Devil's Hopper

       Jim Stallings

2    Devil's Hopper

The babies were crying in the woods and staggering like zombies toward Lucky Taylor. Sure it was a dream or at least he hoped it was. Maybe he needed to uri­nate. Just wake up for God’s sake. But here they came. Naked rubber babies. Burned into grisly dark colors, like bruised souls. The dump back of the Bakerville Toy Factory where he was foreman…well sort of. Still he had responsibili­ties. He had to do something. This residential community in Marktree, Massachusetts, an old suburban town west of Boston. These were upstanding, hardworking middle class folk. They wouldn’t put up with zombie babies invad­ing their overpriced ranchers and extended capes. What with the inanities of cable TV he knew these babies intended serious harm to living families. Thrown out as defectives by the earlier generations running the Bakerville outfit. And out­fit in the gang sense, Lucky meant.

“We know, we know!” the babies cried from the swamp, the wetlands where there was a stand of bamboo, where deer still infiltrated from the thick brush near the town reservoir.

“What do you know?” Lucky yelled back at the end of the paved road fading into the wetlands, squared off by a public garden walk.

He could see their gnarled heads bobbing in the murky light. A phosphores­cence violet in aspect befitting their electric natures. This was bad. Real bad. Lucky a middle-aged Anglo-Irish male, with moderate exercise and a few carloads of cigarettes and a tank car of spirits behind him in a life of moderate self-denial…felt a shortness of breath as he advanced toward the babies.

“We know, we know!” the babies chorused.

“What? What do you know?” Lucky cried out and sank to his knees on the mucky ground.

They came right up to him with their bug eyes and their filthy bodies. “We know everything!” they said and reached forward to feel him up.

That’s when Lucky awoke in a total sweat. His heart pounding, his own eyes bugging into the purple depths of his bedroom.

His long time partner Jewel Hunnecutt was propped up with her finger pok­ing him.

“You’re driving me nuts! You’ve been raving again. You’ll wake up the neighbors.”

Lucky climbed from the bed and in his boxers staggered to the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face. The night-light was a pirate ship and it seemed to wink with evil rays. There was more than enough light to make him look like a derelict with baggy eyes and a face frightened by age, mortality and hopelessness. This is me, Lucky wondered, and tapped the mirror.

Devil's Hopper

Copyright © 2004 Jim Stallings. All rights reserved.
Maintained by R M Stelting.
Updated: 04 February, 2008