IT’S OVER CHRONICLES – Just One Fix
C. Dennis Moore
Copyright © 2013 Charles Moore
Cover photo courtesy Snout Productions
IT'S OVER: CHRONICLES is a multimedia online series in tandem with the IT'S OVER film trilogy, created by Snout Productions. For more information on the three films, the graphic novel, IT'S OVER: TRIBULATIONS, and all Snout music, film and multimedia content, visit www.snoutproductions.com
But first, a little backstory: I have been doing the odd review here and there for THE HORROR ZINE for about a year or more, mostly movies, and so far three of those movies have been Snout movies, HOMECOMING II and the first two in the IT’S OVER trilogy, IT’S OVER and THE STORYBOOK. The guys who run Snout had been reading my serialized story (now available online in its collected form), AFTERMATH, and given both my story and their IT’S OVER series deal with the end of the world, they asked me if I’d be interested in writing a story to fit into their own mythology. Always up for a writing challenge, I said hell yes and took their prompt and, a couple of weeks later, had this story written. Chronologically, this story takes place one week before one of the key events in the first movie, IT’S OVER. For more on IT’S OVER and Snout Productions, you can visit their website.
I’m still not sure how many of the events that day really happened and how many were brought on by the withdrawal.
We’d been driving forever and it wasn’t stopping and if we didn’t get there soon I was going to piss all over the floor. It wasn’t just that I had to piss, but I hadn’t had anything in me all morning and Scott said he knew where we could get something and I didn’t ask what it was or where we were going because when you’re a junkie you don’t care, as long as you get it when you get there, whatever it is, wherever there is. And I needed something. I kept looking in the ashtray because I was pretty sure he had a roach in there; I saw it last time. But I couldn’t let him see me looking, sure couldn’t start digging through the ashes with him sitting there. Scott always had his shit together and I knew he was judging me when I got sick, even if he didn’t say it. And I wasn’t any more of a junkie than he was, he did everything he could get his hands on, that judgmental fuck. So I kept looking at that ashtray, and if we didn’t get there soon he was gonna have to stop for gas anyway and I could probably dig in there while he went inside to pay. That is, if I didn’t spend the entire time pissing.
Fuck, it was gonna start leaking out of me soon.
“How much further?” I asked.
Scott shrugged and said, “I dunno, he said it was a ways up the road. We’d know it when we saw it.”
“You need gas soon?”
He didn’t even bother looking at the gas gauge, that fuck, just shook his head and said, “Naw, I’m alright. We’ll make it there. Pretty soon, I’m sure.”
Fuck.
It wasn’t pretty soon. It was almost another hour. He said it was only fifteen minutes later, but I know it was longer than that. He’s a liar.
But he finally stopped the truck and I didn’t think about the ashtray for a second, I got out and pissed in the dirt. Motherfucker that felt fine, like all the weight of every bad thing was being lifted off me.
But then the really bad kicked in and there was that need again, that need to fix, like cold water putting out the fire in my veins. It filled my gut like a lead ball and I wanted to puke it up. Fuck, my head hurt, too.
Scott went up to the trailer, just this little piece of shit silver fifth wheel thing off the highway--he didn’t even have a car or nothing parked there so I don’t know how he got anywhere from all the way out here, whoever he was, but fuck it, if he had something I didn’t care if he ever left anyway.
Whoever we were meeting didn’t answer, so Scott knocked again, and I kept watching the door, knowing I’d feel a lot better when it opened because then I’d be ok. But he still didn’t come.
Scott banged on it and called, “We’re here! Let’s go, man!”
The wind blew up dust. My hand shook and I thought about getting in the ashtray again to find that roach I saw. Anything would do at that point.
Hoof beats pounded in my head, and I couldn’t tell if it was cuz I needed to fix or from Scott banging on that door. Probably both. I was sweating.
He came back to the car and said, “He’s not answering.” I nodded; I’d seen he hadn’t answered.
“What now?” I asked.
“Let’s just wait around a minute,” he said. “He knows we’re coming. He might have just gone out for a minute.”
“He has a car?”
Scott shrugged.
“Go knock again.”
“Relax. We’ll give him a few minutes.”
I was going to knock on the door if he didn’t. Whatever this guy had better be worth all the trouble. I had to get my mind off it so I tried walking around the car to keep myself moving but I stepped in mud and realized it was where I’d pissed.
“Fuck!” I yelled.
“Is that where--” Scott said and I nodded. He cracked up.
The sound of his laugh dug into my brain and I wanted to block it out but I knew it wouldn’t matter because it wasn’t just the laugh. I needed something like a motherfucker. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, but I was breathing too quick, a combination of the heat and an empty addiction that needed fed and this motherfucker was sitting there laughing at me and I had piss-mud on my shoe.
I looked up and was about to tell Scott to shut up but when I looked at him the guy I had known all these years was gone and all I saw was a black, charred body sitting in the driver’s seat. Smoke rose from it and it was staring at me with wide white eyes and a big grin showing gleaming white teeth and I said, “Shit!” and backed up and threw up my hands for some reason, like I thought it was going to fly out of the seat toward me, but then the vision was gone and there was Scott.
“What the fuck’s your problem, man?” he asked. “You look like hell!”
“Yeah,” I said. I wished I had something to drink.
Scott pulled out a beer from under his seat, pulled the tab and tossed it out the window, then drank his beer. I could see the water on the can and I knew it was ice cold, but how? There wasn’t room for a cooler under his seat, so what the fuck?
“You got another one of those?” I asked.
He tossed the empty can out the window, belched long and loud at the trailer like he was trying to knock the door off its hinges, then he looked over at me and said, “Another what?”
“One of those beers,” I said.
“What beers?”
I shook my head, not in the mood for fucking games, then walked to his side of the car to show him the empty beer can I just watched him toss out the window, but there was no beer can.
“I just saw you toss it out,” I said.
“Dude, you need to get out of the heat and get off that shit, your brain is frying.”
I couldn’t argue with him. I knew he was right in both cases. But if this was what it felt like to kick, there was no way. No, what I needed was a fix. Right the fuck now.
I went to the shitty little trailer’s door and knocked for about five straight minutes, or maybe not that long, but my fist was sore when I stopped and he never came to the door anyway. I turned back to Scott who sat in the car, just watching me.
“Where the fuck is he, man? He knew we were coming, right?”
“Of course he knew,” Scott said.
“Fucker needs to hurry up,” I said.
Just then Scott turned around like he heard something and looked into the distance up the highway. I looked too but there was nothing there, just empty road and tha
t was it.
But then a minute later I noticed something far up the road, some little black speck of nothing that, as I watched, got a little bigger, then a little bigger, and finally turned into a piece of shit truck in even worse shape than this dump of a trailer. We must have watched that truck getting closer for half an hour until it pulled into the lot next to Scott’s car and I wondered how the hell he’d heard that thing so far away. It was like he sensed it coming or something, like Spider-Man.
The guy turned off his truck and sat there for a second like he wasn’t sure if he should get out, but then he did and Scott got out and walked toward him, his hand out. The guy shook, but didn’t look any more sure of what he was doing.
“You took long enough,” Scott said, his smile wide, his expression inviting like always. That dude could charm the panties off a virgin nun. Probably had for all I knew.
“Yeah, I guess I forgot you were coming,” the old guy said. “I had to go to town.”
“Damn,” Scott said. “We could have just met you there and saved the drive.”
“Yeah,” the old guy said again.
“You got the stuff we talked about?” Scott asked.
“Yeah, the stuff,” the old man said. He was looking around, down, everywhere but in Scott’s eyes and I knew something was fucked up here. He took off his cowboy hat and wiped sweat from his forehead. “I was supposed to have it,” the old guy said. He put the hat back on. “The guy I talked to said he’d have it