The Brain Eaters

Chapter 3

Those cocksuckers were talking about him.

The hammering inside was about to break his skull apart, but Hank Stransky still knew what was going on. They were talking about him. Telling lies. Snickering behind their hands. He could tell. They kept looking over here. Thought they were fooling him.

Vic was the worst of them. A guy Hank thought was his friend. Now he saw the truth. Guy owned a shitty little tavern and thought he was better than everybody. Better than Hank Stransky, who had to work with his hands to make a living. Fucking krauthead.

For all Hank knew, it was something that krauthead put in his beer that was making the goddam headache get worse. Now he probably thought it was funny. Him and those other two assholes. In just about five seconds Hank was going to walk up there, grab one of those cocksuckers in each hand, and ask them what the hell they thought they were looking at. If only the pain would let up a little.

Now they were laughing out loud. At him. Laughing at Hank Stransky. Thought it was funny, did they? He’d show them funny. Hank tried to say something, but it didn’t come out in words. Damn headache was making it hard to talk.

Down at the end of the bar Vic had shut up and was staring at him. Vic and his helpful advice.

“Why don’t you take some aspirin?”

Dumb fuck.

“You ought to see a doctor.”

Shove your doctor.

Vic started coming back up the bar toward him. The inside of Hank Stransky’s head bubbled like the core of a volcano. He stared down at his big, smashed-up hands, trying to focus his eyes. The hands squirmed and flopped on the bar like two lumpy living things. His head was on fire. The whole world was out to get him.

Vic Metzger broke off his conversation and started back up the bar. He was really getting worried about the way Stransky was staring down at his hands and mumbling. A few paces away Vic stopped. He opened his mouth to say something, to advise Hank to go home and get some rest. Slowly, Hank raised his head and looked at him.

The words died in Vic’s throat. In more than twenty years as a bartender and a pretty good drinker himself, Vic Metzger had seen men in every imaginable stage of drunkenness. He’d seen them fall, and he’d seen them puke; he watched them try to walk up walls and tunnel under the floor. He’d seen them scream and laugh and cry out loud. But never had he seen anything like what was happening to Hank Stransky.

Red blotches formed on the rough skin across Hank’s cheekbones. The blotches spread across his broken nose, up to the creased forehead, and down around his mouth. They darkened and coalesced into shiny pustules as Vic watched, his stomach turning over. The pustules broke like ripe boils, discharging a gooey liquid.

Hank Stransky jumped up from the barstool and spun completely around like a man in some mad dance. He seized the Miller’s bottle by the neck and chopped it against the edge of the bar. The bottle shattered, leaving Hank clenching a jagged, two-pronged dagger of glass.

From his mouth came a roar unlike anything human. A bellow of pain and rage and more. For a moment then there was silence in the tavern as the patrons froze at whatever they happened to be doing. A pool ball clicked against another. A faucet dripped in the stainless-steel sink. John Denver sang of country roads. For that terrible moment, time had stopped for Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern and for everyone in it.

Then the place exploded in noise and movement. Half a dozen men moved toward Hank. Most of the others looked around to make sure they had an unobstructed path to the exit. They did not want to run out and look like cowards, but they weren’t about to take on a crazy-acting 250-pound man armed with a broken bottle. Hank swung the jagged weapon in a face-level arc, and those who had started toward him thought better of it and backed off.

Hank spun away from them and went over the top of the bar in a ponderous roll. He got his feet under him and lumbered toward Vic. Snarling, he slashed out with the bottle. Vic managed to get his left arm up in front of his face. The sharp point of glass ripped along the meaty bottom of his forearm. Blood splashed on the bar, spattering the bottles ranged behind it and the startled drinkers on the other side.

Vic scrambled backward. Stransky, roaring like a bull, followed. Both men slipped and staggered on the blood and beer that soaked the duckboard flooring.

“Call the cops!” somebody yelled.

Vic managed to get out from behind the bar. He sidled along with his back against the wall, cradling his wounded arm.

Snorting and blowing like a maddened beast, his face a mass of running sores, Hank Stransky climbed back over the bar and rushed the people who had stood back watching. They fell away before him in a panic. One man’s face was laid open from eye to chin. Another was cut across the chest, staining his Green Bay Packers T-shirt a bright crimson.

Somebody ran forward with a pool cue. He swung it from the tip end, cracking the butt solidly on the side of Stransky’s head. The cue snapped in half. Hank Stransky continued to lunge and roar, giving no sign he had felt the blow.

The tavern was emptying fast as people scrambled over one another for the door. A few men stood their ground and tried to subdue the raging man. He flung them away like toys, slashing blindly around him with the jagged bottle.

Somebody threw a cue ball that cracked him hard just behind the ear. Hank only shook his head, spraying about the discharge from the suppurating sores on his face. His eyes rolled wildly, focusing on nothing. He continued the full-throated bellowing, and at last even the bravest of the tavern patrons retreated, leaving only Vic Metzger crouching at the end of the bar, trying to hold together his wounded arm. Stransky advanced on him.

By the time Corey Macklin reached the tavern, the customers were ranged outside in a wide semicircle that was growing fast as others arrived to watch, attracted by the commotion.

Corey’s first thought was that a bomb had gone off inside. At least two men were lying on the pavement being attended by others. There were more injured and bleeding, but with all the milling around, he could not estimate the number. In the distance a siren brayed, coming closer.

Even as the crowd yammered and surged around him, Corey began mentally composing the lead to his story.

Tragedy struck a quiet neighborhood tavern last night as [fill in later] people were injured in sudden explosive violence.

“What happened?” he asked a man with an expanse of belly hanging over his belt.

“Guy went crazy.”

“Somebody inside the tavern?” Corey dug into his pocket for the wad of copy paper he always carried.

“Yeah. I was just havin’ a beer, talkin’ to my buddy, and this guy cracks a bottle and starts yellin’. Most god-awful noise I ever heard.”

“Who was it? Did you know him?”

“I seen him here before a few times. Never knew his name.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like a crazy man. Shit, if you really want to know, he’s still in there.”

Corey edged closer to the open door and looked inside. Barstools were upended, and pool balls and cues littered the floor, along with glasses, bottles, and other debris. The hardwood floor was wet with spilled beer and liquor and bright splashes of blood.

He recognized Vic standing against the far wall, hunched over, his arms across his chest and the front of his shirt a sopping scarlet. A thick-bodied man waving a broken beer bottle was walking unsteadily toward him.

“Hey!” Corey yelled.

The lurching man with the beer bottle paid no attention, but Corey saw Vic’s eyes flick toward him, terrified, beseeching.

Corey grabbed a bottle from the floor and sent it spinning toward Vic’s assailant. It struck him in the middle of the back with a hollow-sounding thump. The man grunted, stopped, and turned slowly around.

Corey’s stomach lurched at what he saw. The man’s eyes, shot through with blood, bulged from their sockets. His face was a mass of oozing sores. Behind one ear grew a fist-sized lump the color of eggplant. The sounds he made were something between a growl and a sob. He took a step toward Corey.

Outside, the bray of the siren died abruptly. Brakes squealed.

The man gripping the bloody beer bottle began a crazy pirouette in the center of the littered tavern floor. He clapped both hands to his leaking head, mindless of the glass shards that sliced into his face. His high-pitched, almost female scream continued as two policemen burst in behind Corey and stopped as though they had hit a wall.

“Mother of God, what is it?” said one of the policemen.

The stricken man continued to spin and scream for several seconds; then his knees buckled, and he went down. His bowels let go and added to the mess on the floor.

The policemen stood transfixed, guns drawn. The one who had spoken shifted the revolver to his left hand and crossed himself.

The body jerked and flopped for another ten seconds; then, with a final spine-cracking convulsion, it lay still.

The policemen approached warily. One of them reached down with great reluctance and put his fingers on the man’s throat. After several seconds he snatched his hand back with obvious relief.

“He’s dead.”

“Thank God,” muttered the other.

Corey moved over to where Vic Metzger still stood leaning against the wall. Vic’s forearm was open in a long, jagged slash. Corey grabbed a bar towel and pressed it over the wound.

“This man needs medical help,” he told the policemen.

“Ambulance coming,” one of them said. Neither could immediately pull his eyes away from the dead man.

“What happened, Vic?” Corey asked. “Who was he?”

A little of the color returned to Vic’s face. “Hank Stransky,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Comes in here a lot. Never caused any trouble before. He acted kind of funny tonight, but I didn’t think much of it. Said he had a headache. Then things started happening to his face….”

Vic broke off in a shudder that racked his whole body. Corey was busy taking notes in his personal shorthand.

“What’s that about the face?” he said.

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Big red patches came out. Then they got all lumpy.”

Corey looked back at the still figure on the floor. “Are you talking about those sores on his face?”

“They weren’t there when he came in. Shit, I wouldn’t serve anybody looked like that. The things just broke through the skin while I was watchin’. Horrible.”

Vic shuddered again. A young man in a white jacket came in carrying a medical case. Corey moved away and let him attend to Vic’s arm.

The crowd outside had doubled since the arrival of the police and ambulance. Two more police cars had arrived, and uniformed officers were keeping people away from the entrance and taking names. The injured had been separated, and the situation seemed under control. No one thought to ask Corey what he was doing inside.

With no one paying him any attention, he stepped carefully through the mess on the floor back to the telephone on the wall by the men’s room. He dropped in a coin and punched out the number of Jimbo Tattinger, the photographer who had worked with him on the tit story. The phone was picked up on the first ring.

“I’m on my way, sugar pie. Just hold your — ”

“How about changing your plans, sweet lips?”

“What? Who is this? Macklin? What’s the idea?”

“I want you and your camera at Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern right now.”

“Are you crazy? I got a date.”

“Fuck your date.”

“That’s my plan.”

“Listen, shithead, there’s a story down here with picture possibilities that will get us a wire-service pickup or I’ll kiss your ass.”

“No use trying to sweet-talk me.”

“Just get here.”

“I’m on my own time.”

“I’ll pay you out of my own pocket, for Christ’ sake.”

“Overtime?”

“Oh, shit yes. Are you coming down here, or am I coming there to rip your lungs out?”

“Okay, hotshot. Where are you, exactly?”

Corey gave Jimbo the address, had him read it back, then went out to talk to the cops and the witnesses. He was actually excited about a story. It was almost like the good old days.