Broken Wings

by Ray Gregory

Julie was doing fifty at dusk, nothing but hazy cypress marsh on either side of the two-lane blacktop. After ten hours driving, she craved sleep. But suddenly, what was that? Did she hit something? She was wide awake now.

Another whack — on her trunk! — then a deranged howl.

“Hot thang, ya ’memma me? I’m in luuuv.”

Her eyes shot to the side mirror. A pickup truck lurched up beside her. A tensed, raised hand was about to whack her trunk again. Her bare toes ground into the accelerator. Her sporty little car pulled away.

When she stared into her rearview mirror now, she could see the whole pickup behind her. The rusty, dented old truck with one headlight shining — the other one dangling by its wires — fell farther back as she watched, her toes still mashing the gas pedal. She fingered the small gold cross around her neck. Thank God for her speedy little car.

She “’memma-ed,” all right. How could she ever forget that truck, those — those things? She never would have stopped at that little ribs-and-barbecue place a few miles back if she’d spotted them first. But that little diner had been too much. She’d had to check it out, as well as get directions. The billboard-size sign on its corrugated tin roof — the sign as big as the diner — had been too stupid/funny to ignore: a big, cut-out pig with a bib over Earl’s Pig Lickin’ Good in flashing neon — say what? It’d caught her fancy, as well as her eye. Just the kind of quirky charm she’d hoped to find in the Deep South.

“Old Earl,” behind the counter in his apron, had been really nice too. So had Ellie, the middle-aged waitress. They’d both known exactly where Julie was headed, the Caroltons’ place. Good thing she’d stopped to ask too, Old Earl had said. “The Carolton’s digs is in the sticks even for ‘round here,” he’d laughed, then given her detailed “shortcut” directions. He’d called her the cutest thing he’d seen all year, despite her Yankee accent. As they’d chatted he’d even torn open a pack of Twinkies from the snack rack by the cash register and given her one — he must have seen her eyeing those Twinkies after all that driving. A little welcoming gift, he’d said with a grin as he’d wolfed down the other one himself. “Nothing like a Twinkie to pick you up,” he’d said, and she agreed with a giggle. “Come on back and see us now, hun,” Ellie had said. “You gotta try my barbeque next time,” Old Earl had added.

Julie hadn’t spotted them, the two rednecks under a spidery weeping willow in the corner of the parking lot, till she’d got outside again and found the flood lights on the side of the diner on now. The rednecks had been sprawled on the front fenders of their beat-up old truck with its dangling, broken headlight. The fat one, with his bursting red cheeks and stubbly rolling chins and bloated man boobs, had been the closest thing to a human pig she’d ever seen. He’d been stuffing his face with both fists, drooling all over himself: Nehi and Moon Pies, no doubt, fast food Southern style. But at least he’d had a shirt on, if a ridiculously tight T-shirt.

The other guy! His filthy denim vest — with no shirt — had looked like it’d been soaked in dirty motor oil. And he’d had a slew of crude tattoos everywhere: chest, neck, arms — real jailhouse tattoos, no doubt. The crumpled, brown paper bag he’d clutched had only half hid his bottle. What a wiry, leering, mean-looking drunk he’d been too. He’d been the one who’d made that awful clucking sound when she’d walked back to her car, like someone did with a horse — someone riding a horse. It’d been all she could have done not to flip him off.

Jeez, she thought now, those skuzzy animals must have watched her the whole time! They must have seen her squirm out of her car barefoot, arch and stretch, even adjust her tube top — her hot-pink tube top — even adjust them!

Her mother’s voice was back now in all its scolding loftiness. Ever since her precocious sixth-grade spurt, it’d been, “Tube tops, Julie? With those?!” Then willowy Mom would always squint down her long, aristocratic nose and sniff, “So, trailer trash.” No wonder tube tops were Julie’s trademark now that she was at last in college. Why not display her “generation-skipping assets,” as even her estate-lawyer dad had once joked? Grandma Gretchen, her mother’s mom, had a “real” figure too. She was no towering twig. Besides, tube tops screamed freedom — “tude tops,” Julie liked to call them. She loved the feel, the snug, cool comfort. Perfect for a long trip down South, she’d figured.

When Julie glanced up again, the pickup’s one good headlight had fallen back — safely back — like a dimming star. She sniffed.

“What’s going on?” Sam groaned from the back seat. “Did you run over something?”

What a sleeper, Julie thought, glancing back between the front seats. If it weren’t for Sam’s alarm clock, she’d never make any of her morning classes. She’d been curled up nearly two hours now under her western hat. She was also wearing a western shirt and boots now, things she’d taken to since she’d met that transfer student from Texas named Truck. Truck! Julie’s eyes rolled every time she thought of that name. Sam even went line dancing at his country-western hangout now, even rode the mechanical bull.

“I didn’t hit anything, Sam. Go back to sleep,” Julie said. She was proud of the way she’d handled those rednecks, all by herself too — not that leaving their rust bucket in the dust had taken any great effort. When she glanced at the rearview mirror again, she couldn’t even see the old pickup. She peeked over her shoulder. Sam’s hat was already back over her face.

Julie shook her head. But Sam’s “cowgirl hat” — Sam hated it when Julie called it that — was a quantum style leap over the high-school letter caps it’d replaced from her softball days. If only she could get Sam to wear her hair down, sans all the androgynous head gear, but Sam was convinced her red hair dangling around her face only made her freckles scream. Besides, that cowgirl hat and those western boots boosted Sam’s five-foot-eleven height through the stratosphere. At five-two and a quarter in her thickest knee socks, Julie couldn’t even come close when she strapped on her highest platforms.

They’d decided on this month in “Nehi and Moon Pie country” — what Dr. Carolton called it — because his parents had needed a house-sitter while they were in Europe. Dreamy, young Dr. Carolton was their favorite professor, and psychology was now their favorite subject. They were already signed up for his Psych 234 class next semester. Favorite professor or not though, this whole marsh country adventure was feeling less and less like a brilliant idea to Julie right now. She never would have left Sam sleeping in the car if she’d spotted those rednecks first. They’d been the grossest things she’d ever seen. Thankfully they couldn’t have seen Sam curled up on the back seat.

“You didn’t hit anything? I thought heard a thud or something,” Sam said, finally awake now, but still lazing under her hat.

“Just some stupid rednecks,” Julie said over her shoulder, then snorted. “The bigmouths! You shoulda seen what they were driving.” She glanced up at the rearview mirror, saw nothing of them now. “I left them in the dust.”

Suddenly there was another whack on Julie’s trunk. “Pull on over now, hot stuff. You’n me gotta meet.”

When Julie’s eyes flew to the side mirror, there was the old pickup again, looming full-frontal, its one good headlight off!

The Human Pig hunched over the steering wheel like a blubbery, beady-eyed demon, determined not to lose that built little blond this time. Screw her fancy, fast little car.

The other redneck, the one with the mouth, hung out the passenger-side window to his waist, his shaggy mullet and denim vest flapping like mad, his bare muscles writhing like mating snakes under his skin. He could see that college decal on Julie’s rear window, just like he’d seen the videos of drunk college girls on TV. He knew what they’d do if you just got ‘em started. Whack! he slapped the trunk again.

“Dangit bitch, pull the fuck over!”

Suddenly the pickup’s headlight flashed on, its evil eye wide-awake now, glaring. The truck shot forward. The mean-drunk redneck’s sweating, sinewy arm lurched through Julie’s window. His leering, pocked face was right next to hers!

“Go on, grabya some, Bobby Ray. Grabya some,” the Human Pig yelled. Before Julie could even gasp, the redneck’s arm smacked across her chest. His hand locked on her right breast, squeezing with all he had. She screamed. Her legs stiffened, bracing against the pain, stomping the brake pedal with both feet. In a flash the redneck’s arm banged the steering wheel, then pounded her chest again, knocking the breath out of her. Then it lashed her jaw, batting her head against the headrest. Her car swerved, banging repeatedly into the pickup with a horrible crunching and scraping. Sparks flew everywhere, then the pickup shot ahead. Julie’s car fishtailed wildly, tires smoking, till it screeched to a stalled halt. The pickup braked, squealing, down the road. It swerved, spun, nearly flipped. It finally stopped in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes and brake smoke about half a city block away, facing Julie’s car.

“Oh ma gah! Ohma gahg!” Sam moaned in silence when time started up again. She’d ended up facedown on the floor, her head throbbing from banging the armrest hard — earth-splitting hard. The last few seconds had seemed like hours to her, hours marinating in a viscous abyss, temples squeezed in some cosmic vise. But now, finally? She thought now she even got what her Introductory Geology professor had been talking about, that thing about electricity swirling in the core of the Earth, about the planet’s magnetic poles suddenly flipping out of the blue. She actually felt it now, the poles of her brain tumbling and whirling, her head charged with jolting juice, everything different, shining, buzzing, full of twinkling magic. “Whassappens?” she muttered — and marveled. Even her speech seemed “eridulite” now, even “eloguentious,” as much as any words she ever read in her lit survey class.

She forced her eyes open, raised herself enough to look between the front seats. Her jaw dropped. “Ohl — Jol-rie!”

Julie looked like a snared little sleeping angel now in the amber/green glow from the dashboard, her head hanging over her shoulder strap. The shimmering little gold cross around her neck flashed with every ticking swing. A drop of saliva swelled on her lower lip, about to creep over the edge. It glistened like the purest nectar. Sam reached out in slow-motion awe to touch Julie’s mussed hair. It gleamed like fine-spun gold in the electronic light, but as Sam’s fingertips make contact with it, the sparkling tendrils weaving Julie’s glowing halo instantly withdrew. Julie’s head moved. Thank God, Sam thought. Still Julie!

A fine line of drool descended from Julie’s mouth as she groaned. Her jaw throbbed, her teeth stung, her whole head ached. Her right breast felt like it’d been ripped out by the roots. She used a handful of hair to sop up her tears and the dripping mucus from her nose — she couldn’t care less now how she looked. She saw the dense, red splatter on the windshield. Blood? Hers?! She frantically patted her jaw, her chest, her stinging breast, then checked her palms. Not hers. She glanced around, her eyes tearing.

“Jol-rie,” Sam’s slurred voice was somber, urgent. “Lurk.” Sam pointed. Julie gasped when she saw it too, lying on the road halfway between the car and the pickup, alone in the headlights: the redneck’s arm!

Julie swung open her door and leaned out, still caught in her seatbelt. She retched mercilessly, as the syrupy, curdling remains of the Twinkie she wolfed down at the diner splattered on the road. When she was upright again, her head limp against the headrest, she heard a car door close. She watched, stunned, as Sam, tall, slender, can-do Sam in her western hat, staggered down the road toward the arm.

Stars sputtered and flared in the indigo sky. Clouds of gnats bounced and roiled in the glow of the headlights as the thunderous croaking and chirping from the cypress marsh charged the hot, humid air. When Sam stared down at the severed arm, the downy hairs on the back of her neck reared and tingled, electricity arcing and crackling around everything she saw and heard. It was an arm all right, a living thing, but incredibly, amazingly now, one end was a bloody mess of splintered bone and shredded flesh. Most of the rest, too, was flayed and gouged and drenched with blood. Yet — Sam crouched, craned, squinted — the drained, ashen hand was marvelously preserved, a museum-quality specimen. Then, Sam’s jaw dropped. In the faint, glancing beams of the headlights, she saw wondrous, cryptic symbols now on the hand, each with hard, clipped lines that jabbed and poked, symbols that pulsed and glimmered with hideous, forbidden power.

A terrible struggle raged in the pickup. The wounded redneck screamed and flailed like a terrified animal, piercing even the roar of the bullfrogs. The Human Pig screamed orders, trying to pin his struggling buddy, to control the torrid arterial spurting. Finally, the rusty old pickup started up again, then barreled toward Sam and the arm. As it approached Sam, its headlight irradiated the hand, enough for her to finally decipher the mystic symbols.

“Quick! Gimme that arm,” the Human Pig screamed when the pickup ground to a halt next to Sam. He reached out the window, his impatient fingers wriggling like the legs of a fly on its back. Sam was still bent, staring down at the arm. This skinny kid dressed like some Texas dude out here in the marsh must be daft, the Pig thought. In the bloody tumult of getting his buddy under control, he hadn’t seen Sam get out of the car. He’d been sure that built little, pouty-lipped blond with the poked-out nipples had been all alone. His mind couldn’t get around it any other way. So who was this scrawny teenage prick now, this bystander in the middle of nowhere?

The Pig’s eyes tore between the arm in the road and his horribly wounded buddy, scrunched in the seat, writhing, kicking, howling. Thank God he was already drunk! The Pig figured maybe some big-city Jew doctor on the other end of a helicopter ride could sew it back on. He’d seen such things on TV. He gasped when he saw the blood oozing from his buddy’s mangled stump, despite the tourniquet he’d made with his belt.

“Gimme that arm, asshole,” he screamed at Sam, wide-eyed. “Gimmit now!”

Sam’s jaw clenched. She reached for the arm, grasping it firmly by the wrist, as firmly as she’d grasped the primal message of its mysterious symbols. Her slim, determined hand was pink and vital next to the rough, ashen hand with its crude tattoos, one on each finger just below the knuckles, tattoos that clearly read H-A-T-E. She hoisted it like a softball bat. She’d been quite a slugger in high school, one whose power had sprung more from grace of movement than brute strength.

“Hurry up, man,” the Pig shouted. He gunned the engine, his eyes still zinging between the arm and his screaming buddy. He figured this dimwitted jerk, ogling that arm like tasty roadkill, finally appreciated the full seriousness of the situation. “C’mon, just gimmit.”

Sam exploded now with a rasping snarl that dwarfed the croaking from the marsh. To the Pig’s ears it sounded preternaturally hideous, like the choking grunt of some monstrous thing resurrected from the roadside muck — monstrous and pissed. But before the Pig could say or do a thing, Sam bashed his extended arm and shoulder with powerful overhead swings. Blood sprayed from the flailing severed limb with every blow, nearly blinding him. When he managed to withdraw himself totally into the truck, his frightened eyes bigger now than his beloved Moon Pies, Sam kept swinging like a crazed ax murderer, at the door, the windshield, the roof, the hood.

“Gotdang!” he whimpered, cringing, shielding his blood-splattered face with an upraised hand. He gunned the engine and sped off, flying past Julie’s car, as Sam stood tall in the road, hoisting the arm in triumph. When the pickup was out of sight, she collapsed.

Julie and Sam woke up in the same big bed, cocooned under a billowy comforter. They hadn’t been able to sleep in separate rooms in the strange house, not after… yet their total exhaustion had even helped them forget their horrors. They’d slept through the night and most of the next day. How they’d ever made it to the Caroltons’ lake house on its own little tree-dense peninsula was a mystery shrouded in a jumble of murky, slow-motion images: whirling roads, dangling Spanish moss, meandering split-rail fences, with both their hands jerking at the wheel till the crunching finale in the backyard shrubbery at the end of the Caroltons’ long driveway.

But now, snuggled together under the tent of the comforter in a dark, timeless otherworld, they were mindful only of each other and their whispery, disembodied voices. Still warm and moist and dreamy from sleep, they giggled and squirmed like little girls again, trading secrets, making confessions — and all in the light of their newfound knowledge of psychology from dreamy Dr. Carolton’s class:

Sam said she hadn’t liked it either when Truck had called Julie a “frilly little filly” — just because Julie was so fashion conscious. Though it came out “fizzy piddle dilly,” it sounded like perfectly good English to Sam. She admitted too that when Truck had called Julie a “silicone heifer” — “sillicum hefner” — she’d known that would-be two-timer Truck — “toot-tamer Trunk” — had just been covering. She’d seen the way he “lurks at Jolrie.” Besides, he knew darn well — “dong swell” — Julie’s breasts weren’t fake. He was such a “jorlk” — Julie didn’t know if Sam meant jerk or joke here, since both made perfect sense. Sam said she wished her own boobs were half as nice — “hap a’ snice.” It’d be fun to be a champ on the mechanical bull and win a wet T-shirt contest — “mechananamacal pull,” “widdy tittachurt conchest.” But her “feedings of inadaquidity” weren’t Julie’s “reponsapilliby.”

Julie giggled uncontrollably. Sam’s baby talk was just a coping mechanism, she figured, Sam’s way of getting things out with humor. Julie confessed her tube tops — and yes, she admitted, her flaunting — were textbook overcompensating. She would have loved to have a tall, lean model’s bod like Sam’s. It would have been great to be tall enough to strut down a runway, to actually look down at someone for a change.

When they finally threw back the covers, the bedroom was calm and quiet, just a pink glow seeping through the shady blinds. Sam crawled to the foot of the bed, reached for the cord by the window. Then, when she tugged it, the whole room disintegrated in a red-hot blast. A lurid Cyclops’ eye glared from a river of shimmering blood on the horizon. The blinds trembled like famished skeleton ribs now. Black shadow talons shred the walls as lewd, accusing imps danced in the corners. “Agh!” Sam yanked the blinds shut again. She and Julie covered their eyes, moaning, hugging each other just like they did at late-night horror movies. The afterimages were murder.

They eased out of bed — the blinds remaining closed this time. As they squinted their way to the bathroom it seemed like someone had stomped squirming, bile-filled roaches on their retinas. Every now and then Sam even saw a flaming centipede scurry across her visual field.

When they trudged downstairs to the kitchen, leaning on each other the whole way, their aches and soreness crept back. Sam’s head still felt “squozed.” But it was better than…. They’d slept almost a full day, she realized, and the fact seemed vaguely extraordinary, but she couldn’t quite place the why of it. When she shook her head though, trying to clear it, her unfurled hair felt good, like an airy helmet whisking about her neck now. Maybe she should have been wearing it down more like Julie said.

They both took aspirins, then had some cereal. Even though the sun, that horrid, accusing eye, had just winked shut outside the kitchen windows, breakfast food seemed perfect. They were starving after their long sleep. Julie put milk on the stove for cocoa. When Sam mindlessly turned on the small kitchen TV, the portal to a glaring, frantic world outside demanded their full attention:

“…was like this Marsh Boy, all scrawny and fulla meanness.” It was the Pig! He was reliving the horror from last night, wide-eyed and wild-handed, with a microphone shoved in his face. “I tried to get at Bobby Ray’s arm, but that there Marsh Boy whupped me with it, then, I swear it to God, he took to gnawin’ on it like a dog on a bone! I swear it to God.”

The anchorman who appeared next shook his head. “He — ate it?” he said, teetering between an incredulous snicker and a nervous giggle. But he composed himself and adds gravely, “Marsh Boy — a ‘thing’ from the marsh, or something even more sinister?” He shook his head again. “This could be drug related, folks.” He explained that local police were on the lookout for a teenage male, wearing a western-style hat, last seen entering the marsh from Route 15 just east of Hettiesville — and carrying a severed human arm. The police sketch artist’s rendering, based on the Pig’s description, appeared next on the screen. Except for getting Sam’s western hat right, the ghoulish caricature barely passed as human, much less looked anything like Sam — who stared slack-jawed now at the small TV.

“This is Marylee Melony,” a slender, thirtyish, tight-suited woman says now. She stood next to a rickety screen door with a microphone in her hand. “I’m about to speak with Mrs. Bertie Mae Diggs, mother of Bobby Ray Diggs, the victim in yesterday’s bizarre hit-and-run road rage incident on Route 15 near Hettiesville. Bobby Ray is in a coma after massive blood loss. His doctors fear severe brain damage. According to the driver of the pickup truck, a young blond woman in a late-model, white sports car screamed obscenities at Bobby Ray. She then deliberately sideswiped the pickup, severing Bobby Ray’s right arm!” Marylee grimaced profoundly. “The young woman then sped off without stopping.” Marylee’s voice grew anguished. She pushed her mike against the screen. “Mrs. Diggs, how do you feel about what happened to your son?”

A hard, scowling woman suddenly barged out the door. She grabbed the mike as well as Marylee’s hand and yanked them both to her tensed lips. “I tellya how I feel. How’s my boy gonna provide now? What kinda man’s he gonna be ‘out a arm? Who’s gonna pay for that? That there Marsh Boy? He just some no-count brute. But he still gotta be hunt down and kilt, ‘cause he got the blood scent now. That — that there hellacious girl, she’s the one done this. Eye for eye.” Bertie Mae gritted her teeth, shook her fist. “Eye for eye. Hear me? Eye for eye.”

“Thank you, uh, Mrs. Diggs, thank — you.” Marylee dropped her notebook as she pried her hand and the mike loose from the hardened woman’s grip. Then she signed off, moving fast, as Bertie Mae Diggs screamed in the background, “Yeah, y’all get on now. Get on. Me and mine, we gonna find that Marsh Boy, and the gotdanged bitch.”

Julie collapsed onto one of the kitchen chairs, shaking her head, panting. Sam was speechless too.

“Well, uh — sounds like we’ve got a new marsh legend on our hands, Sandy,” the moussed anchorman said to the anchorwoman next to him.

“And a missing arm to prove it, Teague,” chipper Sandy added.

“You folks be careful out there — specially around Hettiesville.” Teague pursed his lips, obviously concealing a smirk as the theme music rose.

“Watch out for that Marsh Boy,” Sandy bubbled, waving bye, before a steak sauce commercial replaced them.

“Oh, God! What have I done?” Julie burst into tears. “Why’d I hit the breaks like that?”

“Jol — Ju-lie ¾ you just re-racted. Dat’s all.” Sam’s slurring was better now. “It wudn’t your faulk. Look at whatsa he’d a dood.” She started to point at the shocking purple glowing through Julie’s sheer negligee, but she held back. “No tellum what those basurds woulda….”

“But his arm. His arm!”

“Oh! Oh yeah.” Sam chewed her lip. It was all coming back. Evidence — “eb-bum-nuts” — she remembered pronouncing to Julie last night. It’d sounded so adult and authoritative at the time too, anything to mollify poor, crazed Julie. But in truth, Sam had simply claimed that arm. She’d opened the trunk and grabbed one of the clear-plastic trash bags full of dirty clothes that they’d saved up for the Caroltons’ washer/dryer — screw the crowded laundry room at the dorm. Then she’d emptied out the clothes and wrapped the arm carefully, reverently, like a holy relic, in the clear plastic. After all the hammering and forging and purifying of it, it meant something to her now. It was hers, her special weapon, more special than any favorite softball bat. But actually taking it? Keeping it? What had she been thinking, or had it even been about “thought.” She’d been exhausted. Her brain had throbbed and whirred. When she’d looked up after slamming the trunk closed, she’d grabbed the bumper to keep from flying into the night sky, spinning up whole body into the angry, billowing clutches of the Milky Way.

“I’m gotta down to there,” Sam said now, suddenly drawn to the arm again, to where she’d stashed it. “Like a dog on a bone”? she thought, enraged, remembering what the Pig had said on TV. She headed for the cellar door. Julie sniffled and shook her head, then buried her face in her hands.

As soon as Sam disappeared, the anchorman returned with a live report. There was a jerky helicopter shot now. Smoke wafted from a burned-out structure on a deserted two-lane road.

“I’m here at Earl’s Pig Lickin’ Good, a local landmark on Route 15,” a reporter said. He sounded genuinely upset. “Firemen have just carried out a badly charred body they found on the grill. It’s feared to be the body of the owner, James Earl Clayton — Old Earl, as everyone….”

Julie gasped, horrified. Her hand flew to her mouth. Immediately the phone rang. Julie flicked off the hideous images on the TV. She stepped through the door to the phone in the living room, snatched up the receiver. A frantic, panting woman’s voice asked, before Julie said a word, if she was the girl who’d stopped by Earl’s yesterday asking for directions to the Caroltons’ place?

“Wha…?” Julie said.

“Oh, hun, thank God!” The woman could barely talk through her tears, but Julie suddenly recognized her voice too. It was Ellie, the waitress at Old Earl’s dinner, the one who’d called her “hun.”

“You gotta get outta there right now, hun. It’s on the TV. Them Diggses done killed Old Earl, I know it. Little Jimmy and Big Butch — Bobby Ray’s brothers — was askin’ ‘bout you. They musta gone back after we closed. Dear God, get out now, hun. Just drop everything. Run. I’ll call the sheriff’s office, but they take forever sometimes. Please, hun, just run.”

Julie slammed the phone down, then froze. Sam? She was in the basement. “Sam!” she screamed.

Little Jimmy had just crept across the front porch. He peered now through one of the beveled-glass sidelights next to the front door. He saw Julie in her pink, frilly negligee, her figure silhouetted by light from the doorway to the kitchen. He licked his lips, then waved the others forward from the bushes.

Big Butch crashed through the door with his shoulder, with Little Jimmy and the Pig pouring through after him. Immediately the Diggs brothers tore across the living room, grabbing Julie. They locked one of her arms as their free hands pawed at her breasts and hips. She screamed, straining to free herself.

“Dang!” the Pig blurted, ogling Julie’s jiggling parts. Then the brothers froze, staring toward the front door. The Pig stepped backward. Bertie Mae, the fuming mother from TV, strolled in gripping a rusty old hatchet, its blade glistening from fresh sharpening.

“Take her there,” Bertie Mae demanded. She pointed through the wide, arched doorway leading to the dining room. “Holt her on that table. Got me some butcherin’ to do.”

They hustled Julie to the table. “Please, no,” she cried. “I didn’t mean to. Please, I didn’t, I was just driving, I didn’t mean to....”

Bertie Mae ran a gnarled finger along the edge of the blade, her sunken eyes as dark as portals to hell. They fixed tight on Julie’s arm. Then she noticed Julie’s gleaming necklace. “That cross is a bomination on her,” she growled. “Rip it off.”

Little Jimmy grabbed it and yanked, then lifted the shiny little wonder to his eyes and grinned.

Sam suddenly materialized in the cellar doorway, wielding Bobby Ray’s arm. It was still wrapped in its crackling, translucent sheath, but now it was rock hard from a night in the Caroltons’ deep freeze along with the frozen steaks and chicken pot pies. Its tingling coldness electrified Sam. Her red hair blazed. Her whole being pulsed. Her weakness and nausea seemed like ancient history now. In her wide eyes, Bobby Ray’s frozen arm gleamed like Excalibur pulled fresh from the stone.

She flew across the kitchen into the living room. Her supercharged wits sized up the situation instantly. Her brain spit sparks. She snatched a heavy glass figurine, a rearing unicorn, from the bookshelf by the door, then hurled it like a run stopper to home plate, nailing Bertie Mae at mid spine just as she raised the hatchet. Bertie Mae shrieked and fell to one knee. She gasped, arching like a startled scorpion as she clawed at her stinging back.

Then Bertie Mae spun, indignant, revived by the mockery of rebelling prey. She crouched like a taunted cat, her eyes glaring, then flew at Sam with the hatchet raised. Sam dove aside the way she used to snag line drives to right field from first base. The hatchet slammed into the door frame where her head had just been, sticking deep in the grain of the wood. Bertie Mae pried mightily at the hatchet. But just as she hoisted a knee to the wall for leverage, Sam wheeled up with the frozen arm. The roundhouse swing caught Bertie Mae square under the jaw, snapping her neck back with a fateful pop. She flopped to the floor like a ragdoll, crumpled, glazed eyed, still. Home run. Sam was in the zone!

The Diggs brothers gasped in horror and disbelief. They left Julie with the Pig and tore after Sam. She ran, hugging the arm, barely ahead of them into the kitchen. As she passed the stove, she snatched the handle of the steaming pan of milk Julie had left on the burner and flung it over her shoulder. Little Jimmy, right behind her, ducked and stumbled as it flew past his head, as a strand of scalding milk lashed his face, enraging him even more.

Cornered at the counter, Sam whipped around. She flailed the frozen arm full tilt, just as Little Jimmy righted himself and stepped over home plate. The arm caught him in the face, smashing his nose at the septum. Homer to center! He flopped backward even faster than Bertie Mae had, and landed just as still on the tile kitchen floor as a stream of blood gushed from his crushed nostrils.

Big Butch’s jaw dropped. He half gasped, half howled as a hellish, crimson halo grew around Little Jimmy’s head. This girl! But he had the sense, and grudging respect, to hold up when the she-devil drew back with the arm again. He grabbed the kitchen table instead and slammed it superhumanly at Sam, pinning her thighs against the counter. She shrieked in pain and anger, glaring at the big man, every freckle on her face shooting fire. She slashed wildly with the arm, hoping, praying his head would slip into range.

“You’re dead, bitch, dead!” he bellowed. He stepped back and rammed his shoulder into the table. Sam wailed. Tears flooded her eyes. It felt like he’d crushed both her femurs. She buckled at the waist, collapsing on the tabletop. The frozen arm tumbled to the floor. Before she realized it, he’d shoved the table aside, then torn around it like the first-string lineman he’d been in high school. He yanked her around, pinned her in a hopeless bear hug.

He probed Sam’s hair with his stubbly chin now. He sniffed it like a roused hound. His hot, liquored-up breath scorched the back of her neck as his right hand inched up the front of her T-shirt, savoring the twitching flesh beneath the flimsy cotton. It stopped at her compact breasts, first clawing at one, then the other. “Flat slut!” he snorted in disgust as his coarse fingers plucked in search of her nipples.

“Dyin’ ain’t enough,” he growled, his tobacco-stained teeth nearly biting Sam’s ear. He clasped her even tighter now, his left arm reaching across her belly to pin both her arms. Then he caught the neck of her T-shirt with his right hand and ripped down with shocking strength, exposing her to the waist. Sam yelped and arched as he caught her left nipple and yanked it taut. He leered over her shoulder. “Just the right size for my wallet,” he whispered in Sam’s ear. “My huntin’ buddies gonna be impressed.”

His right hand shot to his pants pocket. There was a metallic snap, then he raised his gleaming switchblade. He wiggled it slowly before Sam’s eyes, catching the light, making the sharp blade shimmy like a well-tipped stripper. He grunted, long and deep, taking his time as Sam squirmed.

It all came back to Sam now, that women’s self-defense course she’d taken last year: Target Number One: The Balls — and don’t forget the vulnerable instep. She stomped her heel hard on his foot now. When he gasped, surprised, then loosened his grip for an instant, she jerked her left arm loose from under his elbow. Her hand shot behind her, grabbed his crotch, a tight fistful, then squeezed with all she had.

“Aagh!” he shuddered as his universe exploded in a blaze of swimming, white-hot stars. His eyes jerked back in his head. The switchblade clanged under on the tile floor as his guts, his power, everything drained in a deafening rush. Then he crumpled and coiled into a quivering ball, his gaping mouth unable to choke out even a whimper.

Sam huffed, impressed by the power of her slender fingers. She picked up the arm and stood over the fallen Goliath, weighing what he deserved, when she suddenly heard Julie screaming in the living room.

Sam rounded the corner from the kitchen just in time. The Pig had Julie bent over the back of a stuffed easy chair now. He’d drawn her left arm tight up behind her like a plucked chicken wing, making her yelp in agony. Her negligee was pulled over her head like a hood for the condemned. Sam crept closer, behind him. She could just glimpse the side of Julie’s bruised, swollen breast. It was an unworldly purple, like the parasitic spawn of some sci-fi monster poking through her pure white flesh. Her panties were yanked down her thighs. The Pig was hunched, fumbling with something under the great overhang of his belly. His belt buckle! Sam realized. Then she noticed the big, bold, red letters across the back of his straining T-shirt: I LIKE WOMEN — NEKKID! She had unfinished business with this guy, all right. She gauged his under-sized head perched on his inflated neck. Just like her t-ball days, she thought. Too easy.

“Hey!” she yelled, the frozen arm poised for a grand-slam homer, ready for his head to pop up.

But the Pig hunched even more. His eyes shot behind him from under his arm. Why was she still loose? What the…? Then he spotted the arm through the clear plastic and the sure way Sam held it. Marsh Boy, her! he realized in an instant. That’s what she’d used to lay out Bertie Mae!

He lurched away now, spinning with an arm raised to block Sam’s swing, but his pants dropped to his ankles, tripping him. Then he crashed down with a seismic thud. Julie slid off the chair and scurried to a nearby corner, clawing up her panties along the way. Sam unleashed the arm now. She flailed it like a pro on steroids, thwacking the Pig’s blubbery flanks and ample backside as he yelped like a kicked puppy.

Then Big Butch, barely able to stand, barreled through the kitchen door, tackling Sam from behind — his sloppiest tackle ever, but he still knocked the wind out of Sam as he crushed her into the floor. The arm flew across the room.

“Fix your ¾ pants, dangit! Get the — fug over here,” he sputtered at the Pig between dry-heave retches. “I’m finishin’ what Ma started. This one here first.” He shook Sam by the neck. He huffed with disgust when he glanced back at Julie who was quivering in the corner like a scared rabbit.

The Pig lumbered over. He flipped Sam, stomped a foot between her shoulder blades. Then he twisted her arm back, jerking it repeatedly till she screamed. “You’n me both’s had a bellyful of this little-tittied bitch,” he said to Big Butch.

Big Butch, sweating and queasy, staggered to the hatchet now. He hardly had a quarter of his strength. His throbbing genitals felt like they’d been encased in molten slag. When he yanked the hatchet from the door frame, he stumbled backward, nearly tripping over Bertie Mae’s body. Her jaw was slacker than he’d ever seen. It wad like she’d never had a chin. “Dang, Ma!” he muttered

Julie eyed the frozen arm from the corner. She inched toward it sideways like a crab. When Big Butch trudged by with the hatchet, she cowered motionless, her knees pulled to her chest. But just as he passed her, she lurched for the frozen arm. In a single, adrenalin-packed move, she grabbed it and swung to her feet — like in high-school cheerleading. She spun again and clubbed Big Butch on the side of his head, not as strong a blow as Sam could have delivered, but the surprise alone stunned him. He banged to the floor, dropping the hatchet, cupping his stinging ear with both hands. When he struggled to one knee, Julie twirled and bashed his other ear, sending him down again. He scrunched on the floor, shielding his head as best he could between his elbows.

“You little whore!” the Pig yelled, his eyes racing between Sam and Julie. He took Sam’s wrist in both hands, threw his mammoth weight into wrenching her arm. There was a horrible pop. Sam shrieked, shaking the walls as the Pig grunted with satisfaction. When her arm plopped to her side, Sam looked as broken and lifeless as a featherless baby bird squashed on the sidewalk.

Julie crouched and gritted her teeth, threatening the Pig with the arm. When he came at her, she lunged aside, twirled, whacked his backside as he thundered past. Maybe she hadn’t been “Cheerleader of the Year,” but not bad for “Most Stylish.”

“You wait,” he growled, wheeling around, clenching his fists, squeezing them like he would her choicest parts when he caught her. Then he rushed at her again. But when Julie backed up and crouched, ready to dive to the other side this time, Big Butch lunged from the floor, snagging her ankle, throwing her off balance. She crashed down as the arm flew and landed by the sofa. The Pig pounced on her and caught both her wrists, locking them with one hand, then he tore at her negligee with the other, ripping it off her with a vengeance. Julie struggled like a snared squirrel, but she was no match for his strong hands and the great, blubbery paunch that pinned her legs.

“Holt her, dangit!” Big Butch shouted, staggering to his feet. He grasped the hatchet with one hand while cupping his throbbing scrotum with the other. “Take holt her hair, stretch her neck. Her head’s mine.”

The Pig scowled. “Shame to just kill her outright.” But Big Butch was already on his feet, weighing the hatchet in his hands like nobody to argue with. With his cracked nuts, rape was the last thing on his mind.

“What a waste,” the Pig grumbled, ogling Julie one last time. “Dang!” He grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked it taut, then leaned to the side as far as he could. “Go on then. Do your worst,” he growled at Big Butch.

Big Butch limped forward, his genitals burning, his ears still buzzing like a kicked beehive. “No-count bitch,” he spat, raising the hatchet high in both hands, taking aim at Julie’s trembling neck.

As he started his downswing — “Umph!” — Sam, clutching her limp arm to her side, biting back the shooting agony, rammed him from behind with her good shoulder. But the hatchet continued down, slashing now with the added force of Big Butch toppling behind it. There was a horrible chomp as it ripped through half a neck — the Human Pig’s! — as hot blood exploded everywhere. Then Big Butch himself crashed down, bowling over the Pig’s huge, frantic frame.

Julie scurried, kicking and screaming, from under the men’s writhing, jumbled legs, away from the gurgling, spurting blood. She leapt to her feet, swatting at her soaked hair, blood dripping and splattering everywhere. Gaping and panting, she plopped on the sofa and clutched a pillow to her chest. Then she scrunched over the side and vomited so completely that she collapsed, paralyzed with weakness.

Sam saw the hatchet stuck in the floor, in the swelling puddle of blood around the twitching Pig. But she couldn’t grab it. The pain was too great. If she let up pressing her mangled arm to her side for an instant — her shoulder had to be dislocated, or worse — she’d pass out from shock.

Big Butch climbed to his knees again, his face drenched with his friend’s blood. “Jesus fuck!” he moaned, trembling, wiping the gore from his eyes.

Then Sam saw her chance. She aimed for his groin again, this time kicking. But when her first kick missed the mark though — she got him under the ribs — Big Butch doubled and clamped his elbows to his sides like a cornered boxer, then rolled, not about to have his balls tenderized twice in the same day — by the same bitch!

Sam crouched. She sidestepped around him, looking for an opening, all the while gasping from the white-hot arcing in her shoulder. Then she slipped on the Pig’s blood, slammed down hard on her back. Big Butch was on her in an instant. He pounded his fists, one then the other, into her jaw. Her head fell back limp. She moaned, drooled, gasped beneath the wet, red tangle of her hair. Then she passed out.

Big Butch finished wiping his eyes now, enough to see the hatchet stuck in the floor, its handle ripe for the plucking. He leaned forward and snatched it, then came back to his knees astride Sam’s thighs. When he flexed his meaty biceps, the blade quivered with anticipation. Then he flinched, glancing about, remembering the other she-devil — his ears still rang from her bashing. He spotted Julie on the sofa. She looked dead already, passed out.

Sam snapped back to consciousness. She realized he was on his knees, over her, wide open. She yanked a knee up, hard to his groin. “Aaah!” he choked. Then she cracked his balls with her other knee, just as solidly. Not enough? She gave him another one with the first knee. He crumpled to the side, gasping anew as the hatchet slipped from his hands, landing flat on Sam’s chest without nicking her.

Big Butch convulsed and fell to the side, coiling again, crying like a baby. Sam rolled. She dug her good shoulder and chin into the blood-soaked floor, hoisting herself up. She screamed when her hurt arm slipped her grip. She felt herself fading fast, yielding to the darkness that promised to take away her pain. The fiery halo of her hair was quenched now. Her dimming eyes flickered, nearly discharged, but she quivered to her feet like a lame, old crone. She barely managed to hobble over to Julie on the sofa, then wobbled and tumbled down beside her. The frozen arm lying by their feet was pale now, dead, just a mangled arm. Sam was done. She keeled over, her head plopping on the pillow in Julie’s lap.

Big Butch struggled to his feet again. He mopped the tears from his eyes with his shirtsleeve. The bitch had even made him cry! He yanked the hatchet over his head with both hands. “Dannit! Boh ya bishes,” he sputtered, trudging forward, squinting through the blinding pain as he lugged the throbbing, molten ingot of his scrotum, as his ears rang and throbbed like a Yankee tourist’s car alarm. “Both ya bishes!”

“Oh, Sam!” Julie hugged her friend, shielding Sam’s eyes with her dangling, soaked hair. Then she squeezed her own teary eyes shut and buried her face over Sam’s. “I’ll see you in heaven,” she whispered to Sam as Big Butch’s shadow engulfed them both.

“Freeze.” It was the voice of God, or one of his fiercest angels. “Freeze” — then a deafening crack, then another and a third, thunderclaps loud enough to split the world. Big Butch spun and flailed and crashed to the floor at Sam and Julie’s feet, a tight pattern of dark holes surrounding his sternum. Bright red blossoms grew like time-lapse photography on his flannel shirt. When Julie, then Sam, stared to the side, they saw a craggy State Police sergeant — the most fatherly face either of them could imagine — crouched in the doorway, his fearsome sidearm leveled and smoking.

It wasn’t the first time Sergeant Grady’d had to drop a man. Once, when he’d been a rookie trooper, a lowlife had come at him with a tire iron. The guy’d landed a good one too. Sergeant Grady, even with a broken rib, had felt bad about the shooting. Using his gun was always gut wrenching. But seeing these two battered young women now, he figured this shooting might be the best thing he’d ever done. It could have even been fate, a last chance to make a career worthwhile.

He’d been riding a desk forever it seemed. Supervising, they called it. He’d just been filling in tonight, manning a cruiser for another manpower shortage. It’d felt good to be on the road again too, doing something real and necessary. He’d been right at the Route 15 exit when the call had come in from Ellie, the waitress at Old Earl’s. Now he was in the thick of things again, one last time. He hadn’t told a soul yet, but the tests had come back two days ago. The prophets of medicine had spoken: cancer, all right, and the prognosis wasn’t good.

He checked the house now and the scattered bodies, marveling at the carnage as he pieced together the sequence of the melee. He shook his head in awe. They’d done a man’s work, these girls, a man’s job and then some. And look at them! He knew he was supposed to say “young women” these days, but just look at them! He gently wrapped blankets from the trunk of his cruiser around them. They were both practically naked, and battered, and splattered with blood. Then he studied the frozen arm at their feet — Bobby Ray Diggs’ arm, all right. He recognized the H-A-T-E tattooed on the fingers. He’d seen that hand before, each time cuffed behind Bobby Ray’s back. He stared at Sam, then Julie, then the arm again. He’d thought he’d seen it all.

Sergeant Grady took a deep breath. He steeled himself to violate all the sacred, ingrained rules of police work now. He went to the kitchen and returned with the western hat he’d seen hanging on a chair. Sam admitted it was hers, just as he’d expected, then she sobbed. She reminded him of a gangly, freckle-faced girl he’d known once, a girl he’d never really given a chance. That had been forever ago, it seemed to him now, before the world had even started spinning on its own.

Then Sergeant Grady picked up the arm. He stared deep into Sam and Julie’s eyes. “These were never here,” he said. He carried the hat and the arm out and stashed them in the trunk of his cruiser.

Just before the paramedics slid them into the ambulance, Sam and Julie thanked Sergeant Grady — for everything.

“It’s gonna be a whole new world with young women like you in it,” were his last words.

On the way home that night, after all the reports and questioning, Sergeant Grady stopped in the middle of a lonely trestle bridge on the Achakochee River. First the arm flew over the side, tumbling in slow motion in the moonlight. Then the hat sailed out like a frisbee and settled on the dark water. The old sergeant watched it drift slowly toward the gulf.

Four months later, Sam was fully recovered from her “curious concussion” — her doctors had never seen anything like it before, the hyper-supercharged way it had made her brain respond to adrenaline.

When she entered the small-town courtroom, she was radiant in safari chic, all khaki and canvas, with a silk leopard-print scarf around her neck. Her face was fully healed. Her red hair and freckles gleamed like burnished copper. She’d met her new boyfriend in physical therapy, a tall, handsome, brilliant biology grad student who’d separated his shoulder doing research in Africa. He was wild about her already.

She was only on the stand long enough to state that, due to her concussion, she couldn’t remember a thing, either about the car accident or the demise of the entire Diggs family and the Human Pig. Bobby Ray Diggs had died too, after three days in a coma, from excessive blood loss.

Julie, who wore the staid pantsuit and ruffled blouse her lawyer dad had insisted on, said she hardly remembered anything either. What little that remained was a jumbled, anguished mess. Then she broke into sobs. Even the most hard-nosed observers at the inquest appreciated the mercy of the young women’s memories sparing them further horror.

Before they’d met Sergeant Grady, Sam and Julie had never heard of traumatic memory loss — instances in which people’s minds block out horrible memories. They hadn’t studied repressed memories yet in Dr. Carolton’s psych class. But as they’d waited for the rest of the police and the ambulance to arrive, the grizzled old State Police sergeant had put his arms around them like a father and described some cases he’d seen — some “other” cases, but none as remarkable as yours,” he’d said and winked. That had been the last time they’d seen Sergeant Grady.

The Diggs family had been infamous to local law enforcement. The sheriff’s department had never bought into the Pig’s lurid tale of female hit-and-run road rage. As one deputy had put it, “A two-lane road, damage on the right side of the pickup, left side of the car? It don’t take much sniffin’ to find the real culprit when there’s a Diggs involved.” The skid marks, blood splatters, vehicle damage, and especially the telltale contusion on Julie’s breast had all confirmed the obvious.

Evidence photos of shapely Julie had made the law enforcement rounds and somehow ended up on the Internet — Julie, the celebrated, topless, battered waif extraordinaire, with the purple handprint of the lowlife who’d lost his arm emblazoned on her breast! The titillating photos had become a download sensation. Julie’s mother was apoplectic with embarrassment, insisting her lawyer husband “do something, sue somebody.”

Now that modeling and endorsement offers poured in daily — even from Paris and Rome! — Julie was even planning her own clothing line. She wanted to specialize in fashionable “tude tops.” Tude Tops by Julie! And naturally, she’d model everything herself. “Trailer trash, Mother? Indeed!”

The only “truth” to the Human Pig’s story turned out to be the most incredible part of all: Marsh Boy. Even Julie had claimed on the witness stand, amid her sobbing and nose blowing, that she too had seen the shadowy figure in a western hat hovering over Bobby Ray Diggs’ arm on the road. That eerie image was about the only thing she’d said she remembered after the accident. She’d even thought it was the same person — “or whatever” — flailing away during the melee at the Caroltons’ house, but everything about that night was so dim and jumbled now, so unbearable to think about.

Considering the Diggs family and its long history of violence, and seeing the pathetic photos of Sam and Julie taken right after the incident — their welts and bruises had paled next to the horror in their eyes — no one in the courtroom believed the broken young women could have survived without the heroics of another savior before Sergeant Grady’s arrival. The photos alone of their tormenters’ grotesquely mangled bodies practically breathed life into “The Thing from the Marsh.” Even Sergeant Grady, who’d taken off out West somewhere to die, had reported glimpsing a gangly individual wearing a western-style hat loping from the Carolton property toward the nearby cypress marsh, and “carrying what appeared to be a bloody human arm.” Every day now, new reports of Marsh Boy sightings poured in from around the state. The ghastly picture the police sketch artist had drawn from the Human Pig’s imagination had stoked the imaginations of everyone, from Big Foot hunters to UFO investigators. Every week some new expedition arrived on the scene to scour the marshes for clues.

After the inquest the rental car cruised through Hettiesville. Sam and Julie rode in the back seat, with Julie’s father sitting up front with one of his young law associates driving — with the smitten young man glancing at Julie in the rearview mirror every chance he got. As the car passed, the people crowding the street cheered and waved. They were a mix of Hettiesville residents — most newly employed — and tourists come to visit the new shrines: “The House” and “The Road” and “The Marsh.” They wore the T-shirts and waved the little stuffed dolls and plastic arms and western hats that were all the rage. Thanks to the sensational news stories, orders poured in from all over the world now. They’d resurrected the sleepy little town. It seemed everyone wanted only the certified authentic versions from right here in Hettiesville, and baptized in the waters of the local marsh.

A little way down the road, just past the building site of one the new motels, the car slowed down. They stared as they passed the new diner on Route 15 where Earl’s Pig Lickin’ Good had once stood. Old Earl’s son had already rebuilt — Old Earl had been a big believer in insurance. While the place looked about the same, with its authentic cinder block walls and corrugated tin roof, it was much bigger now to accommodate all the new tourists, people from everywhere craving to commune with legend. There was a huge, new sign too. The pig in a bib was gone, replaced by the cannibal hero in his trademark western hat. Flashing beneath him in lurid red neon was Marsh Boy’s Finger Lickin’ Good.