Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror by Cheryl Mullenax (Ed)

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Authors: Cheryl Mullenax (Ed)
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it. But there wasn’t any break to be found and there were too many to fight. Nine white boys were knocking him around like he was a pinball and they were a malicious machine.
    “Ain’t that one of our niggers?” Farto asked. “And ain’t that some of the White Tree football players that’s trying to kill him?”
    “Scott,” Leonard said, and the name was dogshit in his mouth. It had been Scott who had outdone him for the position of quarterback on the team. That damn jig could put together a play more tangled than a can of fishing worms, but it damn near always worked. And he could run like a spotted-ass ape.
    As they passed, Farto said, “We’ll read about him tomorrow in the papers.”
    But Leonard drove only a short way before slamming on the brakes and whipping the Impala around. Rex swung way out and clipped off some tall, dried sunflowers at the edge of the road like a scythe.
    “We gonna go back and watch?” Farto asked. “I don’t think them White Tree boys would bother us none if that’s all we was gonna do, watch.”
    “He may be a nigger,” Leonard said, not liking himself, “but he’s our nigger and we can’t let them do that. They kill him, they’ll beat us in football.”
    Farto saw the truth of this immediately. “Damn right. They can’t do that to our nigger.”
    Leonard crossed the road again and went straight for the White Tree boys, hit down hard on the horn. The White Tree boys abandoned beating their prey and jumped in all directions. Bullfrogs couldn’t have done any better.
    Scott stood startled and weak where he was, his knees bent in and touching one another, his eyes as big as pizza pans. He had never noticed how big grillwork was. It looked like teeth there in the night and the headlights looked like eyes. He felt like a stupid fish about to be eaten by a shark.
    Leonard braked hard, but off the highway in the dirt it wasn’t enough to keep from bumping Scott, sending him flying over the hood and against the glass where his face mashed to it then rolled away, his shirt snagging one of the windshield wipers and pulling it off.
    Leonard opened the car door and called to Scott who lay on the ground, “It’s now or never.”
    A White Tree boy made for the car, and Leonard pulled the taped hammer handle out from beneath the seat and stepped out of the car and hit him with it. The White Tree boy went down to his knees and said something that sounded like French but wasn’t. Leonard grabbed Scott by the back of the shirt and pulled him up and guided him around and threw him into the open door. Scott scrambled over the front seat and into the back. Leonard threw the hammer handle at one of the White Tree boys and stepped back, whirled into the car behind the wheel. He put the car in gear again and stepped on the gas. The Impala lurched forward, and with one hand on the door Leonard flipped it wider and clipped a White Tree boy with it as if he were flexing a wing. The car bumped back on the highway and the chain swung out and Rex cut the feet out from under two White Tree boys as neatly as he had taken down the dried sunflowers.
    Leonard looked in his rear-view mirror and saw two White Tree boys carrying the one he had clubbed with the hammer handle to the station wagon. The others he and the dog had knocked down were getting up. One had kicked the jack out from under Scott’s car and was using it to smash the headlights and windshield.
    “Hope you got insurance on that thing,” Leonard said.
    “I borrowed it,” Scott said, peeling the windshield wiper out of his T-shirt. “Here, you might want this.” He dropped the wiper over the seat and between Leonard and Farto.
    “That’s a borrowed car?” Farto said. “That’s worse.”
    “Nah,” Scott said. “Owner don’t know I borrowed it. I’d have had that flat changed if that sucker had had him a spare tire, but I got back there and wasn’t nothing but the rim, man. Say, thanks for not letting me get killed, else

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