Fear the Big Man

Smitch. Flop.

Smitch. Flop.

A tear rolls down my cheek. I’m only just waking up, but I recognize that sound.

Smitch. Flop.

Digging. He’s digging a hole.

A grave, I realize. He’s digging my grave. He whistles while he works.

I keep my eyes closed. I don’t want him to know I’m awake. If he knows, he’ll start talking and that’s worse…so, so much worse. He seems to enjoy the sound of his voice and the terror it evokes. I won’t give the Hog the pleasure. Even if I am about to die.

Quietly, carefully, I test my limbs. A twitch of my fingers and some of my toes, the slight tip of my head. OK, OK, I can move. I’m on my back on the ground, body contorted uncomfortably as if I’ve been carelessly tossed here, and behind me and to my left, he digs.

Smitch. Flop.

How did I end up here? I allow my eyes to open a crack, and in the slit through the blur of my tears I see the tiny pinpricks of stars. I’ve already been here for hours then. No one is coming for me. It’s too much to hope that the Sheriff went out looking for the white van like I did.

A tear leaks out. The digging stops and I freeze, holding my breath until the digging resumes. He’s singing now. Something by Johnny Cash.

The Long, Black Train.

Smitch. Flop.

I met the fat man, who I call the Hog to keep them straight, when I took the scenic way home for spring break. I was supposed to be on a plane with Chad, not driving slowly down backroads I’d never taken before while the GPS on my phone kept suggesting I cut over to the highway, and I was dreading all my dad’s questions and my mom’s fawning over my broken heart. I was so stupid.

Right now I’d give anything to melt into my parent’s arms, and tears burn hot in my eyes knowing that I’ll never see them again.

Smitch. Flop.

I had been thinking about Chad, actually, when I crossed the centerline of the quiet country road and nearly crashed head-on with a charcoal grey Honda Accord with a busted headlight. The driver had laid on the horn and swerved toward the ditch as I lurched my steering wheel hard the other way, flying into the opposite ditch in a spray of gravel that pinged off the sides of my Prius. The driver of the Honda kept honking as he drove away, and I waited until the dust settled before I opened my door and climbed on shaky legs out of the front seat. I had never been in a car accident or had a near-miss like that, and it took a while for my breathing to slow. When some of the panic left my veins, I ducked back inside for my phone, thinking I should call Chad and tell him what happened until I remembered he was sitting on a plane in seat A, row twenty-two beside a blonde from his biology class. I could call my parents, but they’d freak out and I didn’t want them to know I was dragging my feet getting home.

With no one to call—and nothing, really, to tell anyone if I did—I crossed my arms on the roof of my car and squeezed back the tears that had been falling intermittently for days. Three years…I spent three years with Chad, our relationship defining my entire college life. I didn’t know how I’d go back to school or which friends would still be mine of the ones we shared. I still had his clothes and toothbrush at my apartment. My pillows would probably still smell like him when I got home.

I was feeling sick to my stomach trying to figure out how to untangle Chad’s presence from my life when the white van appeared. I didn’t pay much attention as it approached until it started to slow. I wiped my eyes as a large man with a chin full of stubble and an eager smile rolled down the driver’s side window. He asked me what I was doing and if I needed any help. The hair on my arms stood up as his smile widened into something distinctly predatory. Even at a distance, a rotten, meaty sort of smell hit my nose from inside the van. My stomach rolled and I swallowed the lump in my throat and told him I was fine, just taking a break. He seemed disappointed by this and wasn’t in a hurry to leave. I thanked him for asking, and held my phone up, saying I needed to make a call and hoping he’d give up before the smell made me vomit.

The man shrugged and waved as he rolled up his window and kept driving. I was relieved, watching the van drive away, when something in the van’s small, back window caught my attention.

What…is that…

It was the face of a man, and that man had a strip of duct tape over his mouth.

I was back in my car, doors locked, when the van squealed to a stop a short distance down the road. I waited, eyes on the side mirror, hoping the driver didn’t suspect that I’d seen anything. After a few unbearable moments of the sounds of my heavy breathing filling the car, the van continued driving away.

In the minutes that followed, I fought to slow my heart and convince myself that I didn’t see what I thought I saw, except I couldn’t shake his face from my brain. His dark hair. The gash in his nose that was pressed against the window glass. The wide, dark eyes begging for help.

Now, as I lay here listening to bastardized Johnny Cash on the lips of the man who made cracking my ribs with the toe of his boot a fucking sport, I wonder what would’ve happened if I didn’t think I saw a man in the back of the van. If I had kept driving toward home, instead of to the police station in the next town.

Smitch. Flop.

Even though I claimed to have an emergency, it was almost twenty minutes before a man with a bulging midsection and a gold badge that read: Sheriff Scrunt sauntered into the waiting room, brushing crumbs off his uniform and offering me his sticky, pudgy hand. I followed him back to a small office that reeked of whatever food he ate for lunch and told him everything.

Giving my statement, I realized I’ve made a few crucial mistakes. I didn’t know the van’s make, model, or license plate number. I could describe the driver’s face, but I didn’t know his name or height and could only guess at his weight. I didn’t know where the van was headed…I’m embarrassed that I couldn’t even say for sure what road I had been on without pulling up the GPS on my phone. My description of the man in the back was lacking too. I could see him, but couldn’t translate that image beyond my own memory, even if a sketch artist had been available. By the end of our discussion, the sheriff pushed out his gut and sat back in his chair with a sigh. Even though he said he’d look into it, I could tell I hadn’t given him enough to know where to start.

I left my name and number in case he found anything. I knew he wouldn’t. And I knew I should just go home.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the window. The desperation in his eyes. The tape over his mouth. If it was me in the back of that van, and someone saw me in trouble, there was no question—I’d want them to go to any lengths to help me. And meeting with the aloof sheriff with my shoddy witness statement wasn’t far enough.

I got back in my car and followed my GPS back to the road where I almost hit the grey Honda. Then I headed in the direction of the white van.

It was stupid. I can see that now. The stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But I couldn’t shake the man who might already be dead. I tapped into every Dateline episode I’d ever seen and figured that, if there really was an abducted person in the back of a van, the driver probably had a quiet and secluded place to bring them to. Somewhere off of the main road. I took a right on the first road that connected with the two-lane highway and looked down every driveway for a trace of the van. At another intersection I took another right, then a left, going deeper into the country with far more fields and woods than homes.

I kept an eye on my phone as I drove, watching service bars eek away until the dreaded X intermittently appeared where service bars should’ve been. I sent a ping of my location to a friend with no explanation. It would’ve been smarter to send it to my mom, but I didn’t have the time or reliable service to wield her many questions. I also didn’t really think I’d be in danger. I was just driving on the backroads of Indiana. That ping wouldn’t be the thing to save my life. I had no intention of getting out of my car. If I did stumble upon the van, as wild as it sounded, I’d ping that location too and walk it right back into the sheriff’s office.

I had been driving for half an hour, and I didn’t know how many lefts I’d taken. How many rights. My GPS kept rerouting, but I couldn’t see the main road on the map screen anymore. It was okay because that lifeline would lead me out whenever I turned around, and I was about to—certain that I’d failed the man in the van with this wild plan—when an unmarked gravel road caught my eye.

Keep driving, a voice deep inside me begged. It was just a gravel road lined by trees, most of which hadn’t gotten their leaves back after winter, but there was something sinister about it that seemed to make it stretch before me, drawing me in.

Last road, I insisted. I tried sending a ping—to my mom this time because I would call her as soon as I got back to the highway. The X in the upper right corner of my phone told me that it wouldn’t go through. If I stayed in my car, I reasoned, I’d be safe. This road, then the highway. One last chance.

Gravel crunched beneath my tires as I crept along. There were no houses on that road. No sign that it was a private drive. Nothing to deter me. And then…a mailbox. The rusted metal was dented and I thought I saw a white S painted on it, but the rest of the letters were worn off. Down another gravel drive, a weathered farmhouse with chipping yellow paint came into view. On the opposite side of the driveway from the house was a barn and a few other outbuildings in various stages of disrepair. And there, backed up to one of the outbuildings, was a white van.

I checked my phone. There was still an X in the upper corner. I put my car in reverse to back down the driveway and get the fuck out of there when I saw him. There was no question that I found the right place, the right van, as the driver came out of an outbuilding, locked eyes with mine, and smiled.

I didn’t see the second man until he smashed through my window with a pipe.

***

Smitch. Flop.

There are three of them. The Hog. The Monster, a veritable giant with a deformed face. And the tall one I call the Surgeon. They might be actual brothers or just brothers in their perversions, I don’t know.

The Monster is the grunt. He hauls the bodies. He also broke my car window and pulled me out.

The Hog drives the van and digs the graves. He likes to talk and sing, and he kept me company, telling stories of the ones who came before me, while I waited for my turn on the table with the Surgeon.

The Surgeon likes tools. He wears a magnifying glass over one eye while he works, and his breath reeks of decayed teeth which—at close range—is worse than the meaty, rotten smell that permeates the rest of the property. The Surgeon collects the trophies. The jars lining the basement walls filled with fingers, eyeballs, human teeth, and worse suggest they’ve been…collecting…for years.

I already know which parts of mine will end up in a jar…two of the toes they clipped off my left foot, all the fingernails from both hands, the heart-shaped birthmark from my right thigh, and a small patch of scalp from the very top of my head.

Smitch. Flop.

On the ground, the pain in my feet has dulled to a deep ache I can feel in my chest…or maybe that’s the broken ribs. It’s getting harder to breathe. Does that mean my lungs are punctured? I think I would be dead already if they were.

My thigh where they took the birthmark stings, but nothing compared to the raw skin around the exposed square of skull that sends spikes of white hot pain down my face and neck when the wind blows.

Smitch. Flop.

The man from the back of the van is named Harvey. He’s tall with dark hair, a big nose, and probably had a nice smile when he still had teeth. I met Harvey when I sat on the floor beside the table waiting my turn while the Surgeon took his parts. A couple fingers from his right hand. All of his toenails. Strips of skin from his thighs that were tossed to a mangy dog who waited at the Surgeon’s feet.

His left eye that was scooped out with a rusty spoon and absolutely no surgical precision. Harvey’s guttural screams rattled the mason jars on the wall until they abruptly stopped.

Shock, the Hog had said, scratching behind the mutt’s ears. It happened sometimes and took some of the fun out of it.

Before they hauled Harvey, limp and mostly dead, away, I hoped that I would shut down before I felt too much. But I felt everything.

Smitch. Flop.

I hear a scream. Or I think it’s a scream.

The Hog stops singing and digging. I try to calm my breathing so he doesn’t know I’m awake. Another scream. I hear the Hog swear, drop the shovel, and scramble out of the hole. He kicks a boot into my ribs to make sure I’m unconscious and I think the shock of pain through my core will literally kill me, then I hear those boots running toward the house.

Toward the screams.

I gasp for air and hot tears soak both of my cheeks. But I don’t have time to lie here. This is my chance.

I know it’s going to hurt, but the alternative is the nearby grave, and I will not die today if I have a choice. Putting pressure on my palms, away from my throbbing, nail-less fingertips, I gingerly haul myself up. Blood rushes to my head, and more white hot pain shoots through my skull and almost knocks me back down. I bite down hard enough to crack my teeth and after a second, I can see through the black stars in my eyes. More screams come from the house. I don’t know where I’ll go when I get to my feet, as long as it’s in the opposite direction.

I test my feet underneath me. I expect the pain in my left foot, but I am utterly shattered by the intense jolt that shoots up the side of my leg from the gaping holes that seem to mingle with the bare muscle on my thigh scraping against my shorts. I can’t think about it, or I won’t be able to move, so I think about my mom instead. How she’ll hold me while doctors tend to every wound when I make it out of here. Her Chanel perfume in my nose. Her warm hands gingerly brushing tears and blood from my cheeks.

With my mother’s touch as inspiration, one excruciating step at a time, I drag my foot through the scraggly grass toward the trees at the edge of the property. Wet, ragged sounds punch from my lungs every time my right foot lands, and a moan I can’t help squeaks out when the stumps on my left snag in the dirt. Waves of pain spread down the top of my head, igniting white fire in my cheeks and neck. I bite down and taste blood on my tongue.

I don’t hear footsteps behind me. An arm around my waist crushes a yelp out of my chest and I lose track of my mother and all hope of escape. My attempt at a scream is like talons digging into my sides and I stumble. The arm at my waist keeps me on my feet, and I’m trying to pull away when I look up at an empty eye socket.

It’s Harvey. He’s not dead.

The last time I saw him, the Monster was carrying him away and the Hog was graphic in his description of the rest of their plans. The Big Man, it seemed, liked to dangle men from a hook in one of the outbuildings and play with them, before tying them to a target in the field behind the house and practicing his ax-throwing aim.

I assume he means the Monster. He was by far the biggest of the brothers, though I struggled to imagine the clumsy, brutish Monster with the coordination to throw an axe.

Maybe that was why he needed practice.

Harvey drags me across the threshold into the woods. Sticks and gnarly growth on the forest floor chew at my throbbing foot and my stomach lurches and I throw up as we stumble along. Harvey glances behind us a few times and tells me that he got the Monster for sure. He managed to hide a scalpel up his sleeve before he passed out on the table, and when he woke up on the floor of an outbuilding, the Monster was preparing rope and didn’t see Harvey pull himself up or lunge at him from behind. A scalpel to the jugular had been enough to take the axe-throwing beast down.  

There were tools hanging on the wall, Harvey tells me. He had just enough time to grab a pickaxe and slam it into the Hog’s chest when he came through the door to investigate the screams. Harvey didn’t stick around to see if the Hog survived the blow.

And there is still the Surgeon, who Harvey says he didn’t see when he came running out to find me. One fully intact psycho against the pieces of us that are left.

We press on until the trees clear on a deep ditch, and then…the road. The road. My first instinct is to scramble up the side and run down the centerline, but Harvey is smarter. We haven’t gone far from the property, and the Surgeon could be out looking for us right now. We hobble through the thick weeds in the ditch that wrap around my feet, snagging on my remaining toes. The pain is beyond comprehension but the adrenaline that we’ve made it to a road makes the pain secondary to survival.

We see the lights of a house around the next bend and agree it’s our best shot at getting help. On the way, we talk quietly to keep our minds off the torturous steps, the hole in his face, the lightning in my skull that snakes down my cheeks to my neck, so hot it begins to feel cold, like ice freezing in my veins. I don’t consider the possibility that we may make it to the house or the hospital and die anyway.

Harvey tells me he was taken after a flat tire. A few miles from a gas station where he filled up his car, his front end started to wobble. When he pulled over, he found an inch-long slash in the left front tire. He was putting on a spare when the Hog pulled up and offered to help. The mistake had been letting him hold the tire iron.  

The Monster had been waiting in the back of the van to haul him in. I ask if the Surgeon was there, and Harvey tells me that the Surgeon had finished changing the tire and drove Harvey’s car—a charcoal grey Honda Accord—ahead of the van.

My chest tightens, and not just from the fractured ribs.

I ask him if his car had a busted headlight. He tells me it got smashed when he ducked, missing the first of the Hog’s swings with the tire iron.

It was Harvey’s Honda that I almost collided with on that road. The Surgeon had been driving. Pieces that were previously unconnected start lining up, but the timing is…off…

I tell him about my near-miss accident with his car, how that was the reason I was standing on the side of the road when I saw him in the back of the van. But if the Surgeon was driving Harvey’s Honda, why was he at least five minutes ahead of the van?

Harvey hadn’t made it easy for the Monster to tie him up, but that wasn’t the only thing. The Hog didn’t start driving until after he’d called the Big Man to fill him in on their score.

But the Monster is the Big Man, I tell him. Harvey shakes his head and swears there’s one more. Before this has a chance to sink in, a pair of headlights round the corner.

Not just headlights…a flash of red and blue.

In shared relief, we scramble up the ditch and wave what’s left of our broken bodies to flag down the police car that slows with a whoop of its siren. Sheriff Scrunt steps out and stares. Harvey looks like reanimated death in the red and blue lights and I figure I must look the same. The Sheriff’s shoulders drop in relief, and he curses under his breath before coming around and opening the back passenger door for us. We could wait for help, he says, but this will be quicker. Some of the adrenaline is wearing off and I don’t realize how difficult it will be to duck my bleeding scalp through the door or how sharply my ribs protest to bending at the waist and sitting down. Where I gingerly crawl into the back seat, Harvey groans, clamping his toothless gums down on each other as he hurries in next to me and shuts the door.

The sheriff says my parents have been calling his office. Something about a ping I sent with my location. Yes! The pings. It was the only smart thing I did all day. I explain to Sheriff Scrunt that Harvey is the man I saw in the van. I tell him about the farm, the brothers, the body parts in the basement. The sheriff listens, driving us into the night. I expect Harvey to jump in with his version, but he’s staring with his one eye at the bottom bar of the wire partition separating the front seat from the back. His bloody fingers are tracing something, and in a patch of moonlight I see the words he’s found.

Fear the Big Man.

We register the truth at the same time. It’s then that I notice the meaty smell in the cruiser that isn’t from me and Harvey. It’s the same beefy stink from the sheriff’s office and…the farm.

We haven’t turned around to head back to town. We’re driving deeper into the woods, slowing near a gravel road.

Harvey quietly reaches in his pocket and shows me a bloody scalpel I can barely see in the dark. The look in his remaining eye is dark and determined. He won’t go back to the farm. Neither will I.

He lifts the scalpel, and we are about to see exactly how far two strangers will go to help each other.

How far we will go to help ourselves.