The Diner and That Same Old Feeling Again

by Jeff Brown

Table of Contents
Part 7 appears
in this issue.

Part 8 of 11

Revisiting the Past and and End to Ends

“Man, what’s going on around here?” Pete asked. Fear was beginning to creep in and he was starting to have a hard time containing it.

“Nothing, Pete,” Tony said.

“Nothing?” Dolan asked. He held out the shirt he had worn that day when he was twenty years old. “You call this nothing?”

“So, someone else has been here. Big deal.”

“Someone?” Dolan questioned. “Someone? Damn, Tony, do you have to be hit between your damn eyes to tell that ‘someone’ is us?”

“It’s too fresh to have been us,” Tony reasoned. “If that was our campsite then it probably would have been long gone by now.”

“Tony, this is my shirt,” Dolan yelled as he held the jersey up to Tony. “This is my fucking shirt! How do you explain this?”

Dolan had walked over to Tony, his shirt outstretched and all but waving it in Tony’s face.

“Boy, I would step back if I were you,” Tony said in his best security guard’s voice, trying to sound intimidating to make Dolan back down.

“I’m not scared of you, Tony,” Dolan yelled.

“You had best be...” Tony started.

“Guys! Stop!” Pete yelled. He stepped between Tony and Dolan putting a hand on each one of their chests. “Get a grip on yourselves. Ya’ll sound like a bunch of kids arguing like that. We’re not in high school anymore.”

“He’s right,” Tony said. The only reason he agreed with Pete is because Dolan didn’t back down from him. “This is ridiculous — we sound like two little brats fighting over nothing.”

Tony’s hands were now raised in the air. He looked like a man who was about to be arrested by the police. He looked like he was surrendering. In the back of his mind, however, Tony was telling Dolan in some fantasy world in his mind to watch out; that this was not over — not by a long short.

Pete stepped from between them and began to look around. He was looking up toward the tops of the trees.

“I don’t think we’re too far from where Dale fell,” he said as his eyes trained on a tree. It was broken about half way up.

“Why do you think that?” Tony asked as he turned his attention to Pete.

“There’s the tree he fell from.”

Pete didn’t bother pointing up. He just continued to look at the tree. Tony followed Pete’s eyes until he saw it too.

Help!

The word was faint but distinct. All three men turned their heads in the direction where it had come from. It came again, only this time louder.

Help me!

It was a painful cry for help. It sent shivers down the spines of all three men. When the cry came a third time they were off and running in the direction of it. This time they weren’t running from something, but running to it.

Help me!

The cry grew louder as they grew nearer to its source. Tony, Pete and Dolan ran through the trees, none of them noticing the branches that were catching on their clothing and skin. They had all, in their own minds, made a resolve to find the owner of the crying voice; to save that person. Even though they knew who they voice belonged to and that person was dead.

Help me, please!

“Stop, you guys,” Dolan yelled as he stopped running. He bent over and put his hands on his knees. Dolan was breathing hard, his mouth opened wide.

Tony and Pete stopped also. They looked back at Dolan.

“What is it?” Tony asked. He, as well as Pete, was also breathing as hard as Dolan was.

“The voice...” Dolan said between breaths, “It’s all around us... we’ve got to get out of here.”

Pete looked at him with a puzzled look on his face. The he understood. The voice helped him to understand.

Help me!

“You’re right,” Tony said. He was looking all around him and up into the trees.

Help me, please!

It was louder and continuing to grow louder each time the words were spoken. It was as if the words were in...

Pete dropped to the ground. He began to scream loudly as he raised his hands to his ears. He clutched his ears as the tears began to stream from his eyes.

“What’s wrong, Pete?” Tony yelled as he knelt beside him. He put his hands on Pete’s shoulders and tried to get Pete to stop rocking back and forth for a moment.

“It’s in my head,” Pete said as he pulled away from Tony.

Help me, please! The voice called out again, this time much louder than before. HELP ME!

Pete screamed loud as blood began to run from his nose, from between his fingers where he held his ears.

HELP ME! The voice yelled the words this time. It sounded mad this time instead of anguished. NOW!

At the sound of the final word Pete’s screams stopped as his eyes shot open. With two moist pops his eyes exploded. Blood sprayed from their sockets as did a milky pink jelly that used to be his eyeballs. The blood sprayed onto Tony as Pete fell forward and into his arms.

Tony fell backward, pulling Pete with him. He pushed Pete off of him after they landed on the ground and rolled away from him. He got to his feet and stumbled away from Pete and into a tree. He stared down at Pete, his mouth opening and closing as if he were talking but nothing was able to come out. Finally he found the words he was looking for.

“He’s dead!” Tony yelled. “Oh, fuck, man. Pete’s dead.”

Dolan moved quickly to where Pete was lying on the ground. He put two fingers to Pete’s throat. He felt no pulse.

“Yeah, I believe you’re right,” he said. “Pete’s dead.”

Dolan stood and backed away from Pete and toward Tony.

“Come on, Tony, we’ve got to get out of here.”

Tony looked at Dolan in disbelief. It had been Dolan’s idea to come out here and try to find Dale. Dale, who had been dead for an eternity in Tony’s eyes. And now Pete was dead and they still hadn’t found old dead Dale. Now Dolan wanted to get out of there. Tony felt himself becoming unglued as he looked at Dolan. He had a million things spinning through his brain but none of them became concrete enough for him to say anything.

“Tony, do you hear me?” Dolan asked. He was snapping his fingers in front of Tony’s face. Tony blinked twice then gave Dolan a nervous smile.

“What about Pete?” he asked.

Just before Pete died he had heard the voice calling for help. It had been Dale’s voice and it had grown louder and angrier with each time it called out. The voice had crept its way into Pete’s head, becoming more insistent, more intense, as it bounced off the walls of his skull.

The first sharp pains tore through the center of Pete’s brain. It had felt like a very sharp knife had been jammed into the top of his skull. He screamed loud as another stab of pain shot through his head and into his ears. Pete grabbed his ears as they began to ring like an alarm system going off inside of his head. Another loud scream followed as the words started repeating themselves in his head.

Pete was vaguely aware that someone was talking to him. He wasn’t sure what he was saying or even who it was. His eyes were clenched shut and tears were squeezing through the eyelids.

“It’s in my head,” Pete said or thought he had said. He didn’t know — he couldn’t hear his own voice, his thoughts of his screams of pain. The only think he could hear was the pissed-off voice of Dale Rollins screaming at him.

HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME, PLEASE!

The words should have sounded pained. Agonized. But they didn’t. The words of pleading Dale was saying were more of words of taunting, being repeated over and over like the worst part of an already bad song as it skipped on a scratched record.

HELP ME! HELP ME!

Blood was flowing from his nose and ears, pouring through the cracks between the fingers of his cupped hands over his ears.

HELP ME!

There was a flash of red in his closed eyes, snapping them open as if he had been poked by a hot cattle prod. In Pete’s field of vision was a curtain of red that cloaked over all other things. The red was gone with the pronouncement of the last words he would ever hear:

HELP ME, NOW!

Pete’s eyes exploded with two sickening pops. His brain felt as if it had exploded as well, splattering bits of brain matter against the walls of his skull. As Pete fell forward he was aware of only one thing: silence.

Before Pete hit the ground on top of Tony, he was dead.

“We’ll take Pete with us,” Dolan said. “We’ll carry him back to the boat, okay?”

Tony nodded absently. He then looked around himself, trying to find the path they had followed to get there.

“Which way is out, Dolan?” he asked.

Dolan looked around the trees where they were at. The path was gone. They had apparently wandered off of the path while they were running to find the voice they were hearing. Somehow they had reached this area — a grove with giant oak and pine trees and thousands of growing vines that circled the threes like green stripes on a candy cane.

“I don’t know, Tony,” he said.

In one place Dolan saw some matted grass. It looked like it had been trampled down by several sets of feet. He walked over to it, following the crushed grass until it disappeared into a thick of trees. There was no way they could have come that way. The trees were too thickly packed together. The weeds and vines were also more grown up around these trees than any of the others.

“From the looks of it, this is the way we came in,” Dolan said. “But, I don’t think this is the way we are getting out.”

Dolan was still kneeling at the crushed grass looking into the giant trees that seemed to form a wall, blocking their exit, when Tony walked up to him.

“Dolan,” he said, “we have a bigger problem than which way is out, man.”

“What’s bigger than that?” Dolan asked.

“Where’s Pete’s body?” Tony asked.

Dolan felt the world grew cold as he stood and turned to look. Where Pete’s body had fallen was now just a blood soaked patch of grass. But, there was something more. Lying in the grass were several black leaves. The leaves had the same red veins in them and seemed to be growing off of vines coming out of the ground where Pete had fallen.

It had happened while Dolan and Tony searched for a way out of the tree lined area they were in. They had temporarily let their minds slip away from their friend who had died less than a half an hour earlier.

At first it was just a sprig of a plant that poked form out of the ground next to Pete’s eyeless face. Then it began to grow, slowly at first, sprouting small black and red leaves. Brown vines began to sprout from the sprig and grow. The vines began to spread quickly. Leaves began to sprout all along the vines — tiny black ones with those same red veins pulsing through them — covering Pete’s body. It was only a matter of seconds before Pete’s body was completely covered in brown vines and black leaves. The red veins looked to be pulsing, faster and faster, swelling as it sucked the remaining blood from Pete’s body. Slowly his body began to sink into the ground as the black leaves’ veins grew wider and pulsed faster.

As the remainder of the flesh peeled off of Pete’s bones the vines began to drop away, taking with them the leaves. The vines began to sink back into the ground, its leaves breaking off and falling to the ground.

By the time Dolan had found the matted grass and trees where they had entered the grove almost all of the vines, leaves and sprigs were gone, as was Pete’s body. All that remained was the matted grass, blood and several of the black leaves.

“Where’d he go?” Dolan asked.

“I don’t know,” Tony responded.

They both walked over to where Pete had died. The grass there looked greener than anywhere else in the area. There looked to be more blood than had been there earlier. The black leaves, which had not been there before were beginning to shrink into the grass, receding into the ground.

“Do you see that?” Dolan asked as the last of the leaves shrank away. He bent down and touched the grass where Pete had lain. Slowly Dolan began to dig with his hands, his fingers cupped like a fleshy shovel. He pulled the grass away. It came up without much effort, exposing the black soil underneath it. The soil was soaked with Pete’s blood. When Dolan pulled his hands away his fingers were both dirty with soil and red with blood.

“Tony, help me out, here,” he said as he began to dig again. Tony bent down and started pulling away grass and dirt also.

“Oh, shit,” Dolan said as he uncovered something solid. He had continued to clean around the thing until it was exposed to show what it was. The skull that was laying thee stared up at him with hollow sockets.

Tony stopped digging and saw the skull Dolan had uncovered. He looked down to where his own hands had been digging. There were two exposed bones there — both of them looked to be ribs.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Tony asked as he stood. His voice sounded as if he were about to panic. But somehow he was holding on to the little remaining sanity he had left.

“I don’t know, Tony,” Dolan said. He had stood and was backing away slowly.

“Is that Pete?” Tony asked as he stood also.

“Yeah, I think it is,” Dolan answered after a moment’s thought. He then added, “We’ve got to find our way out of here.”

Both men turned back to the enclosed entrance. They both froze as they looked at the now open swath of trees. The path was no longer there. They looked at each other, warily. Then they started into the path, this time Dolan leading and Tony following.

They had been watching the entire time, from the time they got on the boat at the dock to Tony and Dolan finding Pete’s skeletal remains. Calvin and Dale smiled in an almost evil manner. They watched as Dolan and Tony cautiously made their way out of the grove and along the path. They followed close behind them, listening to their conversations and feeling their fear.

“Nice touch,” Calvin said. “You know, with the skeleton and all.”

“Thanks, Big Bird,” Dale replied, “I thought it was, too.”

What had started out as Dale wanting his body found was quickly changing into the revenge they both had really been seeking. Dale had thought he would feel bad for killing a former friend. He was wrong. Dale had felt some sort of exhilaration spread through him as Pete died, his ear drums rupturing, his brain imploding, while his eyes exploded. It was a feeling he had never felt before, dead or alive. It was a feeling he had enjoyed... and wanted to feel again. It was a feeling he planned to feel again.

Proceed to part 9...