Excerpt - The Horror of Bryan Smith

This a sample from an original 10,000-word novelette entitled “Drive-Thru of the Dead”, exclusive to Patreon. To read more, visit Patreon from the links section of this site.

DRIVE-THRU OF THE DEAD
By Bryan Smith

Once upon a time in a shitty little southern town called Drayton Falls, a lot of fucked up shit happened. I phrase it that way because that’s how so many old-timey stories begin, but in truth the fucked up shit to which I refer has never been confined to a single brief or definable period. A lot of folks in these parts will tell you, in all seriousness, that Drayton Falls is cursed, and there are more stories purporting to explain the origins of the curse than there are stars in the sky. Some say the soil itself is tainted in some way, perhaps by all the innocent native blood spilled on it by settlers centuries ago.

Whatever the truth is, one thing is indisputable, and that’s that something is rotten in Drayton Falls. The entire history of the place is rife with tales of the weird and unexplainable, as well as the just plain fucked up as all get-out. At one point way back in the not-so-golden-olden days, things got so bad people took to calling it Drayton’s Folly, a monicker that for a while became so prevalent it even got printed on a number of semi-official maps around the turn of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the town is how, despite its less than shining reputation, it has not only persisted in existing but it actually thrives in a strange kind of half-assed way. You’d expect a bad luck burg like the one I’ve described to become a ghost town at some point, but the population as of the last census was just a shade under 20,000. Located in a valley smack in the middle of nowhere, it’s the biggest little town out there in the wide gulf between the big cities in this state. A lot of the town’s citizens grow up hating it, but not many of them leave, at least not for good. People get stuck in small town life, for better or worse, unable to imagine making it in the big, bad city.

I’ve lived in Drayton Falls all my life.

I know all its sordid stories and deep, dark secrets.

And this is one of them.

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Dave Shepherd was new to working the graveyard shift at Big Fiesta Burgers. He’d had no prior experience in the fast food industry, unless being a frequent customer counted, but he figured it’d be easy and that the biggest challenge he’d face would be dealing with stoner customers who got confused by the presence of “Fiesta” in the restaurant’s name and wanted to order tacos and burritos at 2:45 in the morning.

At no point prior to starting his first shift had he expected he’d spend so much of his time on the clock dealing with the living dead.

But we’re getting ourselves here.

We’ll get back to the reanimated dead folks soon enough, but first you’re gonna need to know a little more about our friend Dave.

Manning a late night drive-thru wasn’t the type of work Dave had envisioned as a career when he was younger. As a boy, he’d harbored the typical big dreams of being rich and famous some way or other, fantasies that for him most often centered around somehow becoming either a Hollywood action star or a homerun-hitting major league baseball player. For Dave, accomplishing these dreams was tragically compromised by a little thing called “reality”.

He possessed no thespian skills and wasn’t nearly good-looking enough to star in his cousin Billy’s backyard amateur camcorder movies, never mind headlining some million-dollar Hollywood special effects extravaganza. As for baseball, he’d never played the game in any type of organized league, not even Pee Wee, which as it turned out was a significant hindrance to his aspirations of becoming the next Babe Ruth. The time he tried out for the high school team without having previously played anything other than underhand pitch streetball would likely forever remain one of the most humiliating moments of his life. He was jeered off the field within minutes. Some of the real players threw things at him, hastening his tearful departure. Rocks, clumps of dirt, soda cans, nine-volt batteries, small kittens…whatever they could find.

This event so emotionally devastated him that he quit school rather than face the embarrassment of being subjected to the same ridicule every subsequent day until graduation. His parents were disappointed but not surprised. He begged them to move to another town so he could start over, but they told him they didn’t believe in his future enough to make the effort. His father told his poker buddies it’d be like investing in a company that’d already gone tits up. Dave was in the room when the old man said this. The way all those beer-bellied old assholes had laughed and laughed hadn’t been quite as humiliating as his baseball failure, not even when they made fun of him for crying, but it was a close thing.

His mom told him he needed to “toughen up” and advised joining the army. Dave gave it some thought. For about twenty minutes. He imagined being screamed at by a hard-as-nails drill sergeant like that dude in Full Metal Jacket and realized he just wasn’t cut out for serving his country.

Instead he applied for a job at a car wash, and when he was hired the next day, he felt a thrill of accomplishment for one of the few times in his life. He beamed with pride as he announced the news to his parents, who both made fun of him for acting like he’d just gotten into Harvard or hired on with Microsoft.

By then he knew it was pointless to seek their approval for anything he did. He moved out and rented a room above the garage of the car wash owner’s house, a roach-infested space that wasn’t connected to the central HVAC. It was too cold in winter and sweltering in summer. Nonetheless, he lived there for two and a half years…until the car wash went out of business, sending Dave into a mad scramble for new gainful employment.

At first he had no luck at all in this pursuit. He filled in dozens of job applications all around town. Weeks passed, then months. His meager savings from the car wash job ran out, resulting in his eviction from the gross garage apartment. His parents again exhibited nothing but scorn and laughter when he begged to move back in. What made this extra galling was the surprise return of his older brother to the old homestead.

Dave had last seen Gary Shepherd right before he was sent off to prison for mutilating cattle and then fornicating with the remains while under the influence of Belgian toad venom, which was tons more potent than ordinary toad venom. Dave hadn’t even known Gary was getting paroled. He was just there when he showed up, hanging out on the back patio with a live chicken held in his lap in a way that struck Dave as troublesome given Gary’s sordid history with farm animals. Gary wasn’t even gainfully employed yet and their parents were letting him stay with them. They just felt so sorry for their oldest and believed he needed time and space to heal from the trauma of incarceration.

The family didn’t need another leech.

Dave was told to take a hike.

His dad and brother threw beer cans at him as he made his sullen way down the driveway to his 1977 Ford Pinto, which now doubled as his new home. Just as things looked their bleakest—and as he was contemplating a possible career as probably the world’s least popular male prostitute—Dave walked into Big Fiesta Burgers and was hired on the spot by Randall “Hacksaw” Farnsworth, the manager of the franchise. No one he spoke to admitted to knowing why he was called Hacksaw and other employees advised Dave not to ask.

He was told he could start that night. They needed someone on the overnight shift because most of the staff had quit the night before. Another, less desperate person might have thought twice before accepting a position at a joint where the turnover rate was higher than that of the death row at a Texas penitentiary, but by that point Dave’s funds were down to the handful of change in his pocket. He couldn’t even afford a quart of beer without bankrupting himself. He was three hours into his first shift when he had his first truly strange interaction with a customer.