Sour

By Allen Renfro

Clairolfaction - the ability of psychic smelling, such as diseases, hunger, or the smell of someone dying days, weeks or even months before they do.

Blue and Vince are just average teenage boys, going to school, hanging out with friends at the mall, playing games at the arcade. It’s a Saturday like every other Saturday until Blue sniffs a strange scent unlike anything he’s ever smelled before. Coming from a girl standing nearby, it’s a scent that makes him sick. And then the girl falls dead.

Blue’s father tries to convince him that he has a gift. He can warn people before they die. He can possibly save them. But in the real world, Blue is a freak, someone to be afraid of. Somehow, he knows when people are going to die.

Rejected by their friends and classmates, Blue finds solace with the one friend that refuses to abandon him: Vince. Even with Vince’s support, Blue struggles to come to terms with his gift. After meeting a man that has the same ability, Blue is convinced that he can use his ability to save lives. But his desire to help people becomes a nightmare as Blue vanishes into a sinister world of lies and betrayal. Desperate to find Blue, Vince devotes his life searching for him. Drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse, Vince is determined to save Blue even if it costs him his life.

Sour, a psychological thriller, contains graphic violent imagery and intense sexual situations. It is intended for mature audiences only.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Renfro
• Release date: Jan 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781370034598

Allen Renfro

Allen Renfro is a native of Tennessee and a graduate of Tusculum College. A published poet and artist in the zine culture of the 1990s he considers himself a "fringe" artist. He is an admitted history buff, horror movie watcher and reader of fiction. He is the author of eleven novels.

Book preview

Chapter One

BEFORE

His name was Blue. He wasn’t different from the rest of us. We were almost thirteen. We’d hang out at the mall on Saturdays with money in our pockets to buy a soda, maybe a candy bar, and play video games. Mostly we spent time wandering through the stores we deemed cool. We’d hang out at the arcade next to the movie theater and flirt with the girls and show off our gaming skills for the boys. We were typical. We were average. We were normal.

Until that Saturday.

She walked past us as we sat in the food court. She brushed against Blue’s shoulder as he sat in the chair closest to her. The girl was somebody that I recognized from school; she was the same age as us, but I didn’t have any classes with her. Her name was Kelly.

Blue reacted right away. He looked at me and our friends.

Do you smell that? he said.

Was it the smell of grilled onions and peppers coming from the sandwich shop next to us? Did somebody blow their bad breath in his face? Did one of the guys fart? Smell what?

He turned his face toward the girl and we followed, five sets of eyes looking at her. She wasn’t wearing too much perfume that I noticed. She hadn’t used a funky body wash. She wasn’t dirty. It wasn’t sweat. She didn’t smell like that weird smell that girls sometimes did once a month. Smell what?

She dealt it and you smelled it and we laughed, except Blue. He looked at me. His eyes were screaming. He was scared. His eyes were all I could see, my hearing turned off to the guys and their teasing.

Kelly. She smells… He hesitated, a dance in his eyes as he stared at me and glanced at the others. She smells…sour.

I watched her, with her popular girlfriends standing in line to order a sandwich right beside us, wearing the best clothes, the best shoes, the perfect hair, the perfect looks. All of them giggling, laughing, noticing that we were all staring and they didn’t mind. They just turned around, disappearing behind a swirl of teenagers, moms, and baby strollers in the hum of a busy food court in a crowded mall on a typical Saturday.

I chased after Blue as he ran to the men’s room, fighting through the herds of people grazing and gazing around us. His hands were pressed against his mouth, and in the urine stench of the bathroom, he slammed open one of a dozen stall doors and was on his knees heaving his insides into the great white throne. The soft pop music flowing through speakers in a futile attempt to mask the stink of a bathroom didn’t muffle the sounds of him puking.

You all right? I asked the stupid question that we all asked when we don’t know what else to say.

I watched him from behind, his back arching with every gag and splash of vomit into the toilet’s waiting mouth. Not able to stand the constant staring of men walking by with questions or invitations in their eyes, I pushed myself into the stall and closed the door.

Blue? What is it?

He looked up, his hands gripping the sides of the toilet.

She smells sour, he groaned, his face as white as the porcelain he was clinging to.

Sour. I didn’t understand what he meant. She didn’t smell any different from anybody else.

Rotten, he gagged as I knelt down beside him, pulling one-ply paper from the roll and wiping his mouth and chin. She smells like rotten food, like a dead animal on the road. I don’t know. Worse than that. You didn’t smell it?

I shook my head as I flushed the toilet to make sure his insides were gone.

She stinks? I said, not knowing what I was supposed to say.

No, he said. She smelled really weird. I don’t know. She smelled… like… dead.

I helped him up to his feet once we both were certain there was nothing more in his stomach to vomit. He staggered past random men walking to and from the urinals and stalls to the sinks and turned on the faucet, leaning his head underneath to have a drink as men stared in confusion. I stood beside him like a bodyguard, arms folded across my chest.

There’s a water fountain outside the door, I said as quietly as possible, uncomfortable with the uncomfortable men staring at us.

I gotta get outta here, he said, sliding the back of his hand across his lips. The bright florescent light reflecting off his pale face irritated my eyes.

I nodded. We didn’t bother to find the other guys, taking the shortest route to get outside. We even ignored a sudden scream from a girl and a rush of yelling frantic people forming a circle not too far from where we had been sitting.

Before we made it to the exit, Blue stopped again. Like damming a river, he caused a ripple, forcing people behind us to stop and then walk around us. His eyes turned, following someone among the crowd—a family, I think—a husband and wife and maybe an aunt and four kids bouncing around them. His eyes turned to me and I knew. I knew he smelled it again. The same sour.

He ran through the exit doors as they automatically opened and I followed him outside into the hot California air. The sun was high overhead and the sprawling parking lot was like a giant charcoal grill with endless rows of cars sizzling in the heat like hot dogs. We hurried over to a bike rack and retrieved our bikes as the sound of a siren drowned out the happy songs from birds perched in the frail trees that lined the mall sidewalks.

We raced our bikes on the sidewalks that, like the yellow brick road, led us away from our version of Oz, and took us back to our version of Kansas. I only half glanced at the ambulance with all its lights flashing and its siren wailing as it turned into the mall parking lot.

We lived in the suburbs where the world was perfect and anything that was bad happened behind locked doors and drawn curtains. We were the lucky ones. All we had to worry about was homework and being popular in school. Blue’s neighborhood was green manicured lawns and tree-lined sidewalks, swimming pools and two-car garages. My neighborhood was nearly that.

We dropped our bikes on the front lawn and I chased Blue inside his house, the front door bursting open. We made a beeline straight for the stairs up to his room, pretending that his two brothers playing video games in the living room didn’t exist. He locked the door behind us after I stepped in. He emptied his pockets and ripped off his clothes, tossing them into the hamper inside his closet, even his underwear.

It’s still on me, he groaned, sniffing his skin. I can still smell it.

I didn’t know what to say or do as I stood there. I sat down on the edge of his bed, staring at his naked body. He had hair in places that I didn’t have, under his arms and around his penis. He was only a few months older than me, but he looked like the junior and senior guys in school, the ones that sounded like men, not boys. I noticed his voice had gone deeper just a few weeks ago, but since none of the other guys said anything, I didn’t either. It was like he changed overnight or something.

What? he asked, staring at me staring at him. Do you smell it now?

I shook my head as my eyes admired him with jealousy. He came over to me, and I jumped when his nose nearly touched my neck and he sniffed. You don’t smell like it.

I stared at him, too close to me, feeling weird, feeling scared.

I gotta take a bath, he said, flinging open the door and disappearing out into the hallway. I walked over to the hamper, lifting up his jeans and his underwear, and sniffing. There was only the smell of him.

I hurried down the hall and to the bathroom. I closed the door behind me. He had turned on the water of the shower, creating a hiss, a spray flowing through the room like fog as the room grew warmer and the mirror over the sink turned to mist.

He stepped into the spray, the water splashing him in his face and flowing down his body. The water soaked his hair as he reached for the soap and began scrubbing his legs and arms, his stomach and groin.

Scrub my back, he yelled as he handed me the soap and reached for the shampoo to lather his hair.

I took the soap and held it for a minute, the rich, clean scent of it filling my nose as I smelled it. I stepped closer, the spray of water beginning to dampen my clothes. I pushed the bar of soap across his back gently from his neck down to his waist.

Harder, he ordered.

I scrubbed harder, pushing the soap against him so that he lurched forward and then back with every slide of my hand. He didn’t protest when I slid the bar of soap across his butt. Enamored, I rubbed the soap gently back and forth across his butt until he took hold of my wrist and pulled the soap away from me, placing it back in the soap dish. I stepped back as he allowed the water to flow over him, rinsing the suds off his body, the heat and steam thickening in the room.

He turned off the faucet, drops of water clinging to the locks of his dark hair in his face. He looked down at his hands, turning them from front to back. He smelled his arms. I think it’s gone.

He stepped out of the shower and walked past me, pulling a towel from a towel rod and drying himself off, ruffling the towel through his wet hair.

I looked down at myself, my shorts and my t-shirt damp and sticking to my skin. Without saying a word, he walked back to his room and I followed.

My phone was ringing in my pocket, text messages from our friends at the mall.

Dude Kelly is dead.

Kelly just dropped dead. WTF!

Where r u?

I slid my phone back into my shorts pocket. Blue was lying on his bed face down, naked, crying into a pillow. I sat on the edge of the bed, afraid to touch him. I didn’t know what to do. What was I supposed to say? I was sure he had gotten the same text messages I did.

Don’t leave me, he said, his hand reaching back to touch my leg, his voice muffled by the pillow.

Chapter Two

AFTER

I count the slow drips of water from a bathroom faucet as I stare up at a cracked ceiling. A motionless ceiling fan hovering over me in its stillness tries to hypnotize me. One of the springs in the mattress underneath my body pokes me in the back like a whore trying to wake me up so she can get paid. Lying in the bed of what people would think is just another two-bit roach motel next to a dying street in the middle of skid row, tangled in sheets that smell like bleach and guilt, I stare at the faded stain of red on the mattress, usually hidden underneath sheets and blankets, touching the color that is a symbol of a life ending. Disguised, buried, unknown.

I appreciate that no one wants to know. They live in a world of pretend. They don’t see what I’m following and none of them want to know why. They don’t want to see the discolored carpet and the bleached streaks on the wall between the bathroom and the bed. They don’t want to know I’m lying in a bed that was his altar for a night. They don’t want to understand how I know he was here. They are content to live in their world of mediocre pretend, away from the truth of the real world. Denial is like promises. They all eventually become a lie. Not that it’s intended to be a lie. It’s just that none of us can stop reality. None of us can stop the slow drips of life that swirl down the drain of time.

I stand in a stained, cracked bath tub, the drain clogged with sin. My bare feet are submerged in a pool of tetanus as the shower belches stagnant-smelling water over my naked body from a rusty faucet that hacks and spits; the stream of water licks my face like a hungry tongue. It feels like temporary penance. I’m wrong for what I’m doing. But it’s what I have to do.

The gray of the room filtered by threadbare curtains that are pulled closed gives me comfort, like I’m hiding from the light that can expose my sin. A sin that’s only washed away from my surface. Water can never reach sin-deep. But I’m not hiding. I’m invisible because no one wants to see.

The pale face in the fractured mirror barely clinging to the wall stares at me as I sit on the edge of the bed. The smile in the eyes mocks me. A raging hardness between my legs screams for release. I wait until the tree between my legs shrinks before I put on my skin, check every zipper and button, check my wallet, my keys, the silver badge, and switch blade before I slide it all into my jeans pockets and turn off the porno flickering on the television screen. I unplug my charging phone that sits idle next to a Gideon Bible on a table that’s a substitute for a desk and slide the phone into my pocket and the charger into my backpack, wrestling the backpack onto my shoulder.

I close the room door behind me and stare at the number on the door.

13.

I touch the protruding digits just above the peephole. The faded white color of each number has formed stains on the door like paint oozing toward the ground. Thirteen is a number that defines him in such a simple way.

In the humid morning air, I walk along the cracked pavement in front of the motel. It rained overnight. The cars and trucks passing by hiss with the sound of tires rushing over the wet pavement. I place the backpack in the back seat of an old black four-door sedan before I make my way to the motel office. Parked just in front of the office door that has more cardboard taped over it than actual panes of glass, my car is the only one present along the front of the motel. The red neon sign in the window next to the office door that reads vacancy is nearly blinding; a lighthouse warning in the overcast morning or maybe the light some see when they die.

The dilapidated motel is like a scratch on somebody’s skin, tucked away on a corner of an abandoned street, away from the giant city that stares at me from the horizon. A broken, faded sign at the top of a rusted metal pole reads Angels Motel. It hovers over the small parking lot near the street and leans like the dying palm tree next to it with an arrow with broken light bulbs that no longer light up, pointing toward the motel just beside it.

The Latino girl sitting on a stool behind glass, chomping gum with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers, is the opposite of the fat, greasy man that checked me in last night. She knows who I am just because I’m the only one that it could be. She must think me a narc, wearing faded jeans with a windbreaker zipped up over a white button-up shirt, my bronze-colored hair cut in a military style, my innocent green eyes that betray my stocky build. I don’t have needle marks leaving a trail up both arms. I don’t have a toothless smile or skin pocked with sores. I walk across the sticky floor, the dingy tile gripping my soles like cancer. The walls covered with a dark paneling from the nineteen seventies feels intimidating, heavy, leaning in on me like a bully.

She offers a suspicious glare and a fake grin that oozes through purple-painted lips. The purple and red dye of her hair is like a jungle at night with creatures waiting to leap onto the next victim that stands too close. I slide the keycard through a hole in the glass and walk away. I could’ve just left the key in the room since I paid with cash last night, but I want her to see me. I want her to know that I’m still coming back.

See ya next time, she says with a half grin and a voice that sounds like fingernails ripping across a chalkboard.

I don’t answer. I don’t have to.

Sooner or later, he always comes back, and so do I.

I sit in my car staring at the motel through the dirty windshield, trying to ignore the aroma of hamburgers and sweat. Maybe I should just stay this time. Just wait. The wiper blades move back and forth in a useless effort to wipe away the timid drops that cry from the clouds. This place, like any other place, like no other place, like the empty of a stomach or the absence of a conscience; this place, this dilapidation, this excuse to feel normal; for some it’s like a palace with red-carpet treatment; for some it’s the ground to dig a hole and bury the one wicked thing that can’t be hidden in a closet. The roaches don’t tell. The meth-infected girl at the front desk won’t tell. Just pay your fee and your sin goes unnoticed. The only ones who care are the ones that don’t want to know. That’s why you come to purgatory for your fucks, your drugs, your lies. So nobody else will see.

People call me Fire. That’s not my name. It’s the name I was baptized with when I became part of him. Blue decided like he decided for all of us. That’s how I remember it anyway. That was then. Years ago, before the world turned upside down, before we became runners.

The wet street weaves and bends like the curl of an agitated, hissing snake. The city is not yet awake and the streets are not filled with mindless ants hustling to their nine-to-five prisons. Only abandoned ghosts, condemned to wander the streets this early, are awake.

I’m hungry.

The city grows larger in front of me as the sun bleeds fiery colors across the eastern sky. I join a growing herd of mechanical four-wheeled cows ambling toward their fates on a freeway that becomes more crowded by each second, flowing like blood in arteries toward a beating heart. Silky beams of sunlight cut through the bluish clouds and stretch to the ground. I feel like a kid again, hoping to see a rainbow. Like it’s supposed to symbolize something to me. Like I’m supposed to receive some sort of peace from light refracted by water. My phone rings and I wrestle it from my pocket and answer.

Yeah.

A woman sighs, the voice oozing through the phone like mud. He wasn’t there.

No.

You said he was going to be.

I said he might be.

You said you could find him.

I can.

The woman sighs again and I wait for her to start ranting. I’ve been paying you for two weeks. You said you could prove…

Fine, I interrupt. Forget it.

I click the button and end the call. I know she’ll call me back. I’m all she has left. To everyone else, her son is a runaway, a useless waste of air, the police don’t care, society doesn’t care, just one more disease erased, one less mouth to feed, one less body to bury. I stare in the rearview mirror at my bloodshot eyes and a hearse that is following me. Another symbol that makes me smirk and then laugh. It’s like I’m running away from death and death is determined to catch me.

My phone rings again. It’s her. I answer without saying anything, knowing she’s going to start talking the minute she hears my breath.

All right, she says. But I need something. I need more than a crazy theory.

You’re gonna have to be patient, I finally say, my eyes glancing up into the rearview mirror at the hearse still behind me.

You keep saying that and you’re still no closer to finding him than when you started, are you? she says. I can feel the heat in her voice, the anger rising. She still has hope that her son is alive. He’s not.

I’ll be in touch, I reply and end the call, tossing my cell to the seat next to me.

I know she hates me. She hates the world and everybody in it. She has every right to be angry. She came to me out of the blue after her son’s disappearance. I mourned her desperate plea that her son needed his medicine or he would die. She was the only one that still believed her son was taken against his will. Actually, not really against his will, but I’m the only one that sees the pattern. I’m the only one that knows the killer exists. Well, I’m not the only one that knows. I’m just the only one that is willing to do anything about it.

I take the next exit off the freeway and look to my left as the hearse races by, carrying death in its stomach. I turn on the radio in order to muffle the sound of my heart beating, the digital clock showing the time as seven a.m. The soothing female voice reading the news feels like a warm pillow underneath my head until I start listening to what she says.

…just after sunrise this morning. Initially mistaking it for a drowned seagull, the witness said the severed foot was floating in the surf at Venice Beach when his dog retrieved it…

Perfect timing to hear a morbid story. I push the button to change stations and escape to what feels like ancient times, to Chopin and Mozart, music that is a jewel to the ears; lush, magical tones that paint a masterpiece in my mind.

I wonder when they will find the rest of him.

I feel like I’ve slept and the car has a mind of its own, meandering along side streets and highways, past tent cities and cardboard villages beneath overpasses with tall rolling hills rising ahead of me. I’ll be on the streets tonight, in disguise, wandering among the living dead, waiting among the shit smells and the hacks and coughs, waiting for The Doctor to appear. I never wanted to be here in the city of concrete, asphalt, and palm trees. But