The Summer I Died: A Thriller Read online

  The Summer I Died: A Thriller

  Ryan C. Thomas Cody Goodfellow

  Coscom Entertainment (2009)

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  Rating: ★★★★☆

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  ****}}36 So much screaming.

  Roger Huntington is home from college for the summer, and he and his best friend, Tooth, can’t wait to start having fun. It’s going to be a summer full of beer, comic books, movies, laughs, parties and maybe even girls.

  So much pain.

  The sun is high and the sky is clear as Roger and Tooth set out to shoot beer cans at Bobcat Mountain. Just two friends catching up on lost time, two friends thinking about their futures, two friends—

  So much blood.

  —suddenly thrust in the middle of a nightmare. Forced to fight for their lives against a sadistic killer. A killer with an arsenal of razor-sharp blades and a hungry dog.

  So much death.

  If they are to survive, they must decide: are heroes born, or are they made? Or is something more powerful happening to them? And more importantly, how do you survive when all roads lead to . . . death!

  Review

  "A tense, bloody ride!" - Brian Keene

  "A down and dirty drive-in splatfest, 70s style!" - HorrorDrive-In.com

  "This book is everything you wish Hostel was!" - Horrorwatch.com

  "Thomas may very well be the next big name in extreme horror." - Hellnotes

  "This book hooked me in hard. I blazed through it, loving every minute of it." - Creature Corner.com

  "The Summer I Died is one wicked trip through man-made hell and I was glad I hitched a ride." - Insidious Reflections

  "This novel takes us deep into the bowels of hell where Thomas doesn�t hold any punches." - SciFiHorrorBooks.com

  "Keeps you in suspense and keeps the pages flying." - Horror-Web.com

  "Sharp and ingenious and a whole lot of fun. Ryan C. Thomas is not just a writer to watch, but one that has already hit a stride that most others at their own game should envy." - HorrorDrive-In.com

  "I loved this book . . . it makes an Eli Roth film look like Sesame Street." - OzHorrorScope.com

  "A hell of a promising beginning from a hell of a writer." - WretchedAndViolent.com

  "My muscles were actually sore the day after I finished reading this book because I was so tensed up." - Multiverse Reviews

  "The most brutal story I've experienced since Poppy Brite's Exquisite Corpse. When you think the author can't wring any more raw energy out of a situation, just turn the page and things spiral even deeper into anguished pain." - John Sunseri, editor/author

  "I have never flinched so much while reading a book. An excellent, nasty little book. I loved it!" - Desmond Reddick, Dread-Media.com (podcast 72)

  THE SUMMER I DIED

  by

  RYAN C. THOMAS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-926712-06-2

  THE SUMMER I DIED

  Copyright © 2009 by Ryan C. Thomas. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce in whole or in part in any form.

  PUBLISHED BY COSCOM ENTERTAINMENT

  www.coscomentertainment.com

  SECOND EDITION

  Cover art by Matt Truiano

  eBook Edition

  Acknowledgements

  A lot of people helped in the making of this book. I would like to thank Jay and Lisa French for giving me a home and unbelievably comfortable couch to sleep on while I spent all my money on ink and postage; Patrick Errins for his expert knowledge of handcuffs; Megan McKeever for her editing skills; the focus group of many friends who gave me immeasurable feedback; Brian Keene for being kind enough to take a look at a no-name’s manuscript and give advice and encouragement; Cody Goodfellow for being such a kick-ass writer it forces me to improve my game; and of course my family for their continuing support no matter how stupid my ideas are.

  For my friends

  THE RITES OF SUMMER

  Whether or not a writer tries—and perhaps even more if he or she doesn’t—your first book is you. Into the first book goes a slice, a sliver, a core-sample of the writer’s uncertain soul, of everything that has led the writer to that desk. You write your first book as if you’ll never write another, giving the world both barrels, and then step back and wait to see if the world invites you back.

  If I wasn’t lucky enough to know Ryan C. Thomas, I would still believe that I know this guy better than most who see him every day, because the voice of his first novel—the free and easy storyteller’s voice that lures readers in and leaves them helpless and naked when the shit gets real, and the deeper themes so seamlessly tucked into this grueling dark carnival ride—that voice seems like such an honest and apt self-portrait. I see Ryan in there, but readers who have never had the pleasure of meeting the man might think they’re looking into a mirror.

  Ryan’s not a comic book artist like the hero—victim?—of this book, but he is a shit-hot guitarist who fronts a rockabilly party band and has bad-ass tats, and basically comes across like how you might’ve thought you’d grow up to be when you were ten. And if you never read his book, you might come away thinking this guy rides a chopped Indian hog, battles mummies before breakfast and sleeps in a pile of hot chicks every night. It’s only through his writing that Ryan Thomas can let you see that he doesn’t sleep very well, at all.

  Thomas’s voice has a natural economy and poise to it that many writers spend their entire lives learning how to fake. As we embark with Roger and Tooth on the kind of sweetly aimless summer day that defines nostalgia, he takes the care to show us who they are and how much they love life, even as they’re squandering it in dubious shenanigans and grabasstic horseplay. The looming unpleasantness might be sharpening its tools in the wings, but Ryan understands how much of the impact of horror is lost when it’s deprived of its cardinal virtue. It comes out of nowhere, exacting irrevocable loss and forcing unacceptable choices. It is not what gets the characters out of bed in the morning, though it’s what keeps us turning the pages. The carnage in The Summer I Died does not slide hand-in-glove over Roger and Tooth, as in so many bogus horror stories where hapless human sock puppets get date raped by fate. Its sudden and seemingly arbitrary detour into bedlam is a much more disturbing prospect, because it suggests that every idyllic summer scene hides an abattoir.

  Layers of bone-deep meaning lurk behind the hot, runny red stuff in this novel, but don’t worry about choking on it. Thomas serves the quality chops so drenched in sauce you’ll never know you’re swallowing some serious themes. Sure, he could just tell us that American society has sanitized and censored all but the lamest remnants of the initiation rites that draw the line between boys and men, so that we can drift into terminal childhood if we wish, until death makes us instant adults, helpless and doomed. But questions keep us up later than even the most unacceptable answers, and the awful agony Ryan wants to share with you will leave scars like question marks on your brain.

  As modern initiation rites go, first novels are tougher than most—somewhere between being left alone in the woods and circumcision by fire ants. But Ryan came through it with his inner boyhood intact, and has revisited it now to find it hardly stings at all. Because he writes like he plays guitar, and he’s never stopped looking for the new hooks hidden in the old songs. He builds and drives tension like a screaming dream in broad daylight, and throws in whipsaw moments of staccato shock that’ll wring a nervous laugh out of you, before they
start to really hurt.

  Because he is that guy you wanted to be when you were ten.

  - Cody Goodfellow

  March, 2009

  Los Angeles, California

  THE SUMMER I DIED

  PROLOGUE

  To avoid the nightmares of that summer, I take caffeine and diet pills, any type of speed to keep me up for as long as possible. As a result, I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours a night in a long time. My eyes have sunken near to the hollows of my skull and I shake with malnourishment because the pills suppress my appetite. My face is bruised and my thighs are dotted with purple welts and half-moon scars from where I have punched and pinched myself to keep myself awake. I am eroding. But this is a far better alternative than the dreams of that summer. That summer of lost innocence, pain, and bloodshed beyond anything you can imagine.

  The pills don’t, however, prevent my daily questioning and ranting, nor do they stop me from cursing at God. They don’t keep me from shaking my fist at the sky and crying with disgust, irreverence, gratitude, confusion, or any other of the myriad emotions I experience each day. Still though, I am unsure whether God played a part in it at all, or whether or not God even exists.

  There are times, late at night, when the pills have worn off and I’ve slipped into a semiconscious state, that I wake myself yelling at the top of my lungs. I find myself back in that summer, only this time I am telling myself to leave the dice at home, or to put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. I wake up and continue to yell, until I am hoarse, until the bloody images dissipate. Then I yell some more. I don’t know why I keep yelling once I realize I am at home in the present. Perhaps to feel my own rage and fear, to know I still have emotions.

  Perhaps.

  People have asked me—therapists, friends, even a biographer—how I felt that summer when I got home from college, before the bloodshed began. I tell them I was happy. They seem to think they can return me to that point. But, trust me, that person—the me from then—is dead.

  For all intents and purposes, the moment I picked up the gun the first weekend I was back was the moment that started it all. Tooth was excited to have me home from school and I was eager to hang out with him. He had convinced me to go shooting with him . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  BOOM!

  The gun jumped back in my hand like a startled cat. I winced at the shot, a screaming thunderclap that cut off my hearing as if someone had snuck up behind me and shoved cotton balls in my ears. The empty bullet shell bounced off my foot and rolled onto the ground. When I opened my eyes, I saw a puff of smoke breathing out of the tree trunk a few yards away from the trashcan I was aiming at.

  Shit, I thought, not even close. If I’d been aiming at Kennedy I would have hit Oswald.

  Next to me, Tooth let out a whoop and slammed his palm against my back. “Well wrap my nuts around a pole and call me Mary, looks like you just popped your cherry.”

  It was the first time I’d ever fired a gun. A .44 magnum to be precise, a big mother of a cannon that Tooth swore would make my dick hard. And he was right. I felt bigger, brighter; hell, I felt invincible. Holding a .44 in your hand, well, it’s a bit like being deified.

  “You missed the shit outta the can though,” Tooth said, taking the gun and aiming at the target. He squared his feet, looked down the barrel, took a breath and squeezed the trigger.

  BOOM!

  With my ears still clogged, the shot sounded like I was underwater. Tooth’s hands, wrapped around the grip, went flying up over his head with the recoil. He burst out laughing.

  The metallic bong and firefly sparks that erupted from the metal can proved he was a much better shot than me, but then again, he’d had all winter to practice while I was down at the university.

  “Did you see that? Dead on!” he shouted.

  I could barely hear him through the humming in my head, but I flipped him off good-naturedly and motioned for the gun back. On the road out past the woods a car drove by. It seemed to slow a bit, like it was trying to spy on us, so I quickly hid the gun behind my leg. Tooth read my concern, shook his head in disappointment and said, “Will you relax? Ain’t nobody gonna care about some gunshots out here. Besides, we’re too far out to be heard.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. The spot we were at—a dirt clearing in the woods that overlooked a small valley of evergreens—used to be a popular hangout area for teenagers, and most everyone in town knew about it. True, it was set back far enough off the road that passing motorists couldn’t really see through all the trees, but no amount of dense foliage would dampen the echoes of a .44’s gunshot.

  We’d been here many times before, whether to get high, drink beer or just shoot the shit on a Friday night. Used to be you could come here and expect to find at least someone you knew hanging around. But its popularity had waned of late

  Two summers ago Mark Trieger, the prodigy running back for Lakewood High, jumped to his death here, and now the place had become associated with ghost stories and bad vibes. Nobody came up here much anymore.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “Just what?”

  “I dunno, people drive by here now . . . they tend to check up on things. I’m just being careful.”

  “Fucking Mark Trieger.”

  “Yeah, fucking Mark Trieger.”

  It happened on a Sunday afternoon after church let out. Some kids had come here to get wasted and accidentally knocked their six pack of Bud over the side of the cliff. Realizing what a bitch it would be to find another adult to buy them more, they climbed down to retrieve it.

  At the bottom they discovered the beer bottles shattered from the fall. They were about to go back up when one of the boys spotted something sparkling in the fallen leaves. It was a necklace. Rumor is he was gonna hock it for more beer, so he reached down and yanked on it and up popped a blue and purple head, the mouth wide open and dripping maggots, two glazed eyes looking into oblivion.

  The boy fell down screaming, his fist still clenched around the necklace. He tried to run away but because he kept gripping the necklace, the body slid after him like a zombie in a George Romero film and knocked him over. He finally let go, but he was in such shock his friends had to carry him back up.

  Turns out Mark’d been down there for about two weeks, nestled among the heaps of beer cans and porno mags people had hurled over the side.

  Like any small town in the New England mountains, the body had drawn a crowd as if it was the second coming of Jesus. I remember standing with Tooth when the paramedics hauled Mark up. The police kept everyone back, but you could still kind of see what was going on through the trees. They had this sort of winch thingy bringing up the body, and when it got to the top, the head bounced over the rocks and made this thwacking sound you could hear all the way back on the road. People gasped. Tooth put his Red Sox hat over his heart and said something I didn’t hear. He didn’t know Mark, but he’d gone to enough Lakewood games to respect him. Personally, I couldn’t care less about sports, but I remember my sister Jamie being real upset. She was a freshman at Lakewood at the time, and like all freshman girls, she thought she was gonna marry the football captain someday, despite the fact that about twenty colleges were interested in recruiting Mark before he’d even graduate.

  Looking back at the trashcan, I lifted the gun.

  “It’s easier if you pull the hammer back first.” Tooth reached over and made like he was gonna do it for me. Beating him to it, I yanked it back with my thumb and found my target. I wanted to hit it this time, because if I didn’t, Tooth would go telling everyone what a bad shot I was and I’d spend the summer the butt of sissy jokes. So I took a breath, and held the gun a little looser than before, a little more relaxed. The first shot had given me some idea of the compensation required in aiming. Since it had gone high and wide to the left, I aimed a little lower and to the right.

  “Steady,” Tooth whispered, “just relax. Once you feel it, then fire away
.”

  I felt the weight of the gun getting heavier, like when you hold a dumbbell out to the side of your body and see how long you can keep it level. I added a little backbone to it, took another breath, and pulled the trigger.

  BOOM!

  The bullet careened off the lip of the barrel, sent sparks flying, and struck the branches in the trees beyond. I stood for a moment, realizing that while I’d shot a bit wide, I’d still managed to hit the target. At fifty feet away, that was a glowing accomplishment. My dick was indeed hard. Tooth threw his Red Sox hat in the air and said, “I can’t believe it, you actually hit it.” He ran toward the barrel. “Not bad, not bad.” He poked at the indentation the bullet had made, somewhat tentatively, then turned back and yelled to me, “Hey, you gotta see this!”

  I put the gun on the ground because I didn’t want Tooth doing anything stupid like jumping on my back and causing it to go off. He liked to jump on people when he was drunk, and he’d downed about four beers already since lunch.

  At the can, Tooth pointed out what he found so fascinating. It was a bee.

  “It musta been sitting on the lip and you winged it.”

  The bee was still alive, but its abdomen was now fused to the barrel where the bullet struck. It was trying to crawl away but all it could manage was a feeble circular pattern.

  “That’s the weirdest thing I ever seen,” he said. “Look at it, it’s like it don’t even know it’s been shot.” Then he got a funny look on his face and hit me in the shoulder. “You shot a bee and didn’t even kill it. You fucking pussy. Man, wait till I tell everyone.”