Time sped up again.
The Automag became inexplicably heavy; K-Bar tried to drag it up as he fell. Zippo opened up with the Uzi. Chattergun racket drowned the store and a shelf of condiments noisily ceased to exist, ketchup and relish and mustard flying to mix like blood and bile. K-Bar fired, wild, un-aimed; he bounced from one knee back to standing and shied the Automag sideways, snapping off. His arm was no longer equal to the recoil. The cowboy sprang up half an aisle from where K-Bar fired and plugged another round through his bicep, disintegrating the bone. K-Bar dropped the Automag.
Zippo managed to hit the cowboy in the ear before the Uzi's clip ran dry. Whatever the cowboy was thinking flew all over the beer cooler in a spray. He folded and piled up on the floor. Zippo hustled over to nab the cowboy's hogleg and kick the corpse once, for macho's sake.
"Aww, dammit." His lip curled. They had never really killed anybody before.
Metallica was making huffing noises, like he was about to try something stupid. His girlfriend punched him in the arm and hissed at him to shut up.
K-Bar was wadded up on the floor, his hands making weak, grabbing motions at air. Toots parked his basket and held threatening with his pet 12-gauge, the chopped-off bore glinting a wicked silver.
"God damn that hurts!" K-Bar managed.
Zippo tried to compress K-Bar's wounds with sanitary napkins. He could not be moved; his breath was already coarsening into a whine. K-Bar was leaking his life away, and making a hell of a mess doing it.
The counterman was still fucking around. Dicky told him to step back. Crammed behind a canvas cash-drop sack, Dicky discovered a mickeymouse .32.
"Thought so. That's why you kept fading; dipping down. Wasting our time. Dumb."
Dicky shot the counterman in the forehead. Bang.
The old fellow flopped backward and cleaned off a bulletin board, going down in a hail of pushpins and for-sale cards. The mother yelped; her baby had been screaming since the cowboy's first shot. Zippo changed clips and gave up on trying to prevent K-Bar's blood from mixing with the mustard and ketchup.
"Okay." Dicky turned, gun up, from the gross-out that used to be the counterman. "Bound to happen eventually. So that's it for me and Zippo. What about you, Toots?"
Toots was watching K-Bar's eyes glaze. "Somebody's gotta watchdog, outside."
"I'll do that," said Dicky. "You do what you have to. Is K-Bar dead?"
"No," said Zippo.
"Fuck." This sort of thing pissed Dicky off.
"I guess you're up, man," Zippo said to Toots. He picked up the basket of goodies. Dicky stuffed the register cash in his back pocket and scored a couple hundred more from the open safe.
The mother had no way to stop her baby from crying; she was crying herself, by now. Toots bow-slung his shotgun and broke a Pit Bull from his shoulder rig, but did not point it.
"What's your name?" he asked the woman.
The woman, who had had the misfortune to see Dog Day Afternoon, got full up with bogus hope. "Miriam," she said between sobs.
"Okay, Miriam, I think it's time for everybody to get inside the freezer." He let the Pit Bull show the way for Metallica and his girlfriend. "No need for alphabetical order or anything like that."
The possibility for practical resistance was zero. They trooped in, but Miriam hesitated at the door, still pushing her baby ahead of her in the shopping cart.
"Please. Promise me. Promise me you boys won't hurt my baby. He's not even two . . ."
"Shh," said Toots. "Don't worry so much."
When she turned, Toots shot her dead-bang in the occipital ditch. The copper-jacketed slug blew her all over the cart in a shower.
"Classic!" cried Dicky from the counter, where he had selected a baseball hat that read HONK IF YOUR HORNY.
Toots shrugged and spent his remaining seven on the Metallica guy. He only missed once.
After the baby stopped wailing, Dicky shoved the still-smoking muzzle of his six-shooter beneath Lady Metallica's trembling chin. Here in the freezer it was cooler, more reasonable.
"Skip the part where you say you'll do anything," he said. "We already know that."
Zippo kneecapped her so she couldn't kick them. They stripped her atop a stack of beer cases, and each one of them picked an orifice. By the time Dicky had his orgasm, the girl was dead.
It always took Dicky the longest.
Between all the ambulances and sheriff's cruisers, the highway patrollers and a van grimly stenciled CORONER, there was just no way for the VW microbus to nose in, so it stopped on the dirt strip bordering the highway. It was the hottest part of the day, and the stench in the parking lot of the Jump Mart was pretty ripe.
"Somebody crapped themself." Conor worked a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, over the white scar bisecting his lower lip. He plucked a blue engineer's kerchief from the visor to blot his forehead. The VW's cooling unit was on the blink again.
Grace made a face. It wasn't as though Conor had never smelled death spoor. "I sure hope they have apple juice," she said.
She dropped down her visor mirror to check how she looked, which was pretty good. She had shorn a lot of her extremely blonde hair into a rag cut that could be backswept and forgotten–tousled, casual, not sloppy. She wore a spun black bandana above Air Force pilot shades as dark as the heart of a silver mine. Grace favored gray work jumpers with a lot of zippered pockets. She was still wearing her BEAM sling; from outside the van it looked like nothing more than a pair of tangled suspenders.
Conor dismounted first. The lowers of his rough-out boots matched the dust in the parking lot. It had taken more than a year to break the damned boots in; right now his feet thought that was just fine. The uppers were tooled top-grain and the next best thing to indestructible. Conor wore very tight jeans because Grace liked very tight jeans on him. Across the breast pocket of his denim shirt he wore a row of miniature skull pins, some with crossbones, some engulfed in biker flames. He had scored them all at convenience marts.
His shoulder holster was empty as he got out. He could pick a weapon later.
A deputy was already hustling toward him, one hand riding the butt of a still-snapped automatic. He squinted in the blazing sun; his scowl suggested that the last thing in the universe he'd countenance was an interruption like Conor.
"Looks like a hit," said Conor, friendly.
"Sorry, but you folks gonna have to back on outta here; we got us–"
"A situation," Conor overrode. "Yeah, I can see that. But I truly need some gum, and my lady needs a cold drink, and it looks to me like the bad stuff here is already past tense." Conor smiled big. His nose was hawkish. His beard and mustache, though precisely trimmed, were full and burnt red. Conor could smile like a satyr.
Conor watched the deputy's eyes consider his empty shoulder holster. Practically everyone in the desert carried weapons. The deputy stuck out a hand that would have halted Conor at chest-level. Conor stopped short.
Sterner, now: "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to ask you to turn around and back on out of here and leave this area. Right now."
Conor appreciated the improvised diction.
"But I still need some gum." Conor scoped the ambulance with its doors still open. "You collected one, didn't you? One of them."
The deputy summoned his partner. "Billy? Get on over here." He unsnapped his gun strap.
Billy approached. Conor thought he looked put out. From the microbus, Grace had counted four peace officers, total.
"You don't want any trouble, am I right?" Conor drew a deep breath.
"That's right, sir, so what you want to do is–"
Viper quick, Conor captured the pistol on the updraw, plucking it right out of the deputy's hand, with his right, while clamping the deputy's throat, with his left. Conor had waited until the second deputy, Billy, was within range. Billy stopped two shots to the head before he could get his next footstep down.
While Billy's glasses and hair made a cloud of r
ed, the deputy thrashed against Conor's death grip.
Grace had selected a loaded Steyr Aug assault rifle and clipped it to her BEAM sling. Deftly, she stepped out to cover the whole parking lot and caught the remaining two cops slow and stupid.
"No trouble, deputy." Conor hoisted him, one-handed, to tiptoe. "No trouble at all."
He let go of the pistol and punched the deputy right in the chest. The deputy's body armor split lengthwise, his ribs caved in, and his heart exploded. The impact made a sound like a tire blowing in the parking lot.
Grace opened up. The highway patroller's vests were no match for her armor-piercing tracers. She greased them and they dropped, still slow, still stupid, weapons sheathed, their viscera flash-fried by incendiaries.
Through it all, ten seconds, max, the medics played statue. By the time Grace's discharge echoes were gone, Conor was through the doors of the Jump Mart.
"You did say apple juice, right?"
Grace nodded, and kept everybody covered.
Conor quickly filled a basket. When he emerged, he headed for the ambulance.
"They took down five that I can see," he told Grace. "Five and a half, if you count the baby."
"Real bad asses," she said.
Conor picked the dead deputy's gun out of the dirt and slid it into his back pocket. He climbed into the ambulance bay, where he found K-Bar strapped to a gurney, immobilized in a traction sling and packed with freon compresses.
"You look sorta guilty to me." Conor smiled again. "Can you understand me?"
K-Bar said nothing. His eyes paid attention.
"I need the direction your friends went. All you have to do is point. If there's more than three, besides you, I want you to tell me. Okay?"
K-Bar kept his teeth clenched. He was obviously in a lot of pain. He told Conor to go fuck himself.
"Ooh, the f-word. I was afraid of that."
Conor dug around in his basket, displacing a box of fresh toothpicks and at least twenty packs of Black Jack gum. He used paramedic scissors to cut a hole in K-Bar's exposed stomach. Into the hole he poured blue drain cleaner. It fizzed.
K-Bar heaved against the straps, screaming, reopening his wounds.
"You know, I find that effervescent action is a real attention-getter," said Conor. "Now, sweetheart, before you kick, I still need to know a direction. Scream once for yes and twice for no."
K-Bar screamed a lot in the next two minutes. Conor only had to use half the can.
He stepped down from the rear of the ambulance and rubbed Grace's shoulders. "You need this one a little more than I do. I'll be okay." What he meant was that the two deputies he'd just waxed would hold him. For a bit.
Grace unclipped the Steyer Aug and Conor gave the medics a gunpoint grin. "You boys just keep on doing what you're doing. You're doing it real good." He broke out a fresh toothpick.
Grace stepped up.
K-Bar was writhing and twitching. Pallid foam lipped the holes Conor had clipped in his chest. His cognizance of Grace was elemental, reptilian.
"Poor baby," she said. "That Conor; he's such a whiz with household ingredients. But you did good. You only have to do one more thing. Don't worry–this one's easy."
She stripped her shades, unveiling laser-blue eyes. Very arresting, very Aryan. She crouched to hold K-Bar's face in both hands and spoke softly, like a lover.
"Die for me."
Conor heard K-Bar scream one last time. It was not a sound of injury or torture, despair, loss, or even simple pain. It was the violent unmooring of life itself. Conor knew the difference.
When Grace emerged, she did, in fact, look better.
Conor felt his deputy's final heartbeats replay in his mind. Not food, but vitamins, at least. A fast-burning jolt, to see them through. He handed Grace her apple juice as they waved good-bye to the medics–at gunpoint–and re-boarded the microbus.
"I picked me up some more skulls." He showed her. "You better?"
"Better." She donned her glasses. "Which way?"
"South. Just like I thought."
"Here's to first blood."
Dicky raised his Budweiser. Toots clinked cans immediately. Zippo held back.
"Blood, yeah!" Toots was a little wasted.
"What the fuck's wrong with you?" Dicky said to Zippo.
"K-Bar." Zippo had been looking toward the floor and his own feet a lot, lately. "It cost us K-Bar."
Dicky cleaned out his can and imploded it one-handed. Easier to do, these days–crushing aluminum was like wadding paper. Dicky was not fond of recycling. He popped a fresh Bud.
"So drink to K-Bar, you fuck."
They were holding forth from a transmission shack, inside the fenced and posted confines of a desert power station somewhere south of Tucson. They drank around a brass-faced work table bolted to the concrete floor. The brass was wincingly old; they'd had to wipe off all the dust.
Tied face-down to the table with bungi cords was a woman they'd collected from the highway. Her mouth was crammed full of cinnamon hots, from the Jump Mart, and sealed with two around-the-head winds of duct tape, also from the Jump Mart. She was trussed so that all she could do was listen to the tea chat of her abductors and stare, straight down, at their case of beer.
The game was that when the last can was drunk, she would be dead chicken.
Her name was Arianne, and there was blood in her mouth. She remembered hearing music coming her way before she or either of her friends could actually see the car that the lunatics with the firearms had called Death Caddy.
That chance encounter had happened about an hour ago.
It's not Nadia's boyfriend, Willy, but Nadia herself, Miz Cautious, who insists on flagging the first car to pass. "This is an emergency, right?"
"Goddamn alternator," Willy grumbles. He slams the hood of the old Impala. "I can smell oil burning. We might have fried a gasket, too." Willy hates the idea of soliciting aid from passing motorists in the middle of the desert. His mohawk, his garb was not popular in this neighborhood . . . as they'd all discovered when they'd gassed up at that convenience mart, two hours back.
The beer cans blurred out of focus as Dicky lifted her head by the hair. "Comfy?"
She had ceased making protest sounds. For what?
"I'll be gentle," Dicky cooed. He licked the free sweat from her forehead. "Is your name really Arianne? Sounds like one of those piss-ant yuppie names ex-hippies give to their litters. It sucks. From now on, your name is Bitch. Like it? Can you say Bitch? I knew you could."
Toots drew another beer. One more can down.
"Snatch is dead. She didn't last very long. No legs. City chick; you could tell."
Tears filled Arianne's eyes. Tears for Nadia.
"Keep it warm." Dicky slapped her naked rump. "Eight cans to go."
Her sinuses were packed, and she could barely breathe through her nose. Maybe if she held her breath, she could ace herself. Cheat them.
By noon it's too hot for Willy to wear his jacket, the fabulous patchwork fatigue that he climbs into like a new identity. He is down to jeans, safety pins, canvas combats and tong shades. His BAD RELIGION shirt now has smears of grime, from the engine.
All he says is, "Just try to get a look at them before you flag 'em down." Then: "I'll do it."
So saying, he sealed their fates.
The music was right. The attitude was right. Their ages were right. None of them could see the bad guy hats.
Arianne can recall saying, "Hey–that guy looks like he has blood on him."
Toots and Zippo took up the back seat of Death Caddy. No one had hurried to claim K-Bar's spot, up front. It was K-Bar's blood, on Zippo, that Arianne had glimpsed.
The pilot of the Cadillac ragtop scabs the road with rubber as he stands on the brakes, slams into reverse, and backs up to rendezvous. Willy steps forward; their rep. Their de facto protector.
The guy in the Wild West shirt–the one with the blood on him–stands with some kind of machine gun and puts nine i
nto Willy, pirouetting him. Arianne freezes, mouth on the hang, eyes large like a shined deer.
Nadia runs.
The handsome one with the long black hair runs after her. He is wearing gray nightfighting pants with an enormous knife sheathed to one thigh. He tackles Nadia, knocks her into a cactus, and breaks her arm taking her down.
Arianne begins to back-pace in welling panic. The driver, wearing a HONKIF YOUR HORNY cap, vaults from behind the wheel, and before she can beg, or promise she'll do anything, he smashes her in the face with a long-barreled revolver
She wakes up in the trunk of the Cadillac. Among her friends, one of whom has shit themselves in the process of roundup. She smells lubed auto tools, spare tire rubber, and is afraid the moisture speckling her face is her own blood. She wonders if she'll be alive in an hour.
Heat and, stink and concussion knock her down until she comes to again, on the table.
The power station stood a good five miles back from the highway, accessed by a dirt track of single-vehicle width. Hotwire towers squared their steel shoulders, a row of gigantic Japanese super heroes, their rows diminishing over the mountains in both directions, properly awesome–the new gods of power, forged in metal, bolted and riveted. On chain link and razor wire, signs bespoke DANGER and HIGH VOLTAGE and OFF LIMITS.
The shack was about ten-by-ten, and Arianne was the most interesting thing inside.
"If one kills, we all kill." Dicky felt the need to remind Zippo and Toots of their blood oath. It was the same thrill as forming a monster club, when you were a kid. "The cowboy shot first, so we're all in the clear. We did what we had to do."
For Dicky, so the story ended.
Toots indicated their current harvest. "Three of them. Three of us, now."
"Bitch is mine," said Dicky. "Zippo took the punk ninety percent of the way; he owns him. You nailed Snatch, so she's yours." He fixed Zippo with his Dicky-glare. "We do this for K-Bar, our bro, whom we love. Right?"
"Ain't got nothing else, you don't have your bros." Toots swigged and tried to nod solemnly; he had already drunk too much to nod without bobbing his head.
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