Box of Bones Read online

  BOX OF BONES

  JEREMY BATES

  Copyright © 2016 by Jeremy Bates

  First Edition

  The right of Jeremy Bates to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-988091-16-7

  For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of both Black Canyon and The Taste of Fear.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  FIVE MINUTES EARLIER

  EPILOGUE

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOREWORD

  I don’t usually write forewords, but I thought one might be appropriate for Box of Bones, given the way the story came about.

  I’d lived in the Philippines for three years between 2010 and 2013, and in early 2016 I returned for an impromptu vacation. I met up with some friends, and we drove from Manila to Mount Pinatubo, with the intention of hiking to the summit of the active volcano. What we didn’t know until we arrived, however, was that the Philippines and the United States were holding a joint large-scale military exercise there. A Filipino soldier carrying an assault rifle politely told us we had to turn around or risk being flattened by errant bombs.

  After a brief discussion, we decided to detour to Subic (ironically, the site of a former US Navy facility) to spend what remained of the day at the beach. A few hours later we were sipping frozen margaritas on a beachside patio when one of my friends—I’ll call him “Dan” for anonymity’s sake—asked me how the writing was going. I told him about the “World’s Scariest Places” series, which features horror stories set in real-world locations. He suggested I write something about the Philippines. I told him I hadn’t thought about it; he told me to pitch him a story on the spot. It went something like this: During a late-night bachelor party, a prostitute drops dead from a drug overdose. The attendees decide to chop the body into pieces and dispose of it in different dumpsters across Manila. They think they’re in the clear—until the girl’s pimp, a very bad and connected dude, begins hunting them down one by one. Dan liked the story, but the girls we were with didn’t, telling me there was no connection to the Philippines except that it was set in Manila. They were right, so I improvised a second story, which ended up becoming Box of Bones, plot point for plot point. I can’t elaborate much more than this without giving away the ending—except to say it’s the ending that makes the story unique to the Philippines.

  One other note worth mentioning is that the novella’s protagonist was inspired by an American expat I got to know in Manila. The protagonist’s entire backstory—the stabbing, the hospital from hell, you’ll read about it—is based on true events.

  Prologue

  “Have you ever been this afraid before?” a voice asked me from the shadows.

  ▬

  My name is Jim Livingston. I’m an American expat living in the Philippines. About six months ago I was visiting my Filipina girlfriend in her barangay—in colloquial terms, what they call either an inner city neighborhood or a suburb over here. There are close to two thousand of them in Manila. I didn’t know the name of my girlfriend’s barangay, and I don’t think she did either.

  Her name is Candy. No, she isn’t a stripper. Bizarre given names are as quintessentially Filipino as a Filipino’s Catholic faith or ubiquitous smile. On any given day you would be hard pressed to walk around Manila and not bump into a Bambi or a Bogie, a Girlie or a Peanut, or even a middle-aged man called Babe.

  Candy lived in a ramshackle cinderblock building. By the average Filipino’s standard, it was an okay place. It had a concrete fence and iron grates on all the windows. In comparison, if you were poor, you’d likely have a bamboo fence and bamboo grates, while if you were prosperous, you’d already have moved to a gated community, surrounded by ten-foot-tall walls and guardhouses, like where I lived. I wasn’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. I taught English at an international school. Even so, I was paid a Western teacher’s salary, which put me alongside the country’s business executives and corrupt politicians.

  I was standing in the building’s second-floor dimly lit hallway, about to knock on Candy’s door, when I heard someone behind me. I turned to find Candy’s former husband barreling down on me, a large knife in his hand. I got my arms up in time to deflect his first attack. I shouted as he whacked at my forearms with the blade. Finally I got one blood-soaked hand around his throat, the other around the wrist of the arm doing the filleting, and drove him backward into the hallway wall. Perspiration beaded his mocha-colored skin. His brown eyes bulged furiously. His lips curled away from his teeth to show his gums. Spittle sprayed my face.

  I opened my mouth, to tell him to calm the fuck down, when he bit me on the chin and held on like a pit bull. I shook my head, tearing free my chin, though his teeth took some of my skin with them.

  My hands went instinctively to the wound. It was a stupid thing to do. With his knife arm freed, Toto—that was his name, like the goddamn dog—slipped the blade neatly in my right side, hilt-deep.

  I issued a lackadaisical sigh, what you might make after sipping a cold soda on a hot day. My hands left my chin and went to my side in a futile attempt to plug the gush of warm blood.

  I sank to my butt, slumping against the wall. Toto came toward me. I thought he was going to go for the knife, maybe to jig it around in the wound, or to yank it out and stab me again. Instead, he reached into one of my pockets and took my wallet.

  His eyes flicked to the right. He stiffened, then fled.

  I heard what he’d heard. It was a familiar sound: the chain and deadbolt on the other side of Candy’s door unlocking. She appeared at the threshold, her black hair hanging straight and wet over her bare shoulders, a purple towel wrapped around her body.

  I think she was screaming. I wasn’t certain. The world had taken on a sickening tilt, and everything seemed to be sliding very far away from me, disconnected somehow. My eyelids felt as heavy as bowling balls, and I struggled to keep them open.

  Then Candy was in front of me, telling me to wake up. She was dressed in jeans and a yellow top. Her friend was there too—Sam? I’d seen him around the barangay a fair bit and had beers with him once on his birthday. He’d been hanging out on the street with a couple of his buddies. Candy and I had spotted them from her apartment balcony, and we’d joined them. I bought everyone a round of Red Horse, the one liter bottles, from a tiny cage-fronted sari-sari store.

  Candy and Sam hiked me to my feet, guided me down the hallway, down the staircase, outside to where a maroon sedan idled at the curb. Sam opened the door, and Candy eased me onto the backseat. She gave me a pillow to press against my side to slow the bleeding.

  Then we were moving.

  Bright lights and neon flashed past the car windows. I swam in and out of consciousness. Candy was talking to me, telling me to stay awake, knowing as well as I did that if I closed my eyes for too long, I might not open them again.

  The drive to the hospital seemed to take hours in the stop-and-go traffic. And maybe it did. I don’t know. But eventually we made it, and then Candy and Sam were helping me out of the backseat, directing me toward a pair of big glass doors. The lobby of the hospital was like a hotel. Candy spoke hurriedly to a male attendant at a desk. Her tone became argumentative. I couldn’t unders
tand what they were saying, they were speaking Tagalog, but there was obviously a problem.

  I went to Candy. “What’s wrong?” I asked her, my voice little more than the rustle of dead leaves.

  “This is a private hospital,” she told me. “They want ten thousand pesos for the admission fee.”

  Which is roughly two hundred US dollars. I was reaching for my wallet when I remembered Toto had stolen it. Candy and Sam, I knew, didn’t own credit cards, and neither would have ten thousand pesos in their bank accounts; Sam, I doubted, even had a bank account.

  “I’ll pay later,” I told the attendant.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You have to pay now, or else we can’t serve you.”

  “Serve me?” I said, the dead leaves whipped into a tempest. “This isn’t a goddamn restaurant! It’s a hospital. And I need help.” I removed the pillow from my side to show him the bloody wound.

  “I’m sorry, sir—”

  We argued with him for another five minutes before giving up and leaving.

  ▬

  I was in the backseat of the car once again, incensed with the hospital for turning me away because I didn’t have my wallet with me. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the ridiculousness of the bureaucracy, given shit like this happened to me all the time in the Philippines. Just that morning, a scant twelve hours earlier, I’d been having breakfast in a café with a British friend named Tony. I ordered an omelet; Tony ordered fried eggs and hash browns. His breakfast was served within a few minutes. When mine didn’t arrive after fifteen minutes or so, I asked the waitress what was going on. She told me the omelets were “out of stock.” I pointed to my friend’s now finished meal and said, “But you have eggs?” She replied, “Yes, sir, we have eggs.” I asked her the same question regarding ham, onions, and cheese. She affirmed all were available. “So how are omelets out of stock?” I asked her. “We have no mushrooms, sir,” she told me.

  I didn’t even like freaking mushrooms!

  ▬

  We arrived at a public hospital maybe half an hour later. Candy and Sam led me inside to the ER. It was chaos, a whirlwind of voices, patients, nurses, and doctors. I could barely stand and had to lean against the wall. Candy joined the priority line for charity services, while Sam took off somewhere. I closed my eyes and fought the incoming waves of nausea and dizziness. Then Sam was back. He had a stretcher with him, though it was spattered with dried blood. I didn’t care. I flopped onto it and wondered when the hell I was going to see a doctor. A nurse came by and hooked me up to IV fluids (there was no stand to hold the bag so she improvised with coat hangers). Candy told me we were waiting for a bed to become available. I asked her how long it would take. She didn’t know.

  It turned out to be an hour or so. A nurse wheeled me to the public ward in the basement of the hospital. It looked like a refugee camp in some war-torn country. Maybe a hundred patients lay in beds with stained sheets, or on pieces of plywood directly on the floor. Some were surrounded by family, others by piles of personal possessions, which made me think they might be living permanently down here.

  My bed was in the corner by an open basement window. The ward wasn’t ventilated so the fresh air was welcomed, even if it smelled like feces and urine. A nurse came by at some point, examined my injuries, and told me I needed a blood transfusion. She fetched a waiver for me to sign. A clause near the end of it stated that if I contracted HIV, Hepatitis, West Nile virus, or some other malaise from the transfused blood, the hospital was not liable.

  I gritted my teeth and signed away.

  After the transfusion, the nurse gave me a couple of Tylenol—my blood pressure was too low for proper pain killers—then proceeded to clean and bandage the defensive cuts in my forearms and the big one in my side.

  Then the bad news. I had a buildup of fluid—likely blood—in my chest, which needed to be drained. I thought a doctor would perform the surgery, but the nurse assured me she was qualified to do so.

  At my insistence she gave me two more Tylenol before she cut a one-inch incision between my ribs. She inserted a tube into the space between the inner and outer lining of my chest cavity. She taped it securely in place and stuck the other end into some sort of canister, which would collect the drained blood.

  I had never felt pain before like I did then. Not even the knife going into my side earlier.

  I screamed and hissed throughout it all. I nearly blacked out. Then the nurse left and Candy climbed beside me into the bed. She spoke to me for a while, warmly, reassuringly, before falling asleep. I wished I could sleep. I couldn’t. The tube felt like an invasive worm, causing me to spasm painfully at the slightest movement. My breathing remained hoarse and phlegmy. And worst of all, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t dying.

  So I remained awake in that dingy dungeon throughout the longest night of my life, during which two patients passed away before my eyes, all the while wondering if I was going to be next.

  ▬

  Was I afraid then? Damn right I was, which was the reason all those memories came to mind when the voice in my head asked me if I had ever been this afraid before. But was I ever this afraid before, as in right at this moment, waking in a pitch-black wooden box I suspected to be a coffin buried six feet underground?

  five minutes earlier

  Something was wrong. I was sleeping in an awkward and uncomfortable position. My arms were behind my back, beneath me. I tried moving them, but they remained where they were—tied together? Yes, I could feel the hard edge of something rigid—a zip tie?—burning into my wrists.

  What the hell? At least, that’s what I wanted to say, but a gag clogged my mouth. All that came out was muffled nonsense. I swallowed painfully and jerked myself into a sitting position—rapping my head on something hard.

  Dazed, a spot on my forehead smarting, I stared into the blackness. My heart beat faster in my chest as my thoughts weaved together a scenario I didn’t want to contemplate.

  I raised my right leg. The toe of my Converse touched what my head had struck. I fanned my leg left and right. Two sides, maybe twenty-five or thirty inches apart, or about the same height as the box I was in.

  Only it wasn’t a box, was it? The dimensions told the truth. It was a coffin.

  I was in a motherfucking coffin.

  Moaning into the gag—it was no longer muffled nonsense; it was high-pitched panic—I writhed from side to side, my wrists straining at the binds that held them, the bed of brittle sticks crackling beneath me—

  Sticks?

  Bones.

  I went still. The darkness swaddled me, overwhelming and suffocating and terrifying. The only sound was my breathing: short, deep snorts, like I was hyperventilating.

  I told myself to calm down. I fought to slow my breathing and the panic that had ballooned inside me to the point it felt as though my chest might burst open like in those Alien movies.

  My restraint lasted all of three seconds before I lost total control, screaming into the gag, flopping around like a fish out of water, snapping the bones beneath me, kicking madly at nothing.

  In my hysterics a small, reasonable voice whispered: Oxygen.

  The word turned my insides to cold mush, and I forced my body still. There was only a finite supply of oxygen in the coffin. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

  My breathing continued too fast, too loud, my chest heaving up and down. I closed my eyes, which made no difference in the blackness, and focused on taking deep, steady breaths.

  That small, reasonable voice returned, asking me from the shadows of my mind whether I had ever been this afraid before. I thought of the night Toto had stabbed me, everything appearing in crystalline clarity—Candy’s barangay, the struggle with Toto in the hallway, the unhelpful attendant at the private hospital, the dungeon-like space at the public hospital, sitting in a bed like a hastily patched ragdoll, wondering if I would see the morning—and I dismissed the memories as quickly as they had come. Because the answer was simple.
r />   No, I had never been this afraid before, ever.

  ▬

  I kicked the lid of the coffin. I bellowed into the gag. I yanked and twisted my wrists against the zip tie binding them until the hard plastic bit into them and they bled, and then I kept yanking and twisting, hoping the blood would act as a lubricant. It didn’t.

  While I struggled to hold onto my composure and sanity, random memories popped into my head, those of my childhood and high school and college, of my family and friends. It was as if my life were flashing before my eyes, what you heard people talk about when they were moments away from dying. Only I wasn’t dying. Not yet, at least.

  Still, the memories came, stuff I hadn’t thought about in years, if ever, all of them underscored by a current of dread and loss, an unsettling feeling that they were somehow no longer mine, as if I’d forfeited them somehow.

  One in particular was of me in grade two, sitting at my school desk, a crayon in my hand, a piece of paper before me. I’d drawn a horizontal green line to represent the grassy ground. Below this, near the bottom of the page, a brown box, and a yellow stick figure inside the box. I was working on a speech balloon above the stick figure’s head, carefully spelling out the word in it: “Grrrrrr!”

  I recalled this day as if it had been yesterday. My teacher, Mrs. Janis, had instructed everyone in the class to draw a scary picture for Halloween, which she would put up on the hallway wall. Most of my classmates chose to depict ghosts and witches and skeletons, some tracing their ghouls from the stack of Halloween-themed books on Mrs. Janet’s desk. I had recently seen Michael’s Jackson’s “Thriller” video on MTV for the first time, hence the zombie crawling out of his grave.

  I had found the drawing roughly six months ago, before I’d moved to the Philippines. My parents had wanted to clear out their garage, and a lot of the junk taking up space belonged to me. The drawing was in a moldy box alongside a coffee mug decorated with popsicle sticks that I’d made for Father’s Day, a raised plaster mold of my small hand I’d made for Mother’s Day, a Superman lunchbox and thermos, some Transformers and Gobots, and lots of glossy eight-by-ten class photographs that usually had me sitting in the front row because I was consistently one of the shortest boys in my grade.