FICTION BY TRAVIS LEE

Travis Lee is the author of several books, including Irish Lightning and Letters from a Dead Mentor. His work has appeared in The Writing Disorder and The Colored Lens, among other places. He currently lives in San Diego.

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JOEY’S INITIATION
by Travis Lee

Saturday afternoon, Joey decided he wanted to join in the next robbery.

Joey’s brother and his two cousins were playing poker in the garage, as they always did on Saturday afternoon. Joey opened the door without knocking and told them he wanted in.

“You do?” Eli asked from the card table, lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Take a drag before you get ash on my table,” Brian said, not looking up from his cards.

“And what if I do?”

“I’ll make you lick it up.” Brian lowered his hand, facedown, and regarded Joey. The leader of the gang since their dad passed, Brian had cold eyes, and little time for bullshit. Tattoos formed a crude tapestry of skulls and flames starting from his left wrist and ending with a topless Virgin Mary on his shoulder, an arrow covering his right forearm, the tip piercing his wrist. Joey hated needles but knew if he wanted to join he’d have to get some artwork too.

“I’m ready,” Joey said.

Brian didn’t blink and his expression didn’t change. As went Brian’s opinion, so did the opinions of the other two. Eli wisely took a drag of his cigarette, a long drag, flicking the ashes into a chipped glass.

They went on playing cards while Joey stood in the doorway. Light withdrew from the edges of the garage door and only after Eli got up to switch on the light did Brian speak again.

“You’re still here.”

“Sure am,” Joey confirmed.

“Go get the Maker’s Mark.”

Joey scurried off. The house was one-story, in a San Diego neighborhood that would resist gentrification with its dying breaths. Their father passed away years ago, his Navy pension supporting them while Brian and the cousins hatched robberies, and Brian and Joey’s mother died slowly in her room, posting memes on Facebook all day.

Joey opened the cabinet above the sink and returned to the garage with a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He set it on the table.

Joey poured the glasses, Brian’s first, his own last.

“Smart boy like you can do anything,” Brian said. “Become a doctor. A teacher. Hell, a Wall Street trader, which is only a little less illegal than what we do.”

“I want in the family business.”

Brian slapped his cards face down on the table. “We only hit small businesses. Safer that way.” He nodded at Joey’s glass. “Drink. No stopping.”

Joey raised the glass. He’d been drinking since eighth grade, not beer, not Mike’s Hard Lemonade like those precious sissies whose parents pulled them out of the Lincoln Heights school system prior to high school and found them a safer, softer high school to go to. Not everyone could handle this life and Joey had watched his father, then his brother get rich and live life on their own terms.

He downed the entire glass and slapped it on the table.

“Well?” Joey said.

“Get in the car,” Brian told him.

Joey rode in the back seat of the Camaro. The car had belonged to Joey and Brian’s father. Now Brian sat behind the wheel and he pointed out the donut shop as they passed it.

It was a small donut shop, King Donut in pink letters. Shades drawn over the windows. The door listed their hours and Joey had to squint to see it.

“Tell me what you think about that place,” Brian said.

“But we didn’t stop,” Joey said.

They rolled up to a red light. Brian said, “Now we’ve stopped. What did you learn?”

“It’s a donut shop. Um, the shades are drawn.”

“Parking lot,” Chance whispered.

“Not many cars. No cars, not now anyways.”

“Anyone inside?” Chance asked.

“Hard to see with the shades.”

The light changed to green, and they didn’t move.

“Shouldn’t we—?” Joey began, and Brian’s voice derailed his words.

“How long do you think we’ve been scoping out this place?”

“I don’t know. Weeks?”

“That’s right. We drive by every so often, and we don’t slow down. Do you know why?”

Joey swallowed. Brian took after their dad in his approach to people while Joey took after their mother. Dad used to call Joey a fairy, too soft to be a man, and Joey knew if he didn’t answer quick, Brian would think the same and yesterday would be all for nothing.

“Because you don’t want to be recognized.”

Chance hooted. “I think he’s learning, I think he is.”

The light changed to yellow, and Brian tore through the intersection.

Over the next week, they picked different days. Mondays, Tuesdays…Friday morning, weekend mornings the busiest. Joey memorized every detail and while some things changed, one constant remained.

“There’s people inside,” Joey said as they idled in the corner of an El Super parking lot. A few spaces away, a homeless man was digging through trash bags in his cart.

“How many?” Brian asked from the driver’s seat.

Joey squirmed. He’d been dreading this question. With the shades pulled shut, all Joey could see were shoes and the first several times he hadn’t seen anyone. It had taken constant trips, the same sights minus the number of cars, for Joey to pick up on the other details.

Brian tapped the steering wheel. He was growing impatient.

Joey said, “Three.”

“Are you sure?”

With his brother, Joey knew the best answer to that question wasn’t yes. He repeated himself, “Three.”

“What’s the best time to hit?”

And at this, Joey didn’t hesitate. “Sunday night.”

“Why Sunday night?”

“No one’s ever there. We hit at closing time. They’ll never suspect it and we’ll be in and out in five minutes.”

“There’s things we never suspect too,” Brian said. In the rearview, the homeless man pushed his cart across the parking lot, legs wobbly. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

Brian said nothing further. Chance hooted and clapped Joey on the shoulder.

*****

Sunday night arrived.

King Donut closed at ten and Brian laid it all out the day before: Brian would grab the cash, Chance and Joey would handle the customers, and Eli was the driver.

On the drive to King Donut, Chance leaned across the backseat and lowered his voice, “Usually people are smart enough to listen to guys with guns. Sometimes though, you get one of these assholes wants to be a hero. What you do is simple: jab him in the chest with the butt of your gun.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Now, if that don’t do the trick, then you can—”

“Shut up,” Brian said. He didn’t raise his voice, and he didn’t need to. Chance and Joey sat up straight. “We’re not in the business of killing people. That’s why we choose the little shops.”

They pulled in behind King Donut and everyone got out of the car.

They crept to the door, Brian first, Joey behind him and Chance bringing up the rear. Brian timed it using an old-fashioned timer; they left their phones at home. The bell on the door clanged as they barged in, ski masks concealing their faces.

Chance shouted this was a robbery and Joey’s legs tingled. This was it, he was finally here. With his heart racing, Joey pulled his gun from his waistband.

Brian trained a 9 mm on the cashier and slapped a grocery bag on the counter. “Empty your register.”

The cashier didn’t appear rattled. “We ain’t got but five hundred bucks, maybe five oh one if you wanna be specific.”

Brian remained calm, too, as he repeated, “Empty the register.”

The cashier opened the register and grabbed the grocery bag.

Joey turned to Chance, who was holding the three regular customers at bay with a shotgun. The three men occupied a table by the window holding styrofoam cups of coffee. No steam rose from their cups and the men wore faded clothes, their bellies putting distance between them and the table. The one closest to the window wore a USS Midway cap and he watched a television bolted into the wall above a gumball machine, the Weather Channel predicting overnight fog and a cool morning.

The cashier stuffed the cash in the grocery bag, and Joey was amazed at Brian’s calm. Beside the register the donuts were on display and Joey had to admit, King Donut did have a great selection of donuts. All these local places put the Krispy Kremes and Dunkins of the world to shame.

Suddenly Joey heard Chance yell, “Hey! Sit down!”

The man with the Midway hat approached Chance, and Chance poked him in the chest with the barrel of his shotgun. “Sit down now!”

The other two rose. Joey’s heart pounded, his breaths short, his fingers tingling. Part of him wanted to stay put, let them handle this. The other part, the one that had observed Brian and their father, the Joey who’d spent years thinking about this, knew what he had to do.

He stepped up beside Chance, gun raised.

“Sit down,” Joey said, his legs wobbling. “I’m going to—”

Joey had intended to make a threat. According to his brother, most people respected the threat of force and the threat was enough. No one wanted to lose their life over a couple hundred bucks. The man with the Midway cap tilted his head, eyes on the ceiling.

Midway Cap’s head kept tilting until it touched his back.

The USS Midway cap clattered on the floor.

Joey’s eyes bulged. He couldn’t look away. Midway Cap’s mouth opened and instead of teeth, there was a maw which spread so wide that the man’s mouth seemed to be cut off from the rest of his face, which became slack until his head hung like a loose cloth. A set of gum appendages ringed the edge of the maw, dangling…spreading down his gullet.

Joey’s hands were shaking, the gun loose in his fingers. He couldn’t move.

The creature tackled Chance and buried its maw in his gut. Chance’s face went slack as color fled his body, his arms limp, as the creature began slurping—great pops followed by long periods of sucking.

It was Brian’s voice that broke Joey’s trance. “Go! Go!”

Brian slapped Joey and they ran for the door. Eli in the car was supposed to only wait five minutes. After that, he would dispose of the car and lay low until Brian contacted him.

One of the other men stepped in front of the door to block any escape. The man gave Joey a push. Joey fell down and his gun went skipping across the shop floor.

Brian yanked Joey up by the arm and started to run toward the back. The emergency exit—Joey figured that’s where they were going. His bigger brother would get them out of this, he always did, and Joey would simply tag along, the little brother. 

But Brian only made it two steps before freezing in place, and his last look at Joey was not of confidence but of confusion.

“Brian?” Joey freed his arm from his brother’s fingers, leaving behind imprints on his forearm. He slapped Brian’s face. “What the hell’re you doing? C’mon.”

And then the cashier came out from behind the counter, his skin shimmering like lake water at sunrise. His shirt was torn in half and hung ragged from his shoulders, a stinger rising from his back, coated in translucent scales under which thick veins pulsed with the poison powering this thing’s system. Green swallowed the man’s eyes in a color like puddles of bile, his skin hardening into a carapace the color of a bruise. His arms fell limp at his sides. Two appendages burst from his shirt, two more, rocketing free in concussive blasts.

Trembling violently, Joey set one foot back. He turned to flee. But the stinger jabbed him in the spine.

The comfort of a warm bath spread through his body. He struggled to get his feet going, his arms pumping. Only his eyes wouldn’t refuse him and these felt droopy; he wanted to sleep. Brian! Brian, go! his brain silently screamed. But it wasn’t a command, it was a plea. Nobody could take down his big brother. Joey watched Brian, frozen in place.

He watched the other two customers lord over Chance.

The other two customers’ heads sagged down their backs, their maws expanding and contracting with a chill Joey could feel from where he stood. They joined the other creature in feasting upon Chance’s gut.

The cashier rushed over to them, something ballooning under his shirt, and he snapped his stinger at them.

“Get off!” he commanded. “Save some for later, you beasts.”

When the creatures released Chance, one of them shrieked. It pierced Joey’s ears as he watched Chance’s eyes rolling into the back of his head. His last sight of Chance was his stomach, his large intestine dangling gray and wormlike over his hips.

Another prick in Joey’s spine. His eyelids drooped even more, heavier now, but before he blacked out, he tried to call out to his brother for help…from lips that no longer served him.

*****

Joey came to in the dark; too dark to see anything.

He attempted to raise his arms and legs, but each time something unseen brought them crashing back down. He realized that he was attached to something, preventing him from getting up. It felt elastic, giving him the ability to move slightly, but pulling him back when he went too far.

And then he heard, “Joey? Is that you?”

“Brian.” Joey lay still. “Where are you?”

“Over here.”

“Where?”

“Your left, I think.”

Joey turned his head to the left—it was as good a direction as any. “Where are we?”

Before he could receive an answer, a light came on and Joey saw that he was in the stock room of the donut shop. The object to which he was attached began to vibrate and the vibrations coursed through Joey’s body. Sharp tingles channeled from his head to his crotch; his shoulders to his fingers, hips to his toes. He winced and the vibrations dwindled, the last one passing through hiss big toe.

A presence loomed over him and Joey closed his eyes, becoming as still as possible. The presence lingered over him for a long time while Joey pretended to be dead, or at least unconscious. Perhaps if the presence received no reaction from him, it would lose interest.

But instead, the presence spoke. “You’re awake,” the cashier said.

“We weren’t going to—”

“Shhhh,” and the cashier pressed an appendage onto Joey’s mouth; not quite a finger, not quite a claw. “I offered your cousin to my spawnlings. Had no choice. All his best parts were already gone.”

Joey closed his eyes once again. Another appendage stroked his cheek and Joey knew if he opened his eyes he could gaze into the horrific nature of this creature. He was not Brian and never had his brother’s courage. There was only so much he could face.

“Sometimes we have to deceive your kind.” The appendage traced a crooked path down Joey’s chest. “But sometimes you come right to us.”

The appendage stopped at Joey’s crotch. It rested there.

Joey whimpered, a single word escaping his lips. “No.”

“Have you any questions for me?”

The single word escaped his lips again. “No.”

“I think you will.” The appendage left his crotch and the vibrations resumed and only when they were gone did the fetid stench of urine reach Joey’s nostrils.

*****

The storeroom was dark once again.

“Brian,” Joey said later when he figured they were alone. “Can you move?”

“Not really.”

“Do you…” He listened.

“Do I what?”

Joey listened further. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper, “Your knife?”

Brian didn’t answer. Joey stared in the direction where he thought his brother was, shapeless in the endless dark. As teenagers, Brian had caught on quicker than Joey. That’s why their father had favored him. The old man would never come out and say it, but Joey knew he suspected gay tendencies in his second-born son—one night, one of their few nights together, they watched a TV special where a son comes out to his construction worker father. Father and son embrace, and Joey’s father, then six PBRs deep but far from finished, said, “If that was me I’d beat the gay out of him.”

If that was me— but Joey couldn’t finish the sentence himself. The old man was set in his ways. He wouldn’t give up the drinking, ditto for the smoking, and it wasn’t Brian the favorite son who made the discovery but Joey, stumbling upon the old man in his man-cave, slumped in his rocking chair beneath his signed portrait of Stan Humphries, yellowish fluid drying in the corner of his mouth.

Brian said, “I can’t reach my knife.”

Joey closed his eyes and let out a moan, one of the old man’s tics. Brian might have been his favorite, but who also took after the old man? Effeminate or not, weak or not, Joey was just as much Donald’s son as was Brian.

“What are we gonna do?” Joey said. “Brian, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

Joey almost spoke, and thought better of it. He’d known his brother long enough to know they were thinking the same thing: Eli. Eli was long gone by now, and not coming back. He’d lay low for a while, checking the news, but when no news surfaced—no arrests, no missing persons reports—then what?

Joey moaned again. Eyes open, eyes closed, it made no difference.

The wetness in his crotch had dried and Joey tested out his bindings: arms, legs, body. Each moment triggered a tiny vibration in whatever held them and Joey lay still, thinking of the old man. Joey could see his body as clearly as that morning. The old man favored a red house robe, cotton slippers. If you didn’t know him you’d think he was sleeping, but the fluid. The smell. And Joey realized that dying peacefully was a myth. Brian said it at his funeral because you were supposed to say it, but both brothers knew different. No one died peacefully.

The tingles coursed through Joey’s body and he closed his eyes as the presence descended upon him once again. His mouth was dry, his stomach empty, and he wrinkled his nose against the phantom stench of his father’s corpse.

Suddenly the cashier was back, looming over him. “Is it Joey? You must be thirsty,” the cashier said. “You must be hungry.”

A scent closed in on Joey. He struggled not to breathe it in, but his lungs worked with a will all their own. He breathed it in. He smelled his dead father. But instead of feeling repulsed, he salivated.

“A feast,” the cashier said. “It can be yours. All you have to do is give me approval. Tell me to eat your brother. Only then will I trust you enough to set you free.”

Joey turned his head back and forth—he thrashed helplessly in his binds and said, “No.”

He stared at the cashier who no longer looked like a man. The thing had a definite shape. A round head, massive frame. Something like eyes regarded him. Joey forced himself not to shy away. “My brother runs things. He’s going places. Take me and let him go. He’ll never say a word, I promise.”

No response from the creature. Elsewhere—to his left, Joey was sure of it now—Brian was in tears, begging Joey not to do this. Joey was surprised. Wasn’t Brian the one who was most like their father? Mean and strong, that was their father. Selfish.

Joey forced himself to be strong—be a man, like his father would have said, be a man and though in his father’s eyes Joey would never be a man, Joey knew if his father could see him now, he’d be proud.

When Joey spoke next, there was no fear in his voice. “What are you waiting for? Take me, leave him alone.”

Brian’s begging faded to a background hum as something wrapped itself around Joey. Joey had time to process what it was: A cocoon, it’s a fucking cocoon. He drifted off into a peculiar and untroubled sleep, unaware that he was changing.

Suddenly he was awake once again; this time with a strange clarity. Joey awoke hungry.

He wasn’t quite himself. He felt alien yet better. Stronger. For one thing, he could move. For another, he knew what he stood on.

A web.

The man trapped in the web was his brother. Joey understood this. Brian, the man whose respect he’d sought even more than his father’s.

But he was also hungry.

Joey glided effortlessly across the web. His brother was begging, and when he started screaming, Joey didn’t hesitate; he didn’t stop. The web vibrated.

Soon, Joey was no longer hungry.

*****

A father and his son stop by a donut shop somewhere in southern San Diego. It’s a new shop, run by a young man, and as the son gawks at the donuts, the cashier comes around the counter.

“Nice donuts, aren’t they?” Joey says.

The boy’s caught off-guard—he’s been well-trained on stranger danger—but only at first. Joey places his hand on the glass beside the boy’s.

“I have some fresh donuts about to come out of the oven.”

The father comes their way.

“Why don’t you come back and give me a hand? There’ll be an extra dozen in it for you.”

The boy doesn’t answer, and Joey makes the same offer to the father. The man hems and haws, but when Joey throws in another dozen, he agrees.

Joey directs them to the back and he locks the door, flipping the Open sign to Closed. It took a big offer to entice the father, but it worked. After all, he’s hungry.

And so is Joey.