes out for cops, Ford Explorers and Tahoes rigged up with light bars and ramming guards, plain ghost-car Mustangs with the PD decals in phantom block lettering that evades easy definition. Once past Junction, they plumb their way into dark, desolate, arid West Texas, night like a long deafening blanket over an already notoriously dry, numbing drive.
Soon enough, the only lights they can see are their own headlights and the distant taillights of the car a quarter mile ahead, with the gaps between each service station growing steadily in both distance and vacancy, no color or filling to populate all that blank terrain. The stars here dominate the sky, the constellations unsheathing themselves to reveal all their thick galactic tissue and shining with all their full, undiminished strength.
They’d thrown on some Sunn 0))) thirty minutes before, the deep, steady drone of layered guitars helping pacify them. Bruce is fast asleep on the bunk they’d put in above the couch, a loud and intermittent snore reminding everyone he’s still there, and Lee is absorbed in watching Tanner battle his way through the tougher late-game blinds on a Balatro run. The van in its deep road-trip stasis.
“Different world out here man,” Joey says to Steve, his eyes scanning the dark landscape for whatever details he can make out, gather, consider.
“No kidding,” Steve replies, eyes fixed on the road. “You kinda get why the government put all their secret shit out here. You gotta drive ten hours to find anything and they can see you coming from hundreds of miles away.”
“That’s all New Mexico though, right?”
“Same difference. They probably have shit out here too.”
“Yeah.”
“Like secret planes and stuff. Stealth bombers. Invisible helicopters. Crazy shit.”
“That’s probably what the UFOs all are. They’re all military test stuff that we don’t have any frame of reference for. So we think aliens.”
“Probably. But you can’t exclude aliens.”
“Definitely not.”
“All that,” Steve says, finger pointing up at the sky, sweeping across the great expanse of which the sky gives them only the faintest inkling, “you’re telling me there’s all that for literally a bajillion light years without life? Even a little bacteria or something? Single-celled shit. That’s more conspiratorial than even the stupidest UFO theory.”
“It’s a Christian thing,” Joey offers, “they have to believe that this is the only world with life on it because the Bible doesn’t mention anything else. It’s like saying you have a theory of everything and then there’s this big-ass hole right in the middle of it.”
“Maybe. When’s the last time you read the Bible?”
Steve looks at him. Joey gets a big goofy smile on his face. They both start to laugh, big deep belly laughs at the idea of even cracking the thing open.
“Did you ever hear that story of the Swedish black metal band who tried studying the Bible to make their shit as heretical as possible and they all ended up converting?”
“What a bunch of pussies honestly.”
Steve shrugs. “Kind of makes me wonder. Just best not to mess with it I think.”
“We have a song about raping Jesus. If heaven exists, we’re not going to that shit.”
Steve looks at his phone, checks the time. “Been on the road two hours now. One more, right? Do you have service?”
“Yeah. One sec, let me map it.”
He maps the route on his phone and takes a screenshot of the bird’s eye view. “Fifty-eight minutes. I’m screenshotting all the turns and shit, hold on,” he says, working his way up the route with his fingers. “Tanner said there’s no service up there.”
“It cuts off like thirty minutes before you get there and you’re blind until you can get back on the ranch house WiFi,” Tanner says from the back, not looking up from his Balatro hand.
Steve’s hands are fixed on the 9 and 3 o’clock positions on his steering wheel, a solemn look falling over his face now. The taillights that had been ahead of them for the last hour have disappeared, where to he doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember seeing them turn off or stop. Only now does he notice it, as a sudden and unexplained development. They are alone now, no other lights ahead or behind them, only the sky and a long, unbroken horizon they cannot see.
“What’s wrong?”
Steve looks at him. “Nothing. Just kinda freaky out here.”
“I like it. Nobody can tell you shit out here.”
They drive on. Tanner has bored of the Balatro and is now lying back on the couch, ball cap over his face, unclear whether or what extent he’s asleep. Lee has switched chairs and is rolling a joint, his fingers working delicately over the thick brown paper, over-the-ear headphones on and head banging lightly to the cadence of something thrashier than the Sunn O))), something with percussion and sturdier riffs.
“Turn coming up soon,” Joey says. “Onto Grange Road 1312, then it’s twenty, twenty-five minutes on Grange 2129. Then a private road for a little bit.”
Steve eyes the exits as they come up and fall away, signposted with small blue boards with boring, functional names, the nomenclature a simple word followed by a string of numbers.
“Service cuts off soon,” Joey says, eyes tracking the side of the road. “There,” he says again, a minute later, pointing at a small blue sign reading Grange Road 1312 in plain white letters.
“All the road names out here,” Steve says, activating his turn signal and tipping the van into the off-ramp. “It’s like they totally gave up.”
The off-ramp takes them onto a dusty two-lane road, split down the middle with an unbroken yellow line and shouldered on each side with solid white fog lines demarcating thin shoulders that taper off quickly into dust, grass, and an uneven asphalt crumble. The paving here is worn and tired, the top surface blemished with long scratchy pockmarks and deep cuts down to a red subsurface that bleeds in dusty gusts of red Martian soil.
Lee, a confused look crossing his face, reaches over for his phone. He fiddles with his settings for a minute. He looks over and snaps at Steve and Joey, eyes fixed on the road.
“Yeah?” Joey asks, looking back.
Lee holds up his phone and makes a slicing motion with his hands at his neck.
“Copy that,” Joey says, turning around. “No service out here. Maybe find a CD we can put on to keep the music up.
Lee obliges. He pulls out the CD box from under the couch and gets to work, shifting through the collection they’ve built over the years. Most of it fished from record-store bargain bins and given out at shows for free by dudes hawking their local slam bands:
Corpse Kisser – Razorwire Catheter
Bloodmeal – Ovipositing Organ Harvest
Encephalorectomy – Tour Guides for the Gore Tide
Encephalorectomy, hey, Lee remembering now, these guys are supposed to be pretty good. He scans over the track list and, going off the titles alone, can gather some kind of unifying narrative, something about botched brain surgeries resulting in violent, blood-mad zombies sweeping over the earth and enacting vivid revenge on pretty girls, happy families, men with important and well remunerated employment.
He brings the CD over for inspection.
“Some slam?” Joey asks, taking the CD and looking over it. The cover shows a man in a hospital gown with jaundiced skin, crazed yellow eyes, and an open skull pulling the spine out of a surgeon hiding beneath the hospital bed and still begging for mercy, brain rolling around inside the bowl of his skull like a pulpy soiled soup.
“That’s not really the energy right now man,” Steve says, his eyes fixed on the road, the big mellow Sunn riffs beginning to cut off, reception beginning to sputter now, the landscape beyond the cone of light extending from their headlights drawing back even further into its cold black self.
Lee, taking in the mood, quickly comes to understand what he means. They have a solemn air about them, Joey and Steve, something like concern—over what, he isn’t sure. Lee’d spent most of the drive focused on distractions, Tanner’s Balatro hands and his blunt-rolling craft, and it’s only here, hearing and seeing how deep into the West Texas sandbox they’ve gone, that the nerves begin to find him too.
The music has stopped. The only sound now is that of their tires treading over the road.
“Where are we?” Steve asks, the question like a sudden awakening, a coming up to the surface from the depths of some dream.
Joey draws a blank. His expression just as blank. He unlocks his phone again, finds the screenshots he took of the route. “I—can you find a road sign? I’m not sure.”
Steve looks at him. Indignance on his face. “What do you mean you’re not sure? You were supposed to be fucking following along.”
“I think we’re still on the road we were on when I was still looking. Meaning the turn is up here somewhere.”
“We’ve been going for a while. Did we miss it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pfff,” Steve says, blowing through his lips. “What road was it?”
“Grange something…let me see,” scrolling. “Grange, Grange 2129. Grange 2129. Look for the next turn and we can see whether the number is, like, higher or lower.”
“Does it go in order though? Like is Grange 2130 west of Grange 2129? Or does it count down? Or are the numbers close at all?”
“I don’t know,” Joey says, avoiding eye contact.
“We gotta see what this road is first.”
“When’s the last time you saw a sign?”
“Shit. I don’t know.”
Lee, nothing to contribute, goes back to the CD pile, hoping to find something more suitable. He racks through it all, a big uneven pile, the CD cases cracked and stained and rough with the sticky adhesive residue of mutilated price stickers. So much of it trash, deposited back into the bin after ten or so minutes of listening. He finds, near the bottom, an old Symptom of the Universe CD, the $2.99 PRE-LOVED price sticker still hanging on in the top left corner. Some classic, more mellow riffage. Perfect, he thinks.
“Oh,” Joey says as Lee hands him the CD, having seemingly forgotten about the music selection task. “Let’s figure this out first, man. I’m not really in the mood anymore.” He rests the CD on the dashboard shelf.
Steve’s focus is on the road, eyes moving in a hopeful scan for that first reflective glint indicating a highway sign, something to locate themselves with. It all seems to have disappeared on them, taken leave of the landscape.
Lee cranes his head in between them and points. Ahead of them, a light, taillights in fact, sitting there in the road. They move closer. Now there’s a pair of them—dim taillights, dim headlights, apparently two cars sitting sideways on the road. One of them, the one with the headlights leaning their way, seems to have a compacted front door, pushed in by the impact of a crash.
“What the fuck?” is all Joey can think to say.
They come closer, slower. Steve’s face draws into a grimace, trying to make sense of the scene that approaches them. Lee begins urgently tapping Joey’s shoulder, pointing into the cabin of the car that faces them. Joey sees it—a woman, a dark purple river flowing down from the crown of her head, dry but with glints of moisture shining in the spare light that reaches it.
“Jesus, man,” Steve says. They’re maybe thirty, forty yards from the wreckage now, all of it resolving into clearer view.
“Is she dead?”
“I don’t know.”
Lee has both hands on his head, a distressed look on his face.
“What the fuck should we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“We need to help,” Joey unbuckling his seatbelt, his hand moving to the interior door handle.
"No. Stop,” Steve says, firm, grabbing Joey’s shoulder. “Something’s fuckin’ weird about this man. Something’s not right.”
“What isn’t?”
“Gut feeling. Gut feeling,” he says.
“Gut feeling? She’s fucking dying man.”
Steve looks at them, incredulous. “You guys are the ones always wanting to put real gore on our albums covers. You see the real thing and you freak out like this? Get a grip, you fucking—"
The woman in the front seat seems to be looking at them now, having taken notice, blurry eyes looking into the headlights that approach her. Her hand appears to move before failing, her arm going weak, unable to gather the strength, her chest compressing with labored breaths, slowly drawing air in, slowing expelling it again.
“Look!”
A pair of calves extending from behind the car, little bloody white tennis shoes, the body face down, the dimensions of a child.
Steve looks paralyzed, hands around the wheel, eyes wide and bleachy white as a ceramic dinner plate. The car in clearer view now, their van rolling forward little by little, the front door compacted in a jagged crush.
Steve, looking intently at the damage, manages to find some uneasy words. “Wait, that doesn’t make sense,” almost quietly.
“What doesn’t?”
“The car. How did it get hit there and end up—”
He doesn’t finish, Lee frantically grabbing his shoulder now and pointing beyond the window. They both look. The tall grass to their left is moving, like an animal is stalking it way through, telegraphing the movement of something.
“Oh, fuck! Look!” Joey says, pointing to their right now. More movement, the grass stirring even more clearly, the movements more violent.
“What the fuck’s going on man? Why’s everybody yelling? Are we there?” Tanner says now, rubbing his eyes as he comes up from couch.
“Dude—” Steve says, his voice trailing cutting off when he sees something swinging in towards his window, long and black with a silver metal prick on the end. The window shatters in a quick, decisive smash, the whole pane fracturing into a shatter pattern for a split instant before falling out of its frame.
A long bony hand reaches in and grabs him by the hair. Starts pulling, hunrily. Joey screams, backing up into the corner of his. Lee takes the hand and bites down on the wrist, skin running with blood as his teeth break the skin. They hear a shriek, a woman’s shriek. Around the elbow is a robe of some sort, dark purple, the color of red wine.
The hand releases its grip. More shrieking. Steve takes it and pushes the wrist into the bottom lip of the broken window, pushing it into the jagged cuts of glass still sticking up at the stem. She screams louder now as he grinds the wrist against the bottom of the window, eviscerating all the skin, blood pouring out into the driver’s seat.
More of them emerge from the tall grass. Long, flowing, wine-dark robes of the same color, their faces hidden in the shadows of hoods, some of them walking more slowly, some of them slithering toward the van at a quicker pace. A dozen of them materializing.
Tanner is rousing Bruce, who scrambles from the bed now with a wild look in his eyes, like he’s been torn from some intense dream. Steve jumps out of his seat and into the back, taking Joey by the arm and bringing him with him. Just as Joey gets clear of his seat, the passenger-side window shatters, glass pouring down from the frame as another robed, bony hand reaches in, going for the latch, trying to unlock the door. Lee delivers a quick succession of ferocious kicks, gets pained screams in return. One of the robed figures is now mounting the hood and climbing up onto the roof, kicking the top with big, heavy, disorienting steps.
“Wait,” Bruce says, rushing up to the front cabin. “Cover me, man,” he says to Lee, who stays in place, alert, ready to give a steel-toe mouthful to anyone who tries climbing their way in. Bruce opens the glove box and reaches in, shifts some papers around, and pulls out a Glock. A loud, shrill hiss, and the robes in front of the van clear the way, going back into the grass.
“You had a gun in there? You didn’t tell anybody you were keeping a gun in here?”
“What, are you mad about it? I’m about to save your fucking dumb ass,” he says as checks the magazine, sees a bullet spring-ready at the top, and pushes it back into the handle before racking the slide. It’s a bite-sized Glock, a mean and puggish-looking thing whose black polymer body takes on the saintly aura of a gleaming Excalibur blade, the instrument of their violent deliverance.
Lee, delighted look on his face, marvels at it, gives Bruce two thumbs up.
“Get us the fuck out of here man! Drive through!” Tanner yells at Steve. “Push the cars out of the way and just drive through!”
“That’ll get us stuck. Drive around, you barely have to go through the grass.”
Activity around them, feet shuffling, cackling, banging on the side of the van.
A shot goes off, racking all their ears and brains with a blunt concussive force, the bendy whine of a ricochet immediately following it.
“Holy shit!”
“What the fuck was that?”
“It’s a warning shot bro.”
“Don’t waste it! There’s a fucking ton of them out there!”
“This is so fucking metal dude,” Bruce says, a thrill in his voice, sweeping the full length of the front cabin with his hand cannon.
“Steve,” Joey says, grabbing him by his shoulder, talking above the noise now as the banging against the side of the van intensifies, as the footsteps above them drive even harder into the roof. “Drive around. Don’t go through. Don’t fucking listen to Tanner. That’ll get us stuck and get us surrounded. Drive around!”
“He’s right,” Bruce says, looking back, Glock still moving, practically vibrating in his hand. “Come up front man, I’ll cover you.”
“Alright,” Steve says, gathering himself and moving up front.
“We’re coming up!” Bruce screams. Clear the fuck out of the way! I’ve got a fuckin’ gun, man, and I’m ready to kill a motherfucker!”
A chorus of hissing in return, cackles, like the hungry growlings of a pack of jackals.
Steve moves up carefully, eyes scanning for any movement beyond the front driver-side window. Bruce right behind him, handgun peering too, any shot he takes from here apt to graze Steve’s nose before finding a target, biting hostile flesh.
“Don’t even think about it! I’ll put a bullet right through your fuckin’ face!” he screams again. “Go!” he says to Steve, hushed, urgent.
Steve, seeing a clearing, jumps into the driver’s seat and puts the van into drive again, Bruce leaning in and pointing the gun out the window.
“I wanna do it, man! I wanna kill one of these motherfuckers.”
“Chill,” Steve says, his voice cooler now, feeling in control again as his foot sinks into the gas pedal. The hisses grow stronger as they start to move again, slow but sure. The van dips as they leave the road. Suddenly, another alien sound, something like a chain, unfurling itself. Then the sharp wheeze of the wheels, deflating as they puncture themselves on the tire trap, the van’s momentum sputtering as it comes to a dead stop.
“Oh, fuck,” Steve says.
The bloodthirst leaves Bruce’s eyes as the realization of what just happened draws across his face. Laughing from outside, evil shrill cakcles. Steve looks back, sees Lee’s hands on his head again with distress in his eyes, Tanner and Joey standing silent with their disbelief.
“What now?”
Steve jumps out of the seat and scrambles into the back of the van, Bruce jumping back too to give him space as he keeps the Glock trained on the front cabin, waiting for one of them to try and unlock one of the doors again. “What now?” he says.
“We have to run.”
“Run? Run where?”
“What, you want us to stay in here? Sit here and stare at our dicks as they figure out how to get inside?”
“Where the fuck do we run, man? It’s nothing but sand and grass for hundreds of miles in every direction. We have to sit it out, wait them out with the gun until they fuck off or someone comes through.”
A hideous racking noise begins to fill the cabin. It’s the sound of a crowbar forcing itself between the van doors, trying to pull the metal back. It stops a moment before coming back in a loud bang against the door, the full sonic force of metal-on-metal sounding through the cabin in a percussive echo.
“We’re going to run,” Steve says, voice firm, his hands up to his ears, “We’re going to fight, and we’re going to run. We’re going to die if we stay in here. We are surrounded.”
They all look at him, eyes wide and afraid, Bruce looking back now with the gun still in his hand.
“Gear up,” Steve says, pulling his guitar down from the rack and raising it up with two hands around the fretboard, bringing it up to his face like a battleaxe. “We’re going to fight.”
They agree. Joey takes his cymbals and cracks them into pieces, creating long slices of metal and wrapping the bottoms in duct tape for grips. Lee takes his guitar out of its case, body curved like the blade of an axe, and slings it around his shoulder, fastening the strap for a snug fit. He opens up his duffel bag and dumps out the contents and shifts through his clothes to find his metal ring collection, a dozen or so packed together in a small wooden box. He puts them on, mixing and matching them across his fingers, a brass-knuckle freestyle with jagged iron skulls and rough-cut synthetic jewels. Tanner takes a few pairs of drumsticks and breaks them in half, creating wooden splints ready for stabbing, and stows them in his belt like knives, backups for the stiletto he clicks open and tosses between his hands. Bruce releases the magazine from his Glock and checks how many bullets he has to spare: eleven, of the twelve he loaded into the magazine before the tour. And Steve—he retrieves the baseball bat he’d kept stowed under the couch, a Louisville Slugger with the glossy treated wood, and rounds out his loadout with a hammer he’d been keeping in a small toolbox.
“Y’all ready?” Steve says, hand at the van’s inner latch, ready to pop it open.
“Fuck it, man. Let’s do this. Bruce, you first.”
Bruce takes point, Glock raised, both hands around the grip, hits a subconscious imitation of the Chris Redfield pose, the situation fitting the template in his head for fending off blood-mad hordes with a handgun.
Steve whispers.
“Get a load of this fag,” Bruce says, face lighting up, pointing his thumb at Steve. “He’s praying!”
“We’re outnumbered here. I probably should myself. You got a better idea?”
“Yeah, going out there and wasting these motherfuckers. How’s that for an idea?”
“Shut the fuck up, all of y’all,” Steve says. “Bruce, I’m gonna throw it open, you shoot the first fuckin’ thing you see, alright? Just don’t even think about it, just light those motherfuckers up, you got it?”
“Hoo ahh. Bring it to me baby!” The adrenaline is coursing through his face, pupils dilating, cheeks red, breath short and hot.
Steve pops the latch. Bruce kicks it open. The doors swing free. A shot rings out, deafening everyone in the packed van interior. A bullet bites the face of the cultist that had been standing right there, waiting for them, crowbar in hand—she flies back, head and neck stretched backwards, blood flying out in a long fan. They rush out. Bruce plugs another cultist, two bullets in the stomach, one in the chest, sending her staggering back into the high grass with blood flowing free across her chest. Steve swings his guitar with the form and gusto one would an axe and connects with a third cultist’s skull, cracking her face open and caving in all the bone to get down to all that soft brain matter underneath. Tanner’s arm drives a stiletto through the face of another, Joey’s a pair of makeshift cymbal shivs through the kidneys of a fifth.
“They’re all chicks, man!” Steve says as he swipes his guitar at another who sidesteps at the last moment and backs up, evincing some fear as she hisses at him. “Outmuscle ’em! They’re just chicks!”
Bruce starts to laugh. “We got thi—” he says before the Glock is swiped out of his hand and sent clattering across the concrete. A victorious hiss as another slithers up to the Glock and kicks it into the grass. “What the fuck,” he says before a cloak wraps around him and takes him to the ground. Reinforcements come in from the grass, gross voices sizzling in their demonic tongues.
They keep fighting, too preoccupied to help Bruce, whose pained screams are tearing out through the night, blood starting to pour out from beneath the cloak that convulses with the fight being put up underneath.
His guitar too smashed up, Steve has taken recourse to his baseball bat, has already broken enough skulls to give it a couple notches. He beats back a pair of cultists and looks over as Bruce is being dragged into the grass.
“They got Bruce!”
“We gotta run,” comes the response from Tanner as he impales a neck with the thick bottom half of a broken drumstick. “They just keep fucking coming. Fuck Bruce.”
More of them descend on them from the grass, whole legions of cultist cannon fodder. The boys rip, tear, stab, and bludgeon all they can, but the work is tiring, shortly exhausting all their limited cardiac resources—too many energy drinks, cigarettes, gas station chicken sandwiches. Lee, a force of nature all his own, leaves a trail of busted faces in his wake, the cultists lying bleeding and heaving around him, blood pouring out from the gashes, cuts, deep lacerations through their heads.
They eventually close ranks, gravitating back toward each other into a more defensive posture, back-to-back in an armed circle, still slashing and swinging but slower now. Some of the cultists are brandishing knives now, long kitchen knives that gleam hungrily in the moonlight. Closer now, the tug of battle moving at a slower tempo, the boys can see the cultists’ features more clearly, gaunt feminine forms with their faces painted in dark earthy hues, bald shaved heads and sharp teeth.
“We gotta fuckin’ run! Now!” Tanner screams as he waves off attackers with his stiletto, the thin blade runny with wet blood.
“Run where? Where?” Joey responds, voice weary with all the violence, down to one last cymbal shiv, all the others having been deposited in cultist flesh and broken off at the grips.
At the front of the circle, Tanner breaks off and pushes his way through Lee and Joey, running past the van and down the road.
“Fuck! Do it!” Steve screams, breaking one last face with the claw end of the hammer before releasing it and taking off after Tanner. The others follow. They shove their way past the few cultists who had drawn up between them and the van, hissing and clawing at them as they shoulder past, taking a few unsuccessful swipes with their knives, taking licks of their own as the boys claw their way free. Once clear of the van, they vault, jump, juke their way through the fake wreckage. A little boy—the owner of those little calves that’d been poking out from behind the car—sits calmly on the roof of a car, watching them calmly, curiously, unmoving. The woman who’d been in the driver’s seat pops out at them from behind the first car but before getting the wind knocked out of her by Joey, spearing her square in the chest with a well-aimed shoulder.
Once out front, they plunge headlong into the dark, endless landscape, their heels burning the solid asphalt underneath, the road carrying them on, the van’s headlights dwindling in the distance, the cultists’ shrill hisses falling behind them, the stars drawing wider and more powerful as they course their way into the wild, hostile, alien West Texas terrain, skipping on from one locus of danger to perhaps another, daring to brave whatever awaits them in that big deep sea of stars, red dirt, bobwire property lines and sleepy livestock. Full sprints, the retreat having taken on a life of its own, their bodies transcending the physical limits that had begun to beset them near the end of their fight.
They go on for what must be ten or fifteen minutes. Total dark now, fully enveloped. They stop and catch their breath, all of them sucking in as much wind as they can, hands on their knees and laying out on the concrete, chests rising and falling in quick succession.
“What the fuck!” Steve says, coming up now with both hands at his waist, still vacuuming up the arid air with his mouth. “Bruce is fucking dead, man, they had his ass like Swiss cheese under there.”
“He sucked. It’s fine,” Tanner manages.
“Facts.”
Blue and red lights on the horizon. Lee taps Steve on the shoulder and points. “Cops!” Tanner says. “Cops,” Joey says back to him, seeing it for himself but unable to shake the evident sense of disbelief in his voice, almost reflexively fighting back the relief that flows through his chest. Lee’s hands on his head, mouth practically twitching in excitement.
The lights close the distance. A single classic black-and-white Crown Victoria rocketing toward them, sirens screaming and lights blasting at full alert. They put their hands up and wave at it, as if to say, SOS, SOS, and naturally forming a blockade across the road to force a stop.
Closer now, slowing down as it comes within 50, 40, 30 feet…arms around each other, beating their chests, freely joking about how they’ve never in their lives been so thrilled to see a police car with the sirens screaming. All of them covered in blood, bone, thick red gristle with dry tissue and torn skin.
The car stops. The silhouettes of two policemen getting out. The boys now on their hands and knees, tripping over themselves to explain all that’s happened.
One of the policemen steps forward, kicking closed the door behind. Pistol out, aimed at the boys, an old, weathered Beretta in his hands. “It’s a shame the girls couldn’t get it done,” he says, voice cool and hateful.
“A damn shame,” says the other, raising his own weapon now, a TEC-9, long barrel glinting in the moonlight that catches on the metal spacing between the vents. “Y’all did a number on them. This is gonna be long and slow,” he says, a cruel smile crossing his face.
“Take a breather, fellas. After that, we’re going to walk all the way back, and you’re gonna clean up that big mess you made,” the other says, grin spreading across his face, a long and deep red scar across his cheek revealing itself as the light catches his face.
______
Nick Mace is a writer, mediocre lawyer, and all-around lowlife based in the Lone Star State, around which he drifts, at random, at all times of the year. His stories have appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Plague Circus Press, and Be About It Press. His first novel SALOMON'S GARDEN is forthcoming on Farthest Heaven in late 2026. You can find him on twitter @MaceSystemsCorp and hit him at his email nickmace@proton.me.
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