Logan's Tale pt. IV
"The Farm"
Two miles from the farm, I spot a diner and leave the Mercedes in the parking lot and move ahead on foot. If there's anything to what the Padre told me, I've got to play this careful. I cut through the woods that surround the farm. I love the woods at night. Especially the sounds. I can hear all sorts of creatures, big and small, rummaging around. Feels like home.
I creep over a small fence and enter the farm. There's one of those old windmill things makin' all kinds of racket and a broken down barn in the distance. No crops or animals I can see. Then the cold thing, it creeps into my guts and tells me one more time it won't let go. I may get confused sometimes, but the cold thing, it's never wrong and I've learned to trust it. Maybe it's something I smell or hear or spot out the corner of my eye, something I just don't notice. But here it is again, that iceball where my stomach ought to be.
This is a bad place, this farm. People have died here. The wrong way.
And that's when I hear the growling. I spin around and come face to face with a wolf. A big wolf. I haven't seen a wolf this big since the last time I was up north. Somethin' ells me that this one wasn't as friendly as the wild ones were.
"I don't want to fight, pooch," I say in a calm, strong voice. Can't show any fear or weakness with an animal like this. They love the smell of fear; it's like perfume to them, like a sign that says attack.
"I got no gripe with you. Let's just talk, one Canuckle-head to another." The wolf answers by growling even louder. He bares his teeth at me and flattened his ears against his head.
"Easy boy," I say just before he leaps at me. I kick him hard in the side just before he can wrap those jaws of his around my throat. A punch to his shaggy head sends him down whimpering. I bend over and scratch him behind the ears.
"No way I was gonna use my claws on you, buddy," I say as I pet him. "Lookin' at you is like lookin' in a mirror for me. No, it's whoever owns you I'm curious about, because there's blood on your breath, and I think I know what kind."
So, I start to sniff around a bit. Not far off is a pile of fresh dirt that reeks of blood. I start to clear away the loose earth. After a few inches, my hands hit something solid.
"Here we go," I mutter. I grab it and pull it out of the hole. It's a bone, a long femur. This didn't come out of any coyote. I turn my attention back to the hole. Something else became dislodged when I pulled the bone out. I reach back in and pull it out. It's a shoe. A red high heel. This didn't come from a coyote either.
All of a sudden…right behind me…
Footsteps.
Impossible! Nobody can sneak up on me. I turn around just in time as a small but powerful foot slams into my throat. I roll onto the ground choking for air. I steady myself and swing back, but the bastard kicks me in the face. I finally get a good look at my attacker. He's a short guy with green hair and skin, was wearing a Charlie Brown sweeter of all things and glasses, and was hoppin' around on his haunches like a damn frog. I pop my claws and lunge at him. It's like tryin' to cut the air. Bastard is too quick. He ducks under my claws and slashes his sharpened, claw-like fingernails across my wrists. My fingers die as my nerves as tendons and arteries are severed. Before I can retaliate, he claws upwards, raking my face. Pain explodes in my eyes. I go blind.
I start flailing my dead fists in the air, swinging wildly. I can hear the air whistle as my attempts to fight back miss by a mile. I can't hear him at all. Not a sound. Nobody's that quiet. Nobody except the one who snuck into that hotel room two nights ago…
Something hot and sticky wraps around my ankle and pulls my feet out from under me. I fall to the ground with a hard thud. That's when the smell hits me, the stench of decaying meat and sewage hits me so hard, it makes my eyes water. And it all comes together…
"It was you, you bastard!" I shout blindly into the night. "You killed her."
There's a scraping of metal against the ground and I can hear soft footsteps approaching. He wasn't hiding his presence anymore. He knew that it didn't matter, that even as my wrists and eyes healed rapidly, there was still nothing I could do to stop him.
"You killed Red," I growled. "It was…"
WHACK!
I barely saw it comin'. Frog-boy had picked up a sledgehammer. Last thing I saw was the sledge swinging down at my face before the world went black.
-X-
For a while it's outer space with no stars in it, cold and black and bottomless. I tumble and float, weightless as a ghost. For a while I've got no brain and no body and that's fine by me.
Then the broken bits start with their nagging. The jagged little bastards dance like leprechauns, pulling together in a bullies' circle, laughing at me, telling me I'm an even bigger loser than I ever thought I was.
They play it back for me like a movie on rewind—from the sunburst of the sledgehammer—back to the soft chilly skin of the goddess who was murdered in my bed.
I blew it Red. I found your killer, but he was better than me, too quiet and too quick, a killer born. He took me out like I was a girl scout. He didn't even break a slimy sweat…
…But if I'm doing all this thinkin', that means I'm still alive, doesn't?
Why didn't he finish the job? …Or is this the hell I've spent my whole life earning, forever falling, never knowing?
Then the hurt comes. The living hurt. Streaking from behind my eyes. Finding places to have its fun.
A smell hits my nostrils, hard burning antiseptic.
Light grows.
I dive for it.
-X-
My eyes snap open. My vision is still blurry but it'll clear soon enough. I cough up a puddle of blood across the white tile floor. The whole room was made out of tile. A large steel door appeared to be the only way in or out and a small window with bars cutting across it provided the only light from the moon. I crawl on my hands and knees for several minutes until I stop hacking up blood. When I finally stop and look up, I see the damnedest thing.
A rose. A bright red rose.
"Huh?" I mutter in confusion. What the hell was a rose doin' indoors? I shake my head roughly and knock away the remaining cobwebs. I look back up at the rose.
It was a tattoo. A rose tattoo on the cheek of a beautiful girl. Her head, with four others, all beautiful young girls, was mounted on the wall like a trophy deer.
For a minute I think I'm dead, sittin' in Satan's waiting room in Hell, lookin' at a wall of his past wives or somethin'.
"He keeps the heads. He eats the rest."
A familiar voice jerks me back to reality. I turn around and there's another young girl, naked, sitting in the corner of the tiled room.
"Jubilee?" I mutter. For a moment, I think I just need my meds again. But I can smell her, clear as day. She's real, not like the Red that nailed me back at the church.
"It's not just that wolf of his," Jubilee continues, her eyes vacant, just staring out into nothingness. "The wolf just gets scraps. Bones. It's him. He eats people," she says trembling from fear and the cold tile. "He cooks the like they were steaks."
I get up and slide off my jacket. Body feels like tenderized meat, but I try not to wince as I move. "Lets get you warm," I say to Jubes, but she's not really listening. Whatever happened to her before she wound up naked in this room left her traumatized.
"Just like they were steaks," she says again. "Now he's got both of us."
I wrap my coat around her naked shoulders and try to comfort her. "It's all right," I tell her. "Take a nice, slow breath." I wrap my arms around her small frame, but it doesn't do any good. She just keeps right on goin'.
"Just look at the heads on the wall. The heads on the wall," she rants. "The heads on the wall." I gently start to rock her back and forth, but it doesn't help.
"Son of a bitch!" she exclaims, her voice cracking with terror. "He kept smiling that damned smile. He made me watch him suck the meat off my fingers." She slowly lifts her left hand out of her lap. It's been cut off at the wrist, a cris-cross of rough stitches closing the still bloody stump.
"Oh, Jesus," I mutter under my breath.
"He made me watch!" shouted Jubilee. "HE MADE ME WATCH!"
-X-
Outside, near a small, barred window, Toad stood motionless in his Charlie Brown sweater as Jubilee's screams echoed across the farm. He doesn't move the whole time, except for a small, damned smile at the corners of his green lips.
-X-
For a long moment we sit on the cold tile, Jubilee held tightly in my arms. She's crying on my shoulder, buckets worth of tears stream down my back and chest. Poor Kid. I didn't mean to drag her into this, never meant for her to get hurt. But best intentions usually don't work out the way you want 'em to. Not in this town. Rage begins to replace my guilt. Now I got another reason to tear this frog hoppin' son of a bitch from limb to limb.
"Christ, I could use a cigarette," Jubilee speaks into my shoulder in her normal, cheerful tone. I smile a bit at her actions. Dames. Sometimes all they gotta do is let it out. And a couple of buckets later, there's no way you'd ever know anything was ever wrong.
Eventually, Jubilee broke our embrace and stood up. I watch as she slides every gorgeous inch of herself into my coat and I shake my head for what must be the millionth time. Hardware like she's got and Jubilee's a dyke. It's a damn crime. But I don't say a word about that. I piped up at her once that maybe she ought to get treatment or something and she hauled off and nailed me with a punch that showed me there was plenty of muscle under all that heaven. But that was years ago and it hasn't got anything to do with getting out of here.
I climbed up the wall and started pullin' at the bars, tryin' to escape. I can still smell frog-boy nearby.
"You've brought us some big trouble this time, Logan," scolds Jubilee as she sucks on one of my cigars. "Whoever's behind this whole thing has his connections right in the department. Any leads?" she asks.
"One guy I talked to told me it was Xavier runnin' the show," I grunt as I pull on the bars. It'd be easier to slice em, but then it'd be a lot harder for Jubilee to climb out.
"Whoever it is, he knew I was checking out that hooker almost before I did," said Jubilee nonchalantly.
Confusion set in once again. "What hooker?" I ask.
"The one you've been obsessing over," she says after taking another drag off the cigar. "Red."
I stop dead in my track as this bombshell hits me. "I didn't know she was a hooker," I say softly, turning my face away. "Doesn't make any difference about anything," I say loudly, more for myself than Jubilee. I pull on the bars again, harder this time. "But I didn't know."
"She was high-class stuff. Top dollar. Must have shown you quite a time," she says coyly. I can't tell from her tone if she's just teasin' me or is a little bit jealous that she didn't get with my angel. Maybe both. Whatever it was I didn't want to talk about it before it got into any more detail (although the idea of Red and Jubilee together did send my imagination into overdrive).
"Let's not talk about that, okay?" It wasn't a request. "Tell me about him. The frog fairy out there who snuck into my room and killed Red and did what he did to you."
"… I never knew what hit me," said Jubilee quietly. "I was walking to my car. That's all I can remember. Then I was in his kitchen. I was paralyzed. I smelled meat cooking." She shuddered at the memory. She looked down at the tiled floor as she spoke. "He'd cut it off before I woke up. My hand, I mean. It didn't even hurt." She turned and looked at the heads mounted on the wall. "Then he made me watch, like I told you."
"Hold on. Quiet," I interrupt. "There's a car comin'."
A pair of headlights cut through the night as a car pulls up to the house. The horn blares twice before a tinted window rolls down.
"Toad!" a voice called from inside the car. The voice was low and had a strange accent. Not quite British, but defiantly a blue blood of some kind, like someone who had been educated overseas.
From my perch in the barred window, I watch Toad trot over to the car. I can't hear what the man inside the car is saying, don't really care anyway. It doesn't matter now. Cuz now I've got a face and a name and that's all that I need.
"I'll see you later Toad," I whisper to the darkness, a promise of pain to come. Anger sweeps through my body and the edges of my vision goes red. Metal groans as my grip tightens around the window bars. With a feral growl, I pull back with all my rage and rip the bars from the window and fall back to the floor with a heavy CLANK! I land on my back with the bars and busted window frame lying on my chest. I heave it all off as Jubilee just stares at me like I just parted the Red Sea or somethin'.
"Let's go," I tell her.
Author's Notes:
Yeah, this was a shorter chapter, but one I thought was important enough to stand alone. Lots more action to come in the next chapter and an old enemy drops by for kicks. Keep reading and reviewing and I'll keep writing.