THUGLIT Issue Twenty

by Justin Bendell

  THUGLIT

  Issue Twenty

  Edited by Todd Robinson

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in the works are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  THUGLIT: Issue Twenty

  ISBN-13:978-1518795596

  ISBN-10:1518795595

  Stories by the authors: ©Justin Bendell, ©Joshua Chaplinsky, ©Paul Heatley, ©T.L. Huchu, ©Russell W. Johnson, ©Aaron Fox-Lerner, ©Carl Press, ©J.M. Taylor

  Published by THUGLIT Publishing.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the Author(s).

  Table of Contents

  A Message from Big Daddy Thug

  Her Brother's Keeper by Russell W. Johnson

  Letters to the Purple Satin Killer by Joshua Chaplinsky

  Black Dragon River by Aaron Fox-Lerner

  The Flight Home by Carl Press

  The Best of All Possible Worlds by T.L. Huchu

  Red Scare by J. M. Taylor

  The Captain and the Snakes by Paul Heatley

  West Mesa by Justin Bendell

  Author Bios

  A Message from Big Daddy Thug

  I got nuthin…

  Your beloved editor is burnt.

  Fried.

  Brain-dead.

  Zonked.

  My usual pith is beyond reach tonight.

  Why, you may ask?

  Because I work so hard for YOU, oh dear Thugketeers. Even past the eight killer brand-spankin' new stories featured inside.

  There's more coming…

  And like all great mysteries, the answer is in the back of the book—or magazine. Whatever.

  Been cooking up something special for yas to imbibe over the upcoming holiday season, oh sweet Thugketeers. Not to literally imbibe. Literarily imbibe. Get your own damn liquor. (Besides, I'm pretty sure that at least one of you is a twelve-year-old boy who hides from his parents the fact that he reads Thuglit. Stay strong kid. Don't do drugs.)

  It's okay to peek at the back if you wanna…and you know you wanna.

  But in the meantime,

  IN THIS ISSUE OF THUGLIT:

  Better dead than red.

  Who robs the runner?

  Ah, the lost art of letter writing…

  Watch out for snakes!

  Run river, run deep.

  Sibling rivalry.

  Robby-rob the jobby-job.

  I shot some braaaains out in Aaaaafricaaaa! (my apologies to Toto.)

  SEE YOU IN 60, FUCKOS!!!

  Todd Robinson (Big Daddy Thug) 10/29/2015

  Her Brother's Keeper

  by Russell W. Johnson

  Most days, Mary Beth Kane enjoyed being the first female sheriff in the 200-year history of Jasper County. The position certainly had its perks: guest of honor talks at all the local lady luncheons, free breakfast at the Waffle House, and one hell of a company car—a Camaro, triple black, with a super-charged V8 and party lights on top that gave her a license to open it up anytime she wanted.

  But then there were days like the one when she got the call that a suitcase full of Emulex had blown the roof off the County Courthouse. A sick feeling in the bottom of Mary Beth's stomach told her exactly who'd done it. A fact that was all but confirmed when she switched the radio to AM 850 and heard her brother Sawyer preaching away about "the den of thieves where local magistrates had been officiatin' gay weddings." Mary Beth knew instantly what she had to do, and how little time there'd be to do it. She flipped on the party lights and hit the gas.

  Ten minutes later she spun to a stop in the gravel parking lot behind a strip club called Mountain Flowers. Up and down Highway 460, billboards of a big-busted woman with daisy tassels advertised the club as "West Virginia's second greatest natural resource," coal being the presumptive first. Or maybe it was weed. Didn't much matter because the mountain was teeming with both. Out back of the club, overlooking a slurry pond, was a cluster of trailers where the patrons could get to know the talent more intimately or pick up a dime bag of Mountain Fescue.

  Mary Beth left her siren blaring as she exited her vehicle, sending some nervous Johns scrambling for their pickups. They were followed by two armed security guards who were obviously displeased about the interruption. One was older, tall and bald and holding a shotgun by his side as he walked. The younger one was short, but built like a brick wall. He walked with the slow, strained strut of a weightlifter, like he was so muscle-bound that every step or casual swing of his arm pained him. Mary Beth remembered seeing him wrestle in high school, an All-State heavyweight back then who still had the cauliflower ears to prove it. She hadn't seen him up here before and was sorry to see him now. He'd seemed like a good kid. Plus, now he was holding a Glock 9 trained at her forehead, holding it sideways the way the gangstas do in the movies but not looking nearly as convincing, arm all twitchy like it was the first time he'd ever pulled on somebody.

  Mary Beth walked straight toward the gun like she hadn't noticed it, more worried about the goon shooting her by accident than anything else. Once she was within spitting distance, she turned to the tall bald man, head pink and freckled, and said with the most pleasant of smiles, "Hey Tommy, why don't you tether your pit bull over here before I rip his nuts off?"

  Tommy, who was some manner of cousin—second or third, maybe once or twice removed, Mary Beth was never really sure—nodded to his partner to lower his piece. "Jesus, Mary. You can't come storming up here like this. It's bad for business."

  "Couldn't be helped," Mary Beth said. "I need to see Mom."

  Tommy frowned and motioned past the row of trailers to the backdoor of the club. "She's in the office." He turned to lead the way, the shorter man falling behind, walking with a wide wrestler's stance till Mary Beth hauled off and kicked him square in the nuts, dropping him like a flour sack.

  The man balled up on the ground, whimpering and gasping for air. Mary Beth chicken-winged his arm behind him and took his gun. "Don't ever point a gun at an officer of the law, dickweed."

  "Goddammit, Mary," Tommy said, shaking his head. "You are so much like your mother."

  That was just about the worst thing anybody could ever say to Mary Beth Kane. "Don't mess with me today, Tommy," she said. "I'm not in a pretty mood."

  Mary Beth's mom was a Paula Dean doppelganger with a syrupy-sweet voice. "Well, as I live and breathe," she said, "the prodigal princess has returned. To what do I owe this incredible honor?"

  "You raised an idiot son, whose redneck buddies just blew up the county courthouse," Mary Beth said.

  Mamie Kane looked legitimately surprised, even scared for a moment. She held her hand to her mouth, flashing three gaudy diamond rings, one for each of her dead husbands. "Well, I certainly don't know what that has to do with me," she said. "Sawyer is his own man. He makes his own decisions. A mother doesn't interfere."

  "Well you're going to need to, Mom," Mary Beth insisted. "Do you have any idea what's going to happen to him if the feds get to him before I do? You know all of those militia idiots up there on the mountain are just creaming their shorts for a Waco-style showdown. I figure I've got an hour or two before the ATF and the FBI have got their compound surrounded. They'll have choppers swarming these parts like a cloud of locusts. By then it'll
be too late. I'll lose control of the situation."

  Mamie fanned herself with her ring-laden hand. "Sweetheart, you overestimate me," she said. "I don't hold any sway over your brother. He doesn't listen to me any more than you do."

  Mary Beth rolled her eyes. "We both know that's not true," she said. Truth was, Sawyer'd been such a mama's boy growing up, the kids at school used to call him "hooter," the local joke being that he was still breast-fed long past the time that'd become a biological impossibility.

  Mamie Kane stood and stretched her back. She had an old bank teller's lamp with a green glass shade on the desk, where she'd been reading a ledger of some type. Mamie closed the leather-bound book and pulled the lamp's black chain, switching it off. "Tell me exactly what it is you think I can do," she said.

  "I need you to call him. Tell him I'm coming up there. Tell him, to tell all his redneck buddies, not to shoot me. They're gonna have to let me in so Sawyer and I can talk."

  Mamie Kane sighed and sat down behind her desk. She held up her hand, studying her rings as she spoke. "Let's just say I were to do this for you. What's in it for me?"

  "You mean other than saving your son's life?"

  Mamie huffed and crossed her arms. "Well you're planning to arrest him, aren't you? A mother can't be expected to just turn her child over. To think, of my child, my baby, wasting away in a prison cell, and you expect me to just—"

  "Cut the bullshit, Mom. What do you want?"

  Mamie tried for a moment to look hurt, then gave up on the pretense. "I would like to see my grandson. I was thinking maybe Thanksgiving." She paused to think, "No, I think Thanksgiving and Christmas."

  Mary Beth groaned. She'd made it her life's mission to keep her boy away from her family. Not an easy task in a small town. She thought for a moment about just walking out. Then she checked her watch. There wasn't time for this. "One or the other, Mom. But not both," she said through clenched teeth.

  Mamie shrugged. "Thanksgiving then. We'll have dinner at my house. And of course, sweetheart, I'll expect to see you there as well."

  Mary Beth spotted the rifle tower in the distance as she hit an incline and caught some air on the four-wheeler she'd commandeered from Cousin Tommy. The tower was about a mile west, made of rusted brown metal and nearly as high as the tallest pines. She veered off the trail, cut through some oaks and maxed out the throttle. Either Sawyer'd told them not to shoot or he hadn't—either way, she didn't want to slow down. Mary Beth wasn't sure if her mom had come through until she was able to make it all the way to the front gate without a shot being fired.

  Four men with AR-15s were there to greet her. Their appearance surprised Mary Beth who'd expected them to be a bunch of tatted-up skinheads with "born to lose" written all over their faces. But the men she encountered looked more like her son's scout leaders. Clean-cut, respectable, middle-aged dorks, turned weekend warriors. She was pretty sure one of the guys was the pharmacist at the local Walgreens. He was the one who spoke. "Ma'am, we'd better get you inside," he said, then insisted upon relieving Mary Beth of her sidearm, which she gave up without a fight, happy that they didn't bother to pat her down or find the backup she kept holstered just above her left ankle.

  Mary Beth climbed back on the four-wheeler and followed as the motorcycles wound through the compound, past throngs of men busily readying munitions, and a playground where she counted at least 30 children playing. Finally, they reached a three-story cement building with a radio tower on top where Mary Beth knew she'd find her brother.

  "What in God's name are you doing here?" Sawyer asked, rising from behind a desk, not unlike his mother's.

  "Saving your ass, as usual," Mary Beth said. She looked around his makeshift radio station lined with an eclectic collection of portraits, trying to figure out what kind of bizarre philosophy a lunatic like Sawyer had weaved together hero-worshipping icons as diverse as Churchill and Che.

  Sawyer laughed. "She ain't lyin boys," he said to his men. "My big sis has been looking out for me my whole life. I remember one time in high school, the McClellen brothers were looking to whoop my sweet little ass over a little misunderstanding with their sister. Big sons a bitches. Caught up to me in the school parking lot where Mary Beth was on a bus about to leave for a softball game, and what does this one do?" Sawyer paused and extended his hand, offering his sister a chance to finish the story.

  "You're the storyteller," she said.

  Sawyer continued, "So Mary Beth pulls off her gym socks, fills em full of rocks and goes at those boys, whipping those socks around like a crazy windmill. Gave one a concussion and the other a pop knot the size of my fist."

  "I don't have enough rocks to fend off who you've got coming after you this time," Mary Beth said.

  Just then a round of machine gun fire growled in the distance and everybody jumped. "Sounds like we have visitors," Sawyer said. "You boys better get to your posts." The men went running, leaving the siblings alone.

  Sawyer moved to the lone window, a mailbox-shaped pane of glass, camouflaged with smudges of mud. While his attention was diverted, Mary Beth retrieved her backup gun and tucked it along the small of her back. She noted how much bigger Sawyer seemed from the last time she'd seen him. He'd taken up weightlifting while doing a stint for fraud after he was caught fundraising for a non-existent charity. Mary Beth always had a hard time understanding what people saw in her brother, why he attracted followers so easily. But as he turned back to her, the light framing his long hair, she thought for a moment he looked like a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus—if Jesus had been a bipolar bilker with a lust for guns and a BA in bullshit.

  "All this just because some folks who never did nothing to you want to get married," Mary Beth said.

  Sawyer waived a dismissive hand. "Don't take it personal."

  Mary Beth knew he was taunting her. Women cops get labeled as lesbians all the time, and Sawyer always thought it was funny. She glared at him with the Kane stare.

  "I'm serious," Sawyer said. "I don't care the least little bit if somebody's gay. That's just the topic of the day. One of the things that's got people stirred up."

  "Just giving the people what they want, huh?"

  "Something like that."

  "Well I hope it was worth it. You'll probably be charged with domestic terrorism and sedition. What was the point?"

  Now Sawyer gave his sister the Kane stare. "For you of all people to say that to me. Do you know what day it is?"

  Of course Mary Beth knew. It was on this day, thirty years ago when she watched a six-year-old Sawyer break free from their mother's grip and run to where their daddy, Billy Kane, was trying to surrender to the DEA agents who'd surrounded their farm. When Billy spun around to shoo his boy away, a high-strung agent thought he was making a move and put a bullet through their father's heart, dropping him dead at Sawyer's feet. Looking back on it, that'd been a pivotal day for both of them. No doubt Sawyer was destined for a life of crime after that. And it was also the day Mary Beth determined to escape the life her parents had lived.

  "Dad wasn't Randy Weaver," Mary Beth said. "He certainly wasn't David Koresh. Or anybody else you militia idiots are worshipping these days. Dad was a drug dealer, plain and simple. He lived his life on the wrong side of the law and it finally caught up to him. Just like it's about to catch up to you."

  Sawyer spat on the ground. "Dad was a farmer. He sold his crop just like every man has a right to. Shit, weed's been growing wild in this country since before there was a country. Until some busybodies in Washington, DC, decided it was ill-legal, and a man—he can't make a living. Then they send their gun thugs down here to shoot him tombstone dead right in front of his wife and kids. That's the government you work for."

  Sawyer moved close, and Mary Beth thought for a moment he was going to hit her. Instead, he grabbed her by both shoulders and spun her around to stare at the portraits lining the wall. "You know what all of these people have in common?" he asked.

  Mary Beth wriggl
ed free. "A lot less than you realize, I suspect."

  "That's what you would think," Sawyer said. "They don't fit in the nice little boxes you like to put people in. What you don't realize is that all these people were freedom fighters. They were all trying to repel an occupying force. And that's exactly what I'm doing."

  Mary Beth rolled her eyes.

  "I'm serious," Sawyer said. "I bet you expected you'd see a bunch of crazy skinheads up here, didn't you? And, okay, we got a few. We got some racists. We got some bigots. Just like everybody else. But we're building a broad coalition of people who just want the Imperial Government to leave them alone. Quit imposing their misguided morals on everybody else. We got school teachers here, dentists, shop owners, little old church ladies who work soup kitchens on the weekends but are sick of seeing their government fund abortions. We got pacifists who don't want their tax money paying for foreign wars over oil, when we got all the coal we need right here."

  "Are those pacifists the ones up in the gun towers?" Mary Beth asked.

  "No. They're the ones who insisted we wait until the courthouse was empty before we staged our little demonstration."

  "You mean before you blew it up. My courthouse. My courthouse. All the buildings you could have chosen, and you don't expect me to take it personally?"

  Sawyer scoffed. "Oh, and you running for sheriff in the same town where your family does business wasn't personal?"