Follow the lives of three high school students: Lorain, a trend-setter hiding a dark secret in her womb, Abdulhabib, a Muslim zombie with an addiction to fairy dust, and Karen, a pagan poseur who gets more than she ever bargained with the devil for when her portal takes them all to another dimension. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll probably sneeze at some point, but I bet it's just allergies.

Read and review-- the power of the Orca compels you.

Thunder Country
copyright Audita Sum 2008

Anyone looking for a plot in this narrative will be severely reprimanded. Anyone looking for a moral will be fed to the Whale. Anyone looking for the bathroom will be led to the nearest facility. Anyone who thinks Mark Twain is teh awsum will also be fed to the Whale, because he was a self-congratulating little shit. Then Moby Dick will shoot the Whale, and Ishmael will cry. You don't want to make him cry, do you?

Let us begin.

Book I
Expositiony Shit

One

The Creepy Old Man Discourses

It's a strange sort, them that live in Thunder Country. Need to be the type that can appreciate cold, dry winters and hot, humid summers. The type that can get settled into a well-worn track of habit and never stray.

Their kids never start that way. Always say they want nothin' more than to get as far away from this place as possible. After college, though, they always come back. Every single damned one of 'em.

It's 'cause they think that Thunder Country is theirs. Truth is, it's not. They is Thunder Country's.

You know how I know?

It's 'cause I am Thunder Country, son.

Death Perception

Deep within a narrow crevice in Stony Park, a piercing voice startled the birds from their trees.

To kill to kill to kill to kill to kill!

O bloody bloody bloody bloody blood!

To kill the rat! To kill it! Kill the rat!

To rip the spine to eat the flesh to kill!

It was a human woman, naked and matted in filth, with black sinkholes where her eyes should've been. The townspeople called her Dirt Child. Though she'd been disturbing the peaceful thoughts of hikers for more than forty years, she was feral and stunted. When the odd kind soul offered her food, she only cawed loudly, blindly scrabbling toward them.

Having been raised by the dark, she couldn't speak. She did, however, think in iambic pentameter.

The sky was a cloudless, powder blue at the horizons when Dirt Child was finished with her rat. She heard voices, which weren't in her own head, though she sometimes heard those too. She climbed up the leafy slope on hands and knees, toward the two people who sat at the top of a particularly tall rock.

"Holy fuck!" said Ralph, clutching his backpack to him.

"Relax," said Lorain, brushing her long auburn hair out of her eyes. "It's just Dirt Child." She unzipped the case protecting her camera, pointed it at the freak, and clicked. At the sound, Dirt Child twitched, then lunged forward. Her hand caught Ralph's shorts. He screamed.

A creature, yes, a creature, creature kill

Must kill the creature or it will kill me

Dirt Child pulled herself forward, mouth hanging open to reveal bloody teeth and torn gums. Ralph struggled to get away, neglecting to realize that he could overpower the woman easily, as she was no taller than a five-year-old.

"You're overreacting," Lorain said. She pointed the camera at him. "Make a gang sign."

"It's touching me!" Ralph screamed, backing away on his ass as Dirt Child began to dig her fingernails into his leg.

Lorain stood, brushing the invisible dust off the faux-vintage top that she'd gotten the previous day at Pac Sun for fifty dollars.

Ralph was still sliding his ass across the rock. "It's touching me it's touching me holy shit Lorain I'm going to die!" Lorain realized a moment too late that her boyfriend was, indeed, going to die, because he was about to fall off the edge of a precipice. He let out one more scream before his body hit a rock below with a horrible gory crack and, then, a slow rasping, the sound of his leather letterman against stone as he slid further toward the earth.

Lorain should've been pissed. This was the fifth boyfriend she'd lost this year, and it was starting to make her look like a whore. And a serial killer. But all she could do was stare at the edge of the rock, where Dirt Child kneeled alone, clutching the rock wall and looking ahead unseeingly into the barren trees. Before the little bitch could turn, Lorain pushed her off the edge.

I am not touching anything but air

But something warm--the creature I have killed!

The creature creature creature creature killed! I'm hungry, yes the food the food the food

Dirt Child wasn't dead. Lorain didn't dare look over the precipice, but she could hear her hoarse laughter.

She ran.

Sun was nearing its setting point when Lorain finally stopped, panting, in front of her house. She opened the gate, trundled up the steps, which were covered, for whatever reason, in astroturf, and turned to face the pink sun. Damn it, she thought. Now I have no one to make out with. She threw open the screen door.

"I'm home," she said.

Her mom, who had probably just gotten home from her nursing job at the hospital, was watching a soap opera. She didn't look up. "How was school?"

"Mr. Carlisle turned into noses." Lorain knew her mom wasn't really listening. Even if she had been, however, Mrs. O'Conner wouldn't have been alarmed. Turning into noses had been known to happen from time to time. A literary example:

She turned into many noses.

She stood, poised on the brink of insanity. Turned and saw the sun, the red earth, the wind like a purple breath of pretentious graphic artistry. Into the wind she squinted, into the unending flagellation of the wind’s curses.

Many noses.

Noses.

-- from John Hanby's Many Noses, Random House 2004

"That's nice," said Mrs. O'Conner. She took a long, melancholy pull on her cigarette and said nothing more.

Lorain rampaged up the stairs, past Shawn's room, from whence ear-grating country music was blasting, into her own bedroom. She collapsed on the pink quilted bedspread and hugged her teddy bear to her chest. "Oh, Gerald," she whispered into his fluffy head. "What should I do?"

"Let go of me," wheezed the stuffed animal, or as Lorain's best friend (an ardent fangirl of all things British) would say, plushie. "I can't fucking breathe."

"Shut up," said Lorain, throwing the helpless teddy bear against the wall. "This is an emotional emergency."

Gerald didn't reply. As Lorain watched, horrified, the stuffing leaked out of him. He was dead.

"What have I done?" Lorain demanded, looking down at her hands like a dude in a shitty action movie after he kills his first bad guy. Lorain had already killed more that one guy, however, with her evil feminine wiles. She could no longer ignore the pattern.

If Lorain had been more aware of literature, she would've likened her situation to a medieval morality tale, created to warn young girls against promiscuity. Or perhaps she'd remember Medusa of mythological lore, whose gaze turned men to stone. Sadly, Lorain was taking Academic English III, and all they did in that class was S.A.T. practice worksheets.

Lorain got rid of Gerald's body quickly, dumping it in the garbage disposal. She got a diet coke from the fridge, ran back up the stairs, and got out her cell phone. "Nobody loves me," Lorain said sadly, seeing that there were no messages. She called her very best friend in the whole world, Karen. The phone rang five times before she picked it up.

"Konichiwa!" said Karen, who not only desperately wanted to be British, but also desperately wanted to be Japanese.

"It's me," said Lorain, not bothering to explain who 'me' was. "I'm feeling down."

"Poor Lorain-chan," said Karen. "What's wrong?"

"Ralph died."

Karen was silent for a moment. Then, "You whore!" she screamed. Lorain, jarred, jumped a little. "Just kidding!" said Karen. "I know just what to do. Come over! We'll eat through an entire tub of ice cream. That's what they do in the movies."

Lorain's stomach grumbled and sloshed. She hadn't eaten anything today, except for a bag of chips at lunch. "No thanks," she said, looking with distaste down at the baby fat that still clung persistently to her abdomen.

There was silence at the other end for a moment. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Lorain sighed heavily and lay down. "No. Let's talk about something else."

"Football tomorrow!" said Karen brightly. "And an assembly. Do you want to go to the after-game dance with me? You could meet new boys. My friend Abdulhabib, from chemistry--"

"No more boys," said Lorain.

"What's wrong with you?" asked Karen. "You're not usually like this."

"I know," said Lorain. "Sorry. I'm PMSing. I've got some godawful cramps right now." That was a lie. Lorain's period had skipped this month, probably due to starvation. It had happened once before, the month that Lorain had stopped eating breakfast about a year ago.

"Daaaamn, girl," said Karen, who not only desperately wanted to be British and Japanese, but also desperately wished she had been raised in the projects. "Have you taken any Ibuprofen?"

"Yeah," said Lorain. "Before I left school. It's starting to wear off, though." This wasn't a lie. Lorain sometimes liked to take pills, just for fun. Her favorite was Excedrin.

"Anyway," said Karen, "how do you feel about going to the after-game dance?"

"Alright,” said Lorain. "I do have a cute top planned out for tomorrow." Why this had any bearing on anything, the reader is only left to wonder. Lorain did, however, like to plan her clothes out ahead of time. That way she wouldn't have to freak out in the morning when nothing matched-- she could freak out the night before. Lorain sighed contentedly. "I feel better already."

"That's the spirit," said Karen in a loud, deep voice. "What's that from?"

Lorain shrugged, though Karen couldn't see her. "I don't know." "I know that's from something. Are you sure you don't know who said that? It might've been some random extra in Family Guy."

"I have no idea," Lorain repeated.

After a moment of silence, Karen said in a cheery voice, "I had fun shopping yesterday. I saw you wore that new top." "Yeah," said Lorain with a smile. "Shopping with you is fun. I wish we could do it more often, but my dad grounded me for stealing his credit card. And for shoplifting that skirt from Macy's."

"Didn't you go out today, though? Stony Park, right, with Ralph?" She paused. "Is that where he... his soul left this world?"

Lorain nodded, then remembered that Karen couldn't see her. "Yeah. He fell off a rock."

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine. I'm over it. But yeah, I snuck out. My dad's pretty fucked up right now, or at least I assume he is. He went to a bar with his friends."

"You should've just called him out when he grounded you. Should've been like, "Bitch, I'm sixteen and this is my life!"

Lorain laughed reluctantly. "You know my dad. He'd kill me."

"Yeah," agreed Karen. "Your dad's badass. Remember that one time when he took us to the movies, and some guy spilled a drink on him, and your dad like literally punched the guy's face in? He needed--"

"--reconstructive surgery," finished Lorain, smiling at the memory. "Yeah, I remember. Those were good times."

"Before--" Karen began, and continued in a whisper: "the curse."

"I was probably cursed my whole life and just never knew it."

"Can you remember being unkind to a stranger who you met in the woods, asking you for a bit of cheese or bread?"

"No...?"

"Oh, well, strangers like that tend to be badass witches. Or Jesus," said Karen, who was a self-professed born-again pagan. And a Christian, too, when her parents were looking. Lorain, however, who had been raised agnostic and who was naturally apathetic, didn't catch the references.

"Yeah, well..." Lorain trailed off. "My mom's done making dinner. I have to go eat." That was a lie. Her parents never made dinner, except for pasta now and again. "See ya later, alligator," she said in farewell.

"In a while, YOU HEARTLESS BITCH!" Karen screamed, then apparently slammed the phone down into its cradle.

Lorain smiled. Her best friend always knew how to cheer her up.