Chp 5: Wastin’ Mama’s Good Sense

Howdy! Pirates of Appalachia is an epic absurdist satire releasing as a weekly serial. Think 2 parts Huck Finn, 1 part Slaughterhouse-Five, served with a punch to the face by A Boy Named Sue. This is a completed novel—not a work in progress. Learn more or start from the beginning via the buttons below. Happy pirating!

Previously on Pirates of Appalachia… While hillbilly handfishin’, Kohl was attacked by a sharkitten, losing his finger in the process. Afterwards, he attempted to propose to Daisy, but she didn’t seem to notice and returned to her trailer with a mysterious character she called “Pittsburgh”….

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TNT Woods

The Second Coming of Wheeling, Unincorporated West Virginia

Thursday, October 24, 5:15 P.M.

Running atop the trees and over the northern finger of Lake Dozmary, the stiff tube of the commuter shaft connecting the City of Cocks to Washington, Still United stretched like the bloated tube of a spent colostomy bag, and smelled only slightly better. As a solitary pod trudged along like a stubborn turd, hot gas eeked out from the vent on its rear, causing Kohl to retch. The smell brought back painful memories, and the stench of the CoC was just the beginning. Kohl squeezed his severed ring finger and the silver ring now embedded within it. The sharkitten fat had done a miraculous job of sealing his wounds, but when they’d tried to preserve his severed fingers with it, the fat had fused with the dead flesh and the ring, creating a Frankenstein’s monster finger, algae-green and disturbingly twitchy. He reckoned he would have to wait for the flesh to decay and release the ring before he could propose to Daisy again.

Kohl pinched his nipple and stared down into the hollow where Daisy’s shack lay, her glow stabbing out of its cracks as she fritted about inside. He was certain the man in the gimp mask was still inside. Pittsburgh, the Steel City, the City of Bridges, the City of Cocks. It was all a lie. The only steel he had seen was the inside of a shaft, as blank and expressionless as the people in the bays waiting to board. The only bridges he had seen were covered in tents, broken down cars, and murderous little folk who refused to let him cross. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen any cocks—they at least would have been human.

He’d never had any inclination to stuff himself up the city’s mud crack, but that’s what Mama had always wanted, and being in love with a girl in love with things, he figured it was his best shot at riches, at least until Mama was dead and gone. But his time in the city had taught him only one thing: he was going to be dead and gone if he ever set foot there again. The city was death, not treasure. But if he could get ahold of that map. If he could find that treasure and brew the Devil’s Lightning, he could break the steel, collapse the bridges, and blow the cocks away!

He could bring the entire city to heel.

And then he would be the one in Daisy’s trailer.

“Hoot, hoot,” called a nearby owl.

Kohl looked up and was certain for a moment that he was looking at the hunched, black figure of the Mothman. But as his eyes adjusted he was greeted by Keet’s familiar, crooked grin. He perched in the tree with his knees up to his chin, a branch of indigo leaves shimmering like a string of toxic tea lights beside him.

Kohl said, “What in the jeepers are ya doing up there?”

Keet teetered further up the branch, his eyes darting down into the hollow, past Daisy’s shack. Following his line of sight, Kohl laughed. “I reckon we’re both up here looking for our white whales. This is the time of day Alfreda journals, so good luck spotting her leaving our trailer.” He spat on a baby white ash tree, its trunk making it no more than two feet high before twisting back into the earth as if hiding its face in the clay. “Git on down here. Let’s go wastin’ before we freshen up for supper.”

Keet examined the encroaching shadows of night and shook his head.

“Oh come on, bird. What are the odds of you getting lost in the woods again? Especially when it glows. Ain’t nothing to be afraid of.”

Chewing his lip, Kohl squeezed the quickly hardening finger—he reckoned there was one thing to be afraid of, and they were both busy fearing it in their own ways. Wind gusted, the luminous leaves tink-tinking like wind chimes. Biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, Kohl tossed the finger up in the air and tilted his head back as if he were going to catch it with his mouth. He considered doing just that if only to lie to himself that he could live without marrying that infernal woman, but gravity be damned: his ring finger did not return. He looked about, confused, his confusion only growing when he looked directly into the elephant-sized face of a black panther crouched in the tree adjacent to Keet.

“Daisy’s been asking for one of you,” Kohl said, a sinister smirk cracking his face as he reached for his hunting knife with his good hand. The beast’s yellow eyes locked on Kohl with malice so cold and ancient it predated language, and as it inhaled, its body grew larger, rippling muscles and black fur transforming into gossamer phantasm and bitter rage. Shivers raced across Kohl’s body as it smiled, revealing his finger and Daisy’s ring clutched between pearly white teeth. The next instant it bound into shadow and was gone.

Breath punched him in the chest like a hammer. “My ring,” he gasped. “That fucking… phantasmapanther… took my ring.”

Keet didn’t make a peep. He just bobbed his head and blinked, snot dribbling from his nose and his eyes as wide as the night.

“Come on, bird!” Kohl jumped into his Jeep Wrangler and jerked the stick into drive. “I’ve told ya before, buddy—I am the hills. Ain’t nothin’ bad can happen to us here. Git in.”

With a flutter of nerves, Keet descended the tree and dropped into the passenger seat as graceful as a bird. Kohl stepped on the gas, and the Jeep screamed into gear, kicking up a wave of mud behind them. Up ahead, he could just make out the phantasmapanther bounding from tree to tree like an unbound shadow.

“It’s heading for the dump,” Kohl said as they bent around a grove of radiumgum trees. Ahead, the beast’s shadow took on a spiked countenance as it burst into the clearing like a wrecking ball. A rainbow of irradiated mud arched through the sky as the beast scampered into the toxic waste dump, slipping and sliding as if it were trying to skate across a petroleum jelly factory.

“Now we’ve got it,” Kohl said, chewing his lip. “It ain’t built for wastin’ like we are. After we collar it, I reckon we can feed it Mr. Pittsburgh for supper. Kill two birds with one stone.”

Keet shot him an anxious look.

“It’s just a saying.”

Located sixty miles from the Independent City of Pittsburgh in the unincorporated area consisting of the former state of West Virginia’s northern panhandle, the Second Coming of Wheeling holds the honorable distinction of being the spot of the first Human Waste Dump in the Shattered Lands of North America, the dumps becoming necessary due to the large number of folks who could no longer afford burials or cremations and who couldn’t sell their bodies to cadaver brokers. But bodies weren’t the only things that required dumping, and a Toxic Waste Dump soon followed, making Wheeling a popular Halloween destination for teenagers from the City of Cocks on account of the way the toxic waste made the skeletons glow and kept the fresh corpses warm for folk who didn’t often get to use their cocks. The boom didn’t last, however, as the interstate road systems fell into disrepair and common folks no longer ventured outside of the city in anything other than tubes or helicopters, leaving the double-dump for Kohl and Keet to use for their favorite pastime of “wasting,” an activity similar to mud bogging, only performed in the radioactive muds of the double-dump and usually resulting in a week’s-worth of glowing laser-piss.

The Jeep jolted over a knot of roots and careened into the double-dump, jettisoning the passenger side door and groaning like a hound dog during a botched coloscopy. Fortunately, Kohl had harvested tires from the neighborhood junkyard a week prior, so besides the tires being bald and of three different sizes, the Jeep handled remarkably well and they quickly gained on the beast, gyrating and shuddering, hooping and hollering, toxic sludge splashing through the missing door’s opening until Keet was covered neck to toe, grinning his beaky grin with eyes so wide you could see the flame of desire refracted within.

“Caw, Caw!” he cried as they skidded around a tower of skeletons shining like a neon sign promoting late-night buffalo wings and bare thighs.

Kohl stepped on the gas and the Jeep lurched forward, gears grinding. As they pulled up next to the beast, it turned a malevolent eye on him and panted an icy breath. He shivered, momentarily frozen in place; then, with an unnaturally quick whip of the neck, the phantasmapanther snapped at the Jeep, knocking it momentarily onto two wheels and tearing off the drive side mirror. Heat poured down Kohl’s neck and shoulder, and his vision swam.

“Cluck, cluck, cluck!”

Kohl turned to see Keet perched in the passenger seat, pointing frantically behind them. He shook his head in an attempt to regain his bearings and checked the rear-view mirror. There was the beast, an iceberg of black paws and yellow eyes, swatting at the back of the Jeep as if it were a ball with a bell inside. The back-passenger side tire blew, and then the driver’s side. The Jeep fishtailed, kicking up phosphorescent skeletons. A neon pink skull caught the phantasmapanther in the left eye, and it yelped in an eerily human, almost German-accented way. Kohl attempted to flip-a-bitch to press their advantage, but they side-swiped an outcrop of fresh corpses and careened into a spin, blanketing the Jeep in glowing mud and human remains. They came to a stop just in time to see the phantasmapanther bound into a nearby ravine.

Kohl expelled a long-held breath, heat still pouring down the back of his neck. Inspecting himself in the rear-view mirror, he realized that not only had the beast stolen his ring finger, but it’d taken the bottom half of his left ear too.

Keet uncorked a squirt bottle, the familiar scent of sharkitten fat filling the cabin.

“I reckon a little fat won’t hurt,” Kohl said, applying it to the wound. “We’re going to be frying me up for supper ’fore long.”

Kohl chewed his lip and considered their options. By some miracle of hillbilly charm, they’d survived two encounters with the phantasmapanther, but it was getting late, he’d lost a lot of blood, Mama had forbidden him from pestering the shapeshifting ghosts of the forest, and Daisy was getting hungry. Maybe they were better off heading back and tending to supper…

The earth grumbled.

No, it didn’t grumble—it purred.

Purred like a cat awfully content with itself.

Purred like a challenge.

Kohl stepped on the gas.

“Cluck, cluck, cluck!”

The Jeep sputtered forward, blowing another tire and vomiting a dragon’s tail of viscous black smoke. The boys’ heads bobbled and their teeth chattered as they mounted a small hill and pitched down into the ravine. But instead of the sprawling meadow leading back to TNT Woods Kohl had expected, they were confronted by a thin but deep gulley. He jerked the wheel, and the Jeep rocked this way and that but no way to safety.

They crashed into the gulley like a chunked punkin. Everything went black, and when Kohl awoke they were corked into the entrance of an underground barn. It would’ve looked like your quintessential red roof barn if not for the roof being constructed of red clay and glowing mud; from within, he could hear roosters and chickens rustling and another noise that sounded like whispering, or hissing.

Kohl spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth. “Crappalachia—what the hell is a barn doing here?”

“Tweet-tweet,” Keet chirped softly, prying his face from the dashboard.

The Jeep was burrowed halfway through the barn’s white picket doors, creating a fissure of black like a faultline leading inside. Kohl examined the threshold, the rustling from within the barn and within himself beckoning him forward. But knowing Keet’s longstanding aversion to anything subterranean, be it holes, wells, or caves, he knew it would take some convincing.

“What do you suppose is inside?”

“Caw, caw.”

Kohl chewed his lip. “The family automobile’s wrecked. Now I don’t have a dowry for Dasiy. I wonder if there’s something inside we can redisposition?”

Not a peep.

With a light laugh, he turned to his oldest pal. “You know Alfreda fancies herself a writer but never fancies she has anything to write about. You bring her back a fancy story—” Kohl licked his bloody lips—“I reckon she may fancy you.”

Keet peered into the darkness, his skin undulating with the same color pattern as the radioactive mud still clinging to his arms and neck. When he turned back to Kohl, his jaw was set and his eyes were as clear as a spring sky. The stench of decaying flesh and ammonia wafted from the opening and stuck to the air like flies in ointment, and the cracked barn doors rattled like they were shivering. With a mutual swallow, both boys turned towards their fate.

“Ain’t nothing suspicious about a foul smell and rattling,” Kohl said, climbing through the shattered windshield and into the darkness. “The things we do for love, aye, Keet.”