Horror Within : 8 Book Boxed Set Page 2

  “Family is only family until you break them,” Max said. That was a good one, aMaxim in the truest sense. He needed to start compiling these thoughts that bubbled up from within.

  These nuggets of golden wisdom. He already had the title of the book in which all this great advice would appear:MAXimum Success: The Maximilian Jenkins Story. That Who Moved My Cheese? guy would become a historical footnote.

  “What about cutting them in?” Robert offered, attempting to compromise.

  One glance from Max and Robert looked at his shoes. Kid still had a lot to learn. Cut them in? Was he serious? “Cloudland Development doesn’t play well with others, Robert,” he said as if talking to a stupid child. “I thought you were on board.”

  Robert grinned sheepishly. “You’re right, sir. I’m learning.”

  Max slapped him on the back hard enough to see the sting in his eyes, though the kid tried to brave it through. Yeah, like you could do that in a suit from Sears.

  “The taxes are past due,” Max said. “I’ve got to seal the deal before it goes to foreclosure. That’s why we took the back way—I needed to get the lay of the land before I make my next final offer.”

  “And the daughter’s willing to sell?”

  “She’ll do anything to keep her precious little camp open. One thing about do-gooders is that they always roll over if they think it’s helping society.”

  “The old man seems pretty set in his ways.”

  Max crouched slightly and shadowboxed a foe. “Just watch Max Jenkins put him on the ropes.” Speaking of, that might make a good title for a chapter in his book.

  - - -

  Jenny opened one of the granola bars and took a bite. “Glad you had a stash. I couldn’t stomach another bite of Booger Hargrave’s mess.”

  “I wouldn’t feed his slop to a hog,” Mark said. “Can’t believe anybody would hire him as cook, even an end-of-the-the-line outfit like this one.”

  Mouth full, he spewed crumbs down his shirt and across the table. He thought he looked cool, like a primal man or something. “Why do they call this place ‘Meat Camp,’ anyway?”

  “Mrs. Fraley said Daniel Boone used to hunt up here. They slept in a cabin and smoked the deer and elk they shot,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t mind smoking a little myself.” He pulled out a pint of whiskey from under the table and slowly unscrewed the cap, staring at her. “At least I’ve gotsomething to keep me warm.”

  Jenny stopped chewing. “If Mrs. Fraley finds out—”

  “Freaky Fraley? What’s she gonna do, fire me and kick me out of the camp? Send me back to Pensacola?” He took a swig and winced. The smell was potent and acidic. “Sounds like a reward, not punishment.”

  She started to respond, something about how she didn’t want him to leave (and that really would be her being coy) and something scratched at the door. It scratched first with curiosity and then rapid insistence. There were wild animals everywhere, mostly deer, raccoons and squirrels, but most of them stayed away from the cabins. A weird slobbery chuckling noise accompanied the scratching.

  “Look, Jenny, I—”

  “Shh. Did you hear that?”

  What kind of animal made that noise?

  Mark glanced at the door and concern flashed in his eyes before fading beneath his Mister Tough Guy veneer. “Don’t worry. I locked the door. Figured I might get lucky and reach second base.”

  More scratching. Whatever animal, it was must be hungry. Maybe it wanted granola. “We’re supposed to be responsible. That’s what they pay us for, not to sit around and booze it up.” She didn’t take her eyes from the door.

  Mark stood slowly, all cocky, and sauntered to the door. Stupid show-off. Even so, the jeans hugged his butt in just the right ways and he knew it. “Probably some brat wanting an archery lesson. You’re camp champ, after all. You cantwangeven if you don’tbang.”

  She was about to tell him to stop being a prick, knowing he’d then say something about his prick, but he reached for the door latch and real fear flared up inside her. God knew what was out there. “Mark! Don’t—”

  Mark opened the door. The animal had fled. Wind gusted in and blew out the candle. Jenny couldn’t help gasping as the room fell into semi-darkness.

  - - -

  A goat bleated a greeting as Delphus entered the barn. Delphus did his best Ricky Ricardo: “Hey, Lucy, I’m ho-o-o-m-e.”

  He paused and whistled. “Lucy?”

  Damn dog must be out chasing something. Lucky dog.

  The evening sun seeped through a hundred cracks, throwing yellow lines of light across the barn floor. Delphus lit a lantern, which pushed the shadows back into the corners. He tossed some hay into a pen and then took a handful of grain and offered it through the boards to the goat. She ate it and licked Delphus’ fingers clean.

  “You got a purty mouth on you, girl,” he said. “If you didn’t whine so damn much, I might marry ya.”

  Chickens scurried before him and he kicked at them. They scattered in a squawking gaggle. Delphus opened the corn crib, grabbed a bucket of grain, and dumped it on the hogs. They made their oinking, chuffing sounds and went to work on the feed.

  “You don’t get no names,” Delphus said. “You’re nothing but bacon.”

  A mean-looking slaughtering hook dangled from a pulley attached to a steel cable. Delphus pushed the hook and it rolled away a few squeaky feet. It swung slowly back and forth, like an invitation. “Your time ain’t come yet. Need to fatten you up first. But you’ll be hanging there soon enough.”

  The hogs gobbled at the feed in thick, slavering gulps, fulfilling their end of the bargain.

  The barn door slammed and Delphus dropped the bucket. He grabbed the pitchfork from the wall and turned to the door. Damn kids were always stomping all over the place, slamming doors and trying to get the best of him. Well, he’d teach those pipsqueaks a lesson.

  If the idea behind Meat Camp was to scare ‘em straight, then Delphus wouldn’t mind doing a little of the scaring.

  Eva Dean Fraley stood in the doorway, hands up as if under arrest, grinning at her joke. As a kid, she’d helped him in the barn, feeding the animals and milking cows, but she’d grown up with books and ideas, along with plenty of nonsense about helping others. Got that from her mother’s side.

  His daughter was forty, hair in a ponytail, no make-up, a healthy build from a routine of hard work. She was cute in that country way that got some guys going down at Antlers Bar & Grill. Her accent was a bit more refined and educated than Delphus’, but she couldn’t completely hide her Southern Mountain roots. Girl ought to be proud to have that drawl, even though she was always dreaming a little bigger than she ought to.

  Still, she was kin. Blood washed away many ills.

  He grinned back at her, lowered the pitchfork. “Eva Dean, you about got yourself a few new pie-holes.”

  “Daddy, you need to quit being so paranoid.”

  “Ever since you started renting out the place for a camp, I ain’t got a minute’s peace.”

  She took the pitchfork from him and pecked him on the cheek. She could always soften him up, but he never let himself get too soft. Going soft around here could get you a pitchfork in the face.

  “They’re just kids. They’re at risk. They’re not convicts.”

  Not convicts. Not yet, anyway.

  Delphus shook his head. “At risk. At risk,” he said. “What the hell does that mean, anyways? The way I see it, every one of us is at risk for something.”

  “Big-city kids who have learning disabilities, trouble at home, minor handicaps. The school psychologists say a few weeks of experiential education will work wonders for their attitudes. We’re making a difference.”

  Delphus picked up the feed bucket and glanced over at the goat. Her thick tongue slithered through the crack. “There you go with them twenty-dollar words again. If your ma was still alive—”

  “She’d be grateful we found a way to make money off the land. But it�
��s not going to be enough.”

  Anger swelled through him and Delphus slammed the bucket against a support post. The pigs grunted and the chickens squawked and scattered again. “Don’t even get me started on them damn developers. ‘Daniel Boone Heights,’ my ass. Them peckerwoods got no claim to the Boone name.”

  Eva Dean took his arm. “Come on up to the house, Daddy. Time to take your blood pressure medicine.”

  Delphus shook his arm free and grabbed the lantern. “I ain’t in the grave yet, so let me do things the old way. Like God intended.” He looked to the goat. “Right, honey?”

  She bleated.

  “You have no idea what God intends,” Eva Dean said.

  “Sometimes I don’t even know if the Good Lord Himself still does, as ass-end-up as things have gotten.”

  “It’s a little late in the day to start on all that, don’t you think? You’ll spoil your sleep.”

  Delphus grunted.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jose would never admit it outright, but he loved Amanda. She knew it, too, of course, and that’s why she’d been toying with him in the car, flirting with Kyle right in front of him. That’s the kind of girl she was and, sick or not, that was sort of why he loved her.

  They’d met at a party held inside a decrepit old factory, a loud, out-of-tune band pretending to be Van Halen. He’d been downing beer and pretending to look as uninterested in everyone and everything as possible when he saw her across the room. She was sitting on some guy’s lap, giggling and necking him. He looked away, not wanting anyone to see him staring and start calling him a perv, but he kept looking back, unable to help himself. There was something about her. Maybe it was her blonde hair or her smooth, white skin. He couldn’t be sure; he just knew that he wanted to keep staring.

  She spotted him and when he finally got the nerve to chance another glance, she smiled at him. The guy was going at her breasts, and it was plain she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  And maybe that was something he liked about her too.

  The guy, some loser in a leather jacket like he was a badass from some old biker movie, tried to get her attention but she kept her eyes on Jose. When she smiled and licked her lips, real slowly, Jose felt like a perv but he didn’t care. This girl was something different. Something special.

  She found him a few hours later when he was hammered and smoking a joint with Kyle, who was the only friend Jose had made at his crappy tenement, and that probably had something to do with the beat-up Camaro.

  “Hey,” she said. Her teeth were so white and straight, like a rich girl’s, even though she lived on the edge of the ’hood, where the streets slopped over into decent duplexes and townhouses and stores that didn’t have bars across the windows. “Can I join?”

  So, she’d made a trio and smoked the joint without coughing, really taking some good drags too.

  Jose kept trying to say something cool to her, something about how he’d never seen a girl like her before, how she was as beautiful as a model or an angel, but he couldn’t find the words. They floated through his drunken brain and swirled into nonsensical vocal flubs.

  She giggled at him and that was okay. It sounded sweet, pure.

  She touched his knee every time she passed the joint his way, and he felt her touch linger there even after her hand was gone. His skin tingled beneath his jeans.

  Still, she seemed more interested in Kyle, and when the joint was gone and the talk dried up, Kyle took her up to his place, since supposedly his mom was in county lock-up for writing rubber checks or some other white-trash crime.

  Jose watched them go. It was all he could do to not go up and peek in the window. Even though the jealousy was like a wet stone in his gut, he hoped to get a look at her with her clothes off.

  Perv.

  He’d popped another beer instead.

  Later, he’d seen plenty.

  Up on a hill among trees and rocks and sweet-smelling animal rot, Jose waited for them to finish whatever they were doing in the car. No one was around to call him a perv, though crows squawked overhead and maybe that’s what they were pointing out.

  Their cries even sounded like Amanda calling out her lover’s name in passion: Kyle, Kyle, Kyle!

  He dug his hands into the moist ground and squeezed them into fists, trying not to picture anything. Since that first time, it hadn’t been as much fun. Now it was more pain than excitement. But still some of both.

  When they were done with whatever they were up to—it couldn’t have been much, because it was barely five minutes, although it seemed like hours to Jose—Amanda got out of the car first, looking around for him as she adjusted her shirt. When she saw him, she grinned and waved.

  He waved back a bit stupidly, then dug into the ground again, yanking at the dark soil in anger. Sure, she had to do it, but she didn’t have to pretend to enjoy it.

  What if she’s not pretending?

  Gradually, he was able to unclench his hands and slip them free of the ground. He wiped mud stains on his thighs.

  “Playing in the dirt?” Kyle asked when he finally made it up the hill. He smirked, strutting a little like a rooster, his cheeks flushed.

  “Just waiting for you two to stop messing around.”

  “Oh,” Amanda said in mock concern. “Is the baby jealous?”

  “Not really. Kyle’s had so many chicks, I’m used to it by now. Although you’ve stuck around longer than most, and you’re a lot classier.”

  To that, Kyle had no response. His mouth hung open for a moment while Jose glowed with cheap revenge.

  Amanda scowled, not sure if he was joking, and headed off through the woods. She swung her hips as she walked, knowing both of them were watching.

  “Thanks, asshole,” Kyle said.

  “I’m doing you a favor. She’s poison.”

  “Yeah, but it’s sweet poison,” Kyle said, now riding high in the saddle again. “Sweet, sweet poison.”

  “I’ll remember that at your funeral.”

  A bird screeched nearby.

  “Maybe if you got yourself laid, you wouldn’t be such a dickhead,” Kyle said.

  He headed off after Amanda.

  Jose willed his bitterness away and eventually got up and followed.

  Twenty minutes later, Kyle asked what the hell they were doing. “I didn’t come up here for a nature hike. Where’s that guy with the weed?”

  “He’ll be along,” Jose said. “He has to sneak away from the camp. He’s not like us. He’s got people watching him.”

  “You can wait in the car if you want.” Amanda squeezed Jose’s arm and kept walking, not waiting for Kyle’s response. “Jose will keep me company.”

  “The hell you smiling about?” Kyle asked Jose.

  “Poison.”

  “This better be some kickass weed.”

  Jose didn’t answer, just let him walk ahead after Amanda and then kept himself a few steps behind.

  Safely within distance.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Back in the comfort of the BMW, Max took the logging road very slowly, branches scraping up the luxury vehicle’s flanks. Damned logging roads. First thing they would do was clear these trees and lay down some civilized pavement. His poor car was going to look like he’d rolled through a demolition derby.

  Oh, well, he’d be able to buy a new one with the payout this deal would bring. Hell, a whole fleetof new cars. There was anotherMaxim in that thought, something about not worrying over the dings and scrapes of today, focusing on the shiny opportunities of tomorrow.

  “A friend of mine said your son goes to the camp,” Robert said. He hadn’t learned the advantages of shutting the hell up and letting the master think.

  The car bounced over a rut.

  “It was either camp or juvenile detention, and no Jenkins is going to end up behind bars while I’m still breathing.” Before he was even aware of it, Max’s radar started pinging. “Who’s this friend?”

  “Nobody. A girl I dated a while in colleg
e. She’s a counselor there,” Robert said, appropriately wary.

  A girl he dated in college? What was this, kiddie hour?

  “Cloudland Development doesn’t tolerate gossip. It’s bad business.” Bam. Another greatMaxim: Gossip is bad business. “That is, except, for when it is planted gossip and then it can actually work wonders, like a pest bomb ferreting out the hidden rats.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sir. That’s damn right.

  “You pork her, this college girlfriend?” Max asked as if it was the next logical question which, quite honestly, wasn’t it?

  Robert looked a bit uncomfortable, tugging at his collar again. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What the hell was it like?”

  Robert squirmed in the passenger seat, a little kid who needed to take a leak. If he had any hope of making it in this biz, he was going to have to toughen up. If “pork her” got under his skin, there wasn’t much hope for him when things got real nasty.

  Damn, what if he’s gay? That’s all I need, a sweet boy on the payroll, playing hell with the discrimination clauses—

  “Look out!”

  A large tree had fallen across the road. Max slammed the brakes and the car fishtailed for a moment before stopping just shy of a crash. He’d been going faster than he’d realized. If he had any flaw, that was it—going too fast. Sometimes, caution was the best play. Not in business, usually, but certainly on a backwoods road in Podunk territory.

  “Well, screw me with a fiddlestick and vote Democrat—looks like we’ll have to walk out. New Guccis, too.”

  When Max looked up from his shoes, Robert was looking down at his own. Probably set him back forty bucks at JC Penney. Might as well be wearing flip-flops.

  The tree blocking the road had been recently cut down. Wood chips lay scattered in a fresh pile. Max tried to push the tree and cursed. “Cutting firewood this late? I didn’t hear any chainsaw.”