Drabblecast 496 – Sundays with Pop-Pop

By Zachary Olson

Pop-Pop’s cabin lay on unincorporated land just across the county line. Calling it a cabin is a bit of a misnomer; really, it’s a mansion. An anemic, bootstrapped, sprawling one, but a mansion nonetheless. A winding gravel path welded it to State Route 336 like a taxidermied limb. Getting from the property’s edge to the house itself was nearly twenty minutes on its own–the path was made of hairpin turns. The kind of place that radiated “get the fuck away.”

Fit the man himself, I guess.

“It’s simple,” said Pop-Pop, all sharp edges and vacuum-packed bones. He wasn’t the kind of old man who got there with healthy eating and exercise. He’d gotten there with grit. “Every Sunday, something comes through the hedge. And every Sunday, you’re gonna kill it.”

He said it more than matter-of-fact. He said it word-of-God. Like we were talking about watering a houseplant or feeding a dog–and not something that required the shotgun he was holding out. I still took it, of course; that way, at least he didn’t have a shotgun.

“Used to be, we had a horn to call ‘em,” he continued, turning away and hobbling up the garden path behind the house. “Old tin thing, sounded like a dying goose. Charlie went and broke it, so now we wait old-fashioned-like.”

“Pop-Pop, what in the hell are you talking about? Why is Charlie in a wheelchair?”

“That’s the problem with your generation,” grumbled Pop-Pop. “Your ma never asked questions. Just did the job and left.” He snorted, hacked, spit a glob of something foul. “Doesn’t matter, anyways. Still gotta get done.” 

Behind the cabin stood an enormous wall of hedge. Fifteen feet high if I was six, thick as thieves and just as hard to see through. Crazy how you couldn’t see it from the drive.

(It sneaks up on you.)

I shook my head, cleared the weird thought that slithered through my inner airwaves. Even through my irritation, I couldn’t deny there was something… compelling about it.

Something ancient. `

Pop-Pop chuckled, wet and wheezy. He fished a battered pack of smokes out of his cargos and handed me a cig. “I figured you would feel it. Soldiers always feel it.”

“What is it?” I’d never smoked. I took the coffin nail regardless.

“Don’t rightly know,” said Pop-Pop. “Barbara, God rest her soul, said it was a border-line. That if anything got through, out into the world, that was it–zip, kaput. End of days, Ragnarok, shit like that.”

(The blasting of the horn. The opening of gates. A tidal wave of teeth and knives.)

I shook my head again. Pop-Pop tilted his.

“This is insane,” I said.

“World’s insane,” said Pop-Pop. “But at least the world’s still there.”

“And you think you’re to thank?”

“I know I am,” said Pop-Pop. He rictus-grinned around his cig. “Never let one past me.”

(A wall against a wall. A rock against a hard place.)

I didn’t bother shaking. “So, what? I just stand here and blast any rabbit I see?”

“Ain’t gonna be no rabbits,” said Pop-Pop. “Can’t you hear?”

I stopped short, halfway to a retort. I listened. It was spring in Tennessee, but the trees were full of nothing. No birds in the branches. No frogs in the ponds.

Nothing but me, the hedge, and Pop-Pop.

(Clever critters keep their distance. What does that make you?)

Pop-Pop stubbed his smoke against the hedge’s leaves. The slinky thoughts receded. “Chatty this week, ain’t you? Excited for the new blood?”

The branches rustled, heedless of the lack of wind.

Pop-Pop clapped his hands. “Alright, you know what to do. See you when it’s done.”

“What?” I jerked around to face him–I hadn’t realized I’d gotten so close to the hedge. “You’re gonna dump all that on me and leave?”

“Rams are at the Niners,” Pop-Pop shrugged. “The Corps ain’t teach you independence?”

And so he turned around and left.

The hedge rustled behind.

#

So, there I was. Gun in hand, perimeter ahead, a mission I only sort of understood.

Damn him, Pop-Pop was right. It was basically the Corps.

The hedge kept rustling. I kept on having slippery thoughts. They sounded like my own voice–with just a little bit more slickness. At the time, I couldn’t confidently clock them as something truly paranormal; everybody has intrusive thoughts, right? Little bits of savage kneejerk id–what if you swerved, what if you jumped, what if you threw your keys in the river?

(What if you blew the old man’s head off?)

On and on and on. I stood there from about nine-thirty, when Pop-Pop walked away, to three or four in the afternoon. Only muscles moving were my eyes, scanning that nearly endless green expanse for apocalyptic harbingers. Like Buckingham fuckin’ Palace.

And then a little kid stepped out. Couldn’t have been more than eleven, chubby cheeks and a stupid haircut that you know his mom picked out for him. He forced his way out through the bramble, cherubic face scored by a dozen tiny cuts. He looked up at me and whimpered.

“Please, sir, I’m lost. Do you know where my mama is?”

A thousand thoughts cracked through my head. Was this a trick–and if so, whose? Some fucked-up family rite of passage? (A lunatic idea.) But what about the inverse? That Pop-Pop had told the truth, and I needed to kill this kid to stop the world from ending? (Equally insane.)

My shotgun wavered in my hands. That was all it took.

The hedge was crafty, but it wasn’t patient.

The child’s face split open like a rotten pomegranate. Tendrils surged forth, sinuous and sloughing offal. They snaked around my wrists, my throat, tore the shotgun from my hands. Something wriggled in them, something dark and bulbous, crawling like molasses through a rubber hose. It poked out here and there, scratching down my arms. The tendrils flexed like razor wire, raising crimson trickles down their length.

Where chubby cheeks had been a moment earlier, prismatic bubbles roiled and popped. These glistening crystal membranes didn’t reflect my terror back at me. Alien landscapes wheeled within them, mirrors of another time, another place, of–

(Salvation.)

Damnation.

(Freedom.)

Destruction.

(Revelry.)

The end of things.

(The end of all.)

It choked(caressed) me, dragged me in(drew you closer for a kiss). The little boy’s esophagus, protruding like a skeeter’s beak, loomed up in my vision. I knew it meant to drain me dry, to (skin you like a buffalo and wear you like a suit, tee hee).

(We’re all so lonely on this side, won’t you be our friend? Won’t you let us come on over, O Red Rover, O Red Rover? Blood’s already on your hands–you’re Uncle Sam’s attack dog. Why not lay down on our lap? Why not be our pet? It’s getting pretty bad out there.)

(Let US have a turn.)

The needle was a centimeter from my eye when Pop-Pop put a bullet through its head. A clean shot, right between where the eyes would be–though with .30-06, there wouldn’t have been eyes regardless. The thing that came through the hedge squealed, seethed, dissolved into ammonia. I wrenched myself away from it, landing squarely on my ass in panting disbelief. Pop-Pop stood above me, Springfield smoking in his hand. He lit a cig and puffed.

“Well, maybe you’ll do better next week.”