Will the Sun Ever Come Out Again?

by Nate Southard

  “What?” she asks. Her voice is so quiet she’s not sure she really said anything. Maybe it was just a thought.

  The Gray Street Banger fumes at her for a moment, and the world goes silent until he speaks.

  “Gimme the boy.”

  Walker hops a chain link fence and jogs across a stranger’s backyard. A jangling sound tells him Rawls is right behind. Not too hot yet, but the Kevlar vest draws sweat from his pores. He already has his service piece drawn and ready to rock. Half a block until he even needs it, but he sure as shit doesn’t want to leave the hardware holstered while jumping fences in the middle of Compton.

  A woman wearing only an oversized T-shirt storms out of a sliding glass door as he reaches the yard’s opposite side. He throws a look over his shoulder and sees the rage in her movements, in the explosive look on her face.

  “Muthafuckas, get out my fuckin’ yard!”

  He hears Rawls spit a quick, “LAPD!” and then he’s over the fence and into the next yard. Toys here. A rusted bicycle. A plastic laser pistol bleached by the sun. Half-inflated football. He wonders if they’ve been touched in the last year, if the kid who owned them is even a kid anymore, even alive. Maybe the owner grew up to be a Gray Streeter. Maybe he got caught in a drive-by and took a round in the chest or face. Thousand ways to die in this hellhole, and he’s seen damn near every one.

  Thank God for the perks. The extra cash might not be official, but it sure does come in handy. Spends as easy as any other cash, too. He thinks the perks are the only thing keeping him from saying ‘fuck it,’ leaving the force and working private security. Pretty good money in that, he’s heard. Gotta wear a suit, sure, but shadowing some teen pop star with a tight ass can’t be too tough.

  Probably wouldn’t get to go knock around a couple of bangers blasting up an Edgar’s, though.

  “You don’t touch my boy!”

  The black hole hovers in front of her face, but Regina doesn’t care anymore. She isn’t going to let this psychopath take her Carl. Shay, neither. She holds her kids tight against her chest. The banger’s words have made Carl go completely limp, and that pisses her off. You don’t go scaring a working woman’s kids.

  She scowls at the Gray Street piece of trash. If the black hole would go away, she’d climb to her feet and beat this punk-ass senseless. She’d teach him something about respect. Real respect, not that gangsta shit the dumb ass niggas coming up care about so much.

  You don’t scare her kids.

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  He stares at her for a second, and somewhere behind the black hole she can see the confusion twisting with the insanity in his eyes. People don’t disobey him, haven’t for a long time. For a second she worries that she’s given him an excuse to pull the trigger, but then she decides she doesn’t care. This limp-dick motherfucker isn’t taking her son.

  The black hole disappears. The Gray Streeter lowers the pistol, and Regina almost smiles. Then something barks. A force like dual hammers takes out her eardrums in the same instant something punches her in the stomach. She folds toward the greasy tile, and her arms go limp. She tries to tighten them again, to hold her kids close to her and tell them everything will be okay, but she can’t find any strength.

  Sound starts to return. She hears a new round of screams, and somewhere far away she hears the ripping noises. She wonders what they might be, but she doesn’t want to raise her head to check. She wants to stay low to the ground.

  Her stomach alternates between freezing and burning, and she thinks she’s never felt anything like this before. She doesn’t like it. Not one little bit.

  He did it, she thinks. Big man went and pulled that trigger.

  Something brushes against her stinging ear, an insect that wants to burrow in and create a new home. She hisses through grit teeth, and she realizes the insect is Shay whimpering in her ear.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

  It’s okay, baby. Everything will be okay. Mommy just needs to plug the hole in her belly.

  Something is pulled from her grip. It’s limp and wet and cooling, and she doesn’t realize it’s Carl until he’s gone and she’s holding stagnant air.

  “No!” The word comes out like a roar. It sends an explosion of pure agony through her system. Her cheek rests against the floor, and she feels something hot and thick touch her face. She knows it’s her blood, but the realization doesn’t make much difference.

  I’m sorry, babies. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m—

  The pistol barks again.

  Walker hits the parking lot at a run. He glances over his shoulder and sees Rawls coming over the last fence. His partner throws him a nod, and together they race toward the restaurant.

  They approach the structure from the rear. Walker looks at the faded brick and sees the first body. It’s a teenager, male, splayed out in the open back door with a pool of blood collecting around him. As he closes in, he makes out a hole the size of a fingertip in the kid’s back. He knows there’s probably a wound as big as a fist in the poor bastard’s chest. Kid never had a chance.

  At least it gives them a way inside.

  He thumbs his radio, speaks into his shoulder. “Approaching from southeast corner. At least one civilian down. EMTs required.” He speaks quietly, but he still feels a tightening in his gut as he wonders if the bangers inside can hear him. He clicks off the radio in order to eliminate any incoming surprises.

  He wonders if the shooters are people he knows. That could cause problems. Nothing he can’t handle, but he doesn’t like complications.

  He closes to within ten feet of the door, his pistol now up and aimed at the open space between the steel and brick. His senses reach out. His hearing pulls in all surrounding information, and his brain sorts the city noise from the closer sounds. He hears a few muffled screams, something that might be laughter, high and shrill. He looks for shadows, any sign of movement, finds nothing.

  He presses his back to the bricks beside the doorway. His heart accelerates. He’s used to the response, almost relishes it. He draws upon an inner calm to balance it. He’s been in dangerous situations before. He’s talked his way out of some and shot his way out of others. This is just the next one in line.

  He feels Rawls fall in place beside him. “If it’s one of ours?” the big man asks.

  “Drop him. No need to take a risk.”

  “Amen.”

  “Ready?”

  Rawls nods. He shows no emotion. His face is a concrete mask. His eyes are dark pools full of secrets. Walker knows he looks the same.

  He gives the body at his feet a glance, and then he steps over it. He plants a foot between its sprawled legs, careful to avoid the blood that’s spilled. In the space of a heartbeat he slides through the door and presses his back to an interior wall. No gunshots greet him, and he figures that’s as lucky as he’ll get today.

  A steel industrial sink stands against the back wall to his left, a walk-in freezer dead ahead. A pile of folded cardboard boxes separates him from a row of steel shelves that hold bags of hamburger buns. He can’t see the grill, let alone the front of the store. He can definitely hear screams, though. There’s giggling, too. Great. Angel dust or meth. Either one means he’s dealing with psychopaths.

  He darts across to press himself against the freezer as Rawls enters behind him. He catches a glimpse of the kitchen as he makes the move, and the smell hits him a second later. It wrinkles his nose and almost distracts him. He can tell it’s supposed to be a comforting smell, a breakfast scent. Instead, it stinks like lard left in a skillet until it turns black and smokes. He flashes back to the summer he spent working in a hamburger joint, the long showers to scrape the rotten smell of grease and mustard from his skin, the burns from popping beef fat and flat grills that should be hauled away by the government as public hazards. Getting shot at by bangers feels pretty good in comparison. At least one gets you laid.

  He ducks low and waves for Rawls to follow. He senses his partne
r pulling away from the wall, and he inches his way into the kitchen.

  Loop can’t stop giggling, but he don’t give a damn. He works on the dead bitch with a smile in his goddamn heart. He don’t even really know what he’s doing to her. He sure as hell don’t know how she got that hole in the back of her skull. Looks like the motherfucking thing exploded. Like a nigga stashed a hand grenade in her dome.

  He hears folks yelling and B-Dawg talking about some shit, but it all sounds far away. It don’t concern him none. Got his own shit right here, his own little world. It ain’t as big as the real world, but it’s just as pretty.

  He holds a tool in his hand, but he can’t remember the word for it. It’s sharp. He knows that much. It moved through the dead bitch with no trouble at all. He reaches inside and pulls the squishy stuff out. It feels good, but he don’t think that makes a big never mind no more. Everything be new in the hood now. Ain’t nothing gonna be the same again. Not after last night.

  A phrase rolls through his head like a bass line.

  He stepped through. He stepped through. He stepped through.

  Sporadic screams punctuate the journey from the back of the store into the kitchen. They sound beyond scared, crossing the line into hysterical. Walker thinks the stretches of silence are worse, though. When it goes quiet he can hear other things, like the giggling and a second voice muttering rapid syllables. There’s another sound, too. It takes him a second to figure it out, but once he realizes what the ripping sound followed by wet splats must be he knows this is a call unlike any he’s ever seen.

  He hears a nearly-silent whimper to his left, and he swings the pistol around as he moves his eyes. He finds a teenage boy, a skinny thing with eyes the size of golf balls and a tremble born of horror in his limbs. Walker puts a finger to his lips and prays the kid knows well enough to do as he’s told. The kid gives him a look that says Please get me out of here. Walker shakes his head. Can’t risk it, not with two psychos within fifty feet of the kitchen. He turns away before the kid starts crying.

  He jumps when a finger taps his shoulder. He thinks it might be the kid, that this whole thing just got a lot harder and a lot more aggravating. He shoots an angry look over his shoulder, finds Rawls. He asks a question with his eyes, and Rawls jerks a thumb back and up.

  A mirror. It hangs on the kitchen’s rear wall just below the ceiling. To the customers waiting in line for their grease-saturated burgers, it would provide a view of the cooks fussing around between the grill and warmers and deep fryers. From Walker’s crouched position, he can see the front counter and a good portion of the dining room.

  He doesn’t like what he sees.

  Two homeboys. The witnesses got that much right. Their colors say Gray Street. One stands at the counter, slashing at a body with a knife. The jumping of his shoulders marks him as the giggler. The body might have been a girl once. Now it’s a mess.

  The other banger is crouched over something in the dining room. It looks like he’s got his piece jammed in the back of his jeans, but Walker can’t tell for sure. His eyes keep pulling away to the bodies that litter the floor like wreckage. He counts five in addition to the girl spread across the registers like a science experiment.

  His eyes move to Rawls. His partner shakes his head. He doesn’t like it, either. If there’s any bright side, it’s that neither of the bangers looks like one of theirs. It’s not much of a comfort, but it helps.

  He gives Rawls a nod, and together they move to the edge of the warmer. He leans around so that he can see the asshole with the laughter problem. The guy looks older than your average New Jack. Probably been in for awhile now. Should be smarter than something like this. The giggling makes Walker want to think the guy’s sailing. Something about it doesn’t sit right, though. He’s seen plenty of fiends over the years, and none of them have sounded like this. This guy just sounds crazy. His tittering grabs Walker by the spine and squeezes, chills him. It certainly fits with the banger’s little hobby.

  Walker tries to watch as the Gray Streeter works on the dead girl. He sees the blade—a butcher knife longer than the average forearm—rise and fall. He has to turn his head when the man pulls a thick loop of intestine from the girl’s opened torso and flings it down the counter’s length. He still hears the fleshy smack of the girl’s innards slapping the counter. The sound tells him it’s time to stop this.

  He rises to his full height and whips around the warmer in the same instant. He brings his pistol up and locks it on the banger’s head. He knows Rawls will cover the Gray Streeter crouching in the dining room. In the space of a breath he takes a single step forward.

  “Freeze! LAPD!”

  A round of screams fills the restaurant, but it doesn’t faze him. His eyes don’t leave the man with the knife; his aim doesn’t waver. He’s good at this, one of the few things in life he can make work.

  The giggler doesn’t stop, doesn’t even acknowledge Walker. He keeps working on the thing that used to be a girl and is now just a sloppy pile of meat and blood and bone. The arm moves in spastic jerks. The blade dives, rips, pulls free. Walker focuses on the psycho, refuses to look at the girl. There’s nothing he can do for her. Right now he has to get this crazed banger under control before somebody else gets hurt.

  “Hey, asshole. I’m talking to you, here. Drop the weapon and put your hands behind your head.”

  No response. The psycho keeps hacking away, probably lost deep inside his head.

  “Yo!”

  For some reason, the word gets through. Walker sees the giggler twitch. Something flashes through the banger’s eyes. He whirls, bringing the knife around like a sword. Walker jerks back even though the Gray Street boy is still at least ten feet away. He sees the dark shadow of madness in the man’s eyes, but then the blade slashes again, and he pulls the trigger.

  The bullet enters the banger’s face just below the left eye. Walker charges forward as the back of the man’s head erupts and his body slumps to the bloody tile. He kicks the knife from fingers that still grip because they don’t know they’re already dead. He refuses to take chances with this psycho. The blade clatters across the ground as it disappears beneath the warmer. Good. A uni can dig it out later.

  “Walker!”

  He turns toward Rawls’ voice and sees his partner standing over the remaining banger, piece trained on the man’s temple. Rawls doesn’t look up from the man he has covered, doesn’t so much as glance in another direction. He’s good, always has been.

  Walker sees something in his eyes, though. There’s too much white there, and they nearly vibrate in their sockets. His face has gone pale and tight. Walker knows horror when he sees it. Maybe the mess on the counter is catching up to Rawls, but Walker doubts it. Something has gone wrong.

  He gives the giggler a final look just to make sure he’s not getting up, and then he rushes around the counter. He moves with practiced care, his feet avoiding every spatter of blood, keeping the crime scene intact.

  As he enters the dining room he hears a soft sound, something meaty and moist. Chewing. Did this drugged out piece of shit decide he was hungry and start chomping on a breakfast sandwich? The thought angers Walker. He sees himself pistol-whipping the banger to sleep, writing it up as resisting or threatening an officer. Serves this asshole right for going on a killing spree just to grab a snack.

  But that doesn’t explain the look on Rawls’ face. As Walker steps closer, his pistol trained on the lone Gray Streeter’s back, he sees the tiny legs. They lay twisted clumsily, peeking out from in front of the hunched banger. They’re a puzzle piece he doesn’t like. The dead woman lying face down a few feet away and the little girl staring and trembling are other pieces, and he hates them just as much. He hates that chewing sound most of all, though. He can’t make sense of it, and it eats away at his patience. It disintegrates his dwindling sense that everything will be okay.

  He creeps closer, avoiding paper cups, greasy wrappers, and streaks of fresh blood. He keeps his e
yes on the killer’s back. He feels it’s safe to not call the man a suspect. The piece remains in the man’s waistband, and the chewing sound grows louder. He wonders if a kick to the back of the banger’s skull would make it stop. Instead he inches forward until he can touch the man. He sees the man has his hands to his mouth, but he instead concentrates on the pistol. He reaches forward slowly. When his fingers are within inches of the piece, he snatches it from the waistband.

  The banger’s unarmed, but he doesn’t find it comforting. Instead, he just wants to know what the hell the piece of shit is chewing on.

  “Walker,” Rawls says. His voice sounds sick. “Look.”

  He slides the weapon into his holster as he steps to the left. He keeps his own pistol trained on the man’s skull. As he moves, he sees the rest of the tiny body attached to the twisted legs. A little boy with crumbs from a breakfast biscuit on his fingers. Glassy eyes stare at the ceiling. A T-shirt lies in tatters around his shoulders.

  “Holy shit.” He can’t stop the words from tumbling past his lips.

  There’s a hole just below the child’s sternum, a ragged opening surrounded by blood. Walker sees no knife, no cutting tool of any kind, but he knows the banger got in there somehow. Because that’s the only way he could have retrieved the small heart he now holds to his mouth.

  “Put it down,” he tells the psychopath. “Put it right the fuck down.”

  He doesn’t expect the Gray Street boy to obey—to even pay attention—but the man chews noisily for a second and then swallows. The man pulls the half-eaten organ away from his mouth and smiles, a terrible expression smeared with thick blood.

  “He stepped through.”