Weird Ones Read online

  THE WEIRD ONES

  Steve Vernon

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / Steve Vernon

  Copy-edited by: Darren Pulsford

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by:

  http://ashenwood.deviantart.com

  LICENSE NOTES

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS BOOKS BY STEVE VERNON:

  Novels:

  Devil Tree

  Gypsy Blood

  Long Horn, Big Shaggy

  Nothing Down

  Nothing to Lose

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  Dedication

  It takes a lot

  Table of Contents

  Plague Monkey Spam

  Gnarly Ho-Tep Hoedown Two-step

  Hunger Time at the Midnight Mall

  The Last Curl of Gut Rope

  Afterword

  Plague Monkey Spam

  * 1 *

  A man can find god in the damnedest of places. There's just no telling how an epiphany will play itself out.

  There's an order to life, and it runs like this. Hum along if you don't know the words. Sometimes things happen because you make them happen. That's called karma and it is the favorite four-star rated, two thumbs up, sundae topping of choice for any god you care to mention. The gods invented karma for its stickiness. It clings to you like freshly flung monkey dung. On the other hand, sometimes things just happen for no particular reason at all. That's called life – a process of dumb-fuck-luck that starts and ends like any other story.

  Bobby Kaye's life story ended and started with an e-mail from hell.

  Hello good friend. In all heart I write to you, offering you this chance in one of your lifetimes. E-mail me here, at hanuman.org/con for an opportunity your eyes will fall out to believe. Drugs, all kinds, you will want everything. Gods will it, sending soon. All you have to do is ask.

  ARdeth99.

  "Damn!" Bobby swore. "There it goes again."

  "What's wrong, honey?" Maggie answered.

  Bobby looked up. Maggie stood there in the doorway of his home office, wearing her blue flannel bathrobe and the pair of fuzzy gray monkey slippers he'd given her for her last birthday.

  "Have you broken another keyboard?" she asked. "It would serve you right for monkeying around with that old computer of yours before even saying good morning to your loving wife."

  Her smile hung just a little off center, like her sense of humor. Bobby smiled back. Her grin was that contagious and he never wanted to find himself a cure.

  "It's just this damned spam," he said, pointing at the screen. "It doesn't even make sense. Look, here's another one."

  He read the second spam out loud to her.

  "Hello good friend. It may be of surprise to see me writing two you, I em Prince Wakanda Nazerie of Nigeria, and I and my family of fifty eight apostle raised children and..."

  It went on and on for some time but the gist of it was fairly predictable. Send money. Send a bank account number. Send the name of your first born. Prepare to make sacrifice.

  "See what I mean? It's always the same sort of thing. Either a sales pitch or a heartfelt plea from his royal fecundity Prince Wakanda of Nigeria asking for my bank account number." Bobby rolled his eyes. "Fifty eight kids? What kind of Viagra do you think he takes and what website does he order it from?"

  Maggie laughed. She always laughed at Bobby's jokes. She swore that he had subliminally imbedded the habit within her genetic make-up as a part of their wedding vows, and Bobby never argued. If something wasn't broke, why the fuck would you want to try and fix it?

  "The web is a scary place," Maggie said. "I wish you didn't have to hang around it so much."

  "Scary for sure. It's way scarier than zombies and witches and reanimated buffalo. It's scary like cell telephones, the way it connects us all, like we're all just dancing in some mad spider's mucilage snare." Bobby raised his voice to a Vincent Price - Mickey Mouse castrato. "Help me, help me."

  Maggie shook her head. "Shouldn't you be writing this down?"

  "I'll let your memory capture it for me. In later years when I've gone to that old writer's home in the sky to creak in my haunted rocker right next to HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Hisownself Poe, you can repeat my wisdom for generations to come."

  "Suppose I'm dead by then?"

  "Impossible. You are my young trophy wife. It is your destiny to be my memory, thesaurus, and bearer of piping hot caffeine."

  Maggie laughed and Bobby laughed along, and Maggie laughed harder in a perfect loop. If God was looking down he should record it and file it under good things that he had created, as far as Bobby was concerned.

  "It's just this spam. I keep thinking that it has to mean something."

  "It sounds like a conspiracy to me," Maggie said, arching her eyebrows in a perfect Groucho Marx brow-waggle. "Somebody better alert Mulder and Scully."

  Bobby stared at the spam, lying there flat and plain on his screen. He couldn't let go of his irritation anymore than a fat bearded lady could let go of her last candy frosted sticky bun.

  It just stayed stuck.

  "It makes me angry, is all."

  "Maybe it's time to get a brand new computer," Maggie suggested. "With a great big firewall. You could leave it in its packing box and not even plug it in. Then you'd be sure of never getting any spam."

  Bobby made a face. "Have I ever told you how much I appreciate you razor keen sense of sarcasm? Remind me to rub a little lemon juice into the paper cuts you've carved onto my delicate psyche."

  "You do need a new computer," Maggie pointed out.

  She was right. He needed a new computer but evolution scared the hell out of him. He'd written for so long with pen and ink and then with an old Brother typewriter. When he finally broke down and bought himself a real honest-to-Bill-Gates computer he grew unnaturally attached to the thing. It became a kind of good luck charm, and even though it was now sadly obsolete he believed in that good luck so much that he couldn't imagine replacing the old beast. He wasn't up for the sacrifice such a revolution would entail.

  Still, the old machine was dying. Every day it worked a little slower. Just last week Maggie warned him that the computer was degrading.

  "I'm a writer," he had told her. "I'm used to degradation."

  "Poor baby," Maggie had said. "Am I that hard on you?"

  "Do you know how often and in how many different ways your mother asks me when I'm going to give up this writing foolishness and get myself a real job?" I asked.

  "I've never heard either of my parents say any such thing."

  "Your mother never says anything directly. She's like advertising - subliminal, downright insidious, only worse. She gets in and around the cracks in a man, kind of like mildew."

  "Face it Bobby, you're about as cracked as they came. You just plain hate change."

  "That's not true. I'm incredibly flexible."

  "Ha!" Maggie pointed around the room. "You packrat your manuscripts in a filing cabinet that'd take Godzilla, a case of industrial strength steroids,
a half a hundred hernia and a nuclear-powered Jesse James pimped-up forklift to move. You single handedly generate enough paper to feed a platoon of hungry mutant wasps. Your paperbacks are double stacked on every bookshelf in the house - and that cobweb," She said, pointing up at the ceiling lamp. "How long are you going to leave that hanging there?"

  Bobby looked up to the veil of cobweb that was tented across his ceiling lamp.

  "I've left that broom down here, hoping you'd get the hint," Maggie pointed at the broom lying beside his desk. There were cobwebs around the broom, as well. Bobby hoped she didn't notice.

  So he shrugged to camouflage the clutter. "I haven't the heart to sweep it."

  "Why not?"

  "My Welsh grandfather told me that spiders and cobwebs brought good luck. I believed him. Writers need that kind of faith."

  It was a good try, but mostly pure bullshit. The most that Bobby's grandfather had ever said to him amounted to "Bring me that belt, boy." followed closely by "Bend over and catch hold of your toes. I'm going to learn you your scripture, good and proper."

  Maggie made the sound of an over-ripe road-killed strawberry. She wasn't buying his bullshit one damn bit.

  "It's just this damned spam," Bobby went on, trying to change the subject. "It's plaguing me. Everyday there's some new variation crammed into my mailbox, and yet they're all so banal. Not one of them shows the slightest spark of creativity."

  Maggie smiled at that.

  "Do you really want creative spam?" she asked.

  "Why not? At Cannes every year they hold a festival for the world's greatest commercials. A whole weekend of nothing but commercial watching with no television to get in the way. They sit and they watch and they select the world's top commercials and award them lions."

  "They give them lions," Maggie said, with a question in her voice.

  "That's right. Lions. Gold, silver and bronze lions."

  "It makes sense to me," Maggie said. "Giving lions for lying, why not?"

  "I'm just saying that if somebody is going to waste time printing up this sort of spam, then why not get a little creative? There are dozens of ways to say send-me-money. Why don't they find something new?"

  "Perhaps you've found yourself a brand new career? Spam writer for the cyber-gods. Did you ever stop to think about that?"

  She said it so seriously that Bobby had to laugh.

  "I couldn't write this stuff," Bobby said. "I'm a fiction writer, I don't do ad copy," He had tried several times before, in one of his habitual let's get practical moments. "It's inevitable. Whatever I write, sooner or later I have to make up a story. I am a raconteur at heart."

  Maggie laughed.

  "What you are is a consummate bullshit artist, but fortunately you've figured how to make that pay."

  I grinned at that.

  "Is there any other kind of artist? We are nothing more than a pack of over-educated monkeys, blindly flinging our feces against the canvas of life, and calling it a masterpiece."

  "I wasn't really serious," Maggie said. "But you do have a point."

  "Neither was I. It just bugs me, is all."

  "Honey, it is just spam. It rhymes nicely with scam and flim-flam," Maggie said. "It's just something to play on your greed."

  "You'd think if this scam was that successful the con artists behind it could afford to hire an editor to proof their copy before they send it out. Jesus Christ, even Stephen King uses an editor now and then."

  "Anne Rice doesn't," Maggie pointed out with an evil grin.

  "Well maybe she ought to."

  Writer jokes. They were the brick and mortar of Maggie and Bobby's marriage. Maggie had worked as a copy editor in a local newspaper for the last eight years. Her veins ran blue-black and gray. The two of them shared a bond of common and constant communication.

  Bobby wrote horror. He'd been writing horror for the last sixteen years. It took ten years to get to the point to where he almost didn't need to worry about ever getting a "real" job. That was a good thing. Writing was a habit he just couldn't break. Every morning he woke up and tiptoed down to his basement office. He didn't stop for coffee. His writing was all the caffeine he needed.

  Not that it was that bad of an addiction. With the royalties rolling in from his last three books, and an advance on a movie deal he'd lucked into, coupled with the occasional strategically timed short story and come-by-chance foreign rights deal, Bobby and Maggie had more money coming in then they needed. The fact was they couldn't spend it all if they'd tried. They were too busy being too happy living their lives.

  Someone should have warned them that happiness like that can be an awfully tempting target.

  * 2 *

  "So what are you working on today?" Maggie asked.

  "A new novella. I just hammered out a deal with Graveyard Waltz."

  "That was fast."

  "I'm in demand."

  It was a good thing to be in demand. Bobby enjoyed being asked for his stories. It sure beat sending them out over the transom. These days there were too many publishers who were scared about accepting unagented submissions. There were far too many folks scared about opening a boxful of Anthrax and catching something worse.

  "Is it going to be a good one?" she asked.

  "They're all good," he told her. He was lying, of course. The last book hadn't felt all that true to him. He was pumping them out, trying to keep up with his contracts and commitments and it was beginning to show. The sales figures were still sky-rocketing, but the editors were a little less careful with his work. He was the zombie-man.

  He could do no wrong.

  The e-mail signal lit up.

  "There's another, I bet. Another damned spam. I wonder what I did now to earn that sort of a gift?"

  "Oh honey," Maggie said. "Spam like that is entirely random. A computer program generates each message and shoots them off gatling gun style."

  "Well why does it keep hitting on me?"

  "Dumb luck?" she shrugged and laughed.

  "I prefer animal attraction," Bobby said, thumping his chest with a questionable Tarzan vigor.

  "So go dance the dirty boogie with a lovesick bull gorilla," Maggie joked. "Honey, it's nothing personal. They don't aim this stuff, you know?"

  "Are you certain?" Bobby asked. "I am a successful horror writer, you know."

  "The next Stephen King."

  Maybe not that big, but Bobby was getting there. He had developed a following. He was becoming a name brand author. Folks couldn't wait for the next Bobby Kay horror novel.

  It hadn't always been this way. Five years ago he'd been nothing more than one of many semi-successful small press writers hanging out on the message boards, trying to reach folks that he never saw, plugging away doggedly at story after story, hoping and praying that something would catch.

  Then he got lucky. A zombie novel of his skyrocketed into minor league success. Two sequels brought the movie deal and the rest was happening right now. If Stephen King was the McDonald's of horror literature than Bobbie Kay was the Chuck E. Cheese of zombie novelists, with twice the fat count and nearly half as nourishing.

  Maggie smiled. "You don't really think those spams are typed up by actual people, do you?"

  "Actually, I'd always pictured a room filled with drunken giddy monkeys, shot full of crack and itching powder, hammering blindly away on a long line of computer keyboards. I r riting 2 U."

  "What an imagination. You ought to give writing a try."

  "Imagination?" he looked shocked. "You mean there is no Prince Wakanda of Nigeria, with eight million dollars that he's looking to deposit in my bank account?"

  "Probably not," she grinned. "It's just a blind draw. Random computer generators shotgun-pumping spam out into the ether-world, one a minute every minute, twenty four hours a day. They call it blizzarding."

  "That's even scarier than Prince Wakanda."

  Bobby looked at the message again, focusing on it.

  "Stop obsessing," Maggie warned. "Y
ou're thinking in story again. Just erase the darned thing. That's what the delete key is for, isn't it?"

  "I can't help it. It's the writer in me. I smell a plot."

  "You smell your own bullshit, darling. It's how you work. If reality doesn't suit you, you make something up that fits your vision."

  "You've got a point," he admitted. "It's like an itch, sometimes. Like a scab. I just have to pick at it."

  "It's an addiction is what it is, and I knew it was there when I married you, and I wouldn't change it if I had a hundred wishing genie jars."

  Bobby smiled. "You know what it's like? When a story is germinating I feel this little itch of a tickle, like a black spider scuttling through my brain, stringing a fine strong strand from the hooks of its spinnerets, linking two or three completely disparate ideas together."

  What if? So often that's just how it started. From out of the blue Bobbie would think to himself something like - what if a man walked into a diner and asked for an egg and was served a live chicken - and a story would begin to grow. The crazier the idea, the better the story. It was like a connect-the-dots puzzle thrown together by a blind three-armed lunatic orangutan. He'd mosaic the canvas of his writer's mind with a few crazy ideas, and then the story spider that lurked in the basement of his lower brain would begin stringing the connections together.

  "That's my job." he'd tell her. "I'm the storyteller. Every tribe needs a good storyteller to make sense out of the nonsense and to assure them that the things in this world that happened to you were built to fit into some kind of plan. Don't go into those woods or god will eat your ass. Don't pick your feet on Sundays. Don't eat oysters until you shuck them from their shell."

  But right now the campfire seemed a long way off. Right now, all that Bobbie could do was stare at his computer screen, trying to visualize just who was on the other end of these damn spam messages. "I have to get to the bottom of this, is all."