New Title 1

by White, Wrath James

“Naw, I’ll be alright. I’m just sayin’, just in case. I’m sure you don’t want me hurlin’ all over your leather interior.”

  “True dat. Go ahead and take your ride. Just follow real close so we don’t get separated.

  We drove slower than usual as we made our way down G-town Ave passing row after row of abandoned businesses whose front steps were now home to bums and derelicts. We made our way through rundown neighborhoods with houses that looked long condemned. I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat as eyes seethed in the shadows of windows and doorways, following us as we drove slowly past. I wanted to empty my nine into every dark corner we passed. I was supposed to be above these kinds of feelings, but nobody in this game really was. Anyone who didn’t see enemies at every turn wound up getting crept on and blasted into the arms of his maker. My cell phone rang and I almost wet myself.

  “Yo, Snap, it’s me. You ready for this, dog? ’Cause I got some real unpleasant shit for us to handle. It ain’t dangerous or nothing. I’m just hopin’ you ain’t got no moral objections.”

  “Why would I? Who we doin’?”

  “This crack whore snatched some product from us and she’s goin’ around braggin’ about that shit. Dog, she’s dissin’ us all over the hood. We gotta blast this bitch ’fore she fucks up our whole rep. There’s just one thing though.” He pauses for dramatic effect.

  “What?”

  “Last I heard she was pregnant—about nine months.”

  “You know damn well I don’t give a fuck about some knocked up ass crack ho. One less for the welfare lines.”

  “Yeah, well I just gotta be sure. You know some brothas get all soft about doin’ women and kids and shit. I should have known you wouldn’t sweat it though. You just like me, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, a thug for life.” Scratch laughed and the sound made me want to toss the phone right out the window.

  “I ain’t shit like you, Scratch. I’m just like, if a bitch is dumb enough to get her trick ass hooked on that shit then she’s probably already killed herself. So fuck should I trip on it for? If she don’t value her life, I damn sure don’t.” I hung up and stared straight ahead at Scratch’s tail lights.

  A pregnant woman? What tha fuck was I doin’?

  I could talk all that cold-blooded shit, but it did bother me, more than I even knew. It was quarter to eight when we pulled up in front of the broken down crackhouse. I hopped out of the Impala and met Scratch on the porch.

  “You ready for this, Snap?”

  “You shouldn’t even have to ask.”

  “Yeah, I shouldn’t.”

  He looked me up and down like he was still trying to make up his mind about me. Then he pulled out his .45 and checked the clip.

  “Nothin’ to it but to do it.”

  We went inside.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 18

  “There are in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan.”

  –Charles Baudelaire

  ««—»»

  The steps creaked, splintering and cracking beneath the weight of our cautious steps and I wondered if they might give way entirely and send us tumbling down into the dark basement below. I could hear the junkies and crackheads scurrying around in the opaque blackness. The hoarse whispers and agitated breathing from below informed us that they were aware of our presence and had at least some clue of why we had come, making ambush a very real possibility.

  A crackhouse had burned to the ground the previous night and everyone inside had been immolated. Those who had not died in the fire were gunned down as they tried to escape. Every piper around the way was now on alert for the arsonist. I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I just didn’t understand why. It made no sense to me why Scratch was killing his own customers.

  The crackwhore we were after was somewhere down in the mildew and filth below and these steps were the only exit. She was trapped. I had no idea how many pipers and hypers were down there nodding and scratching among the rats and roaches, but I had a fifteen shot clip in the Berretta and anyone who tried to interfere with business was gonna catch a bad one.

  My senses were screaming. I could smell the sweat, the foul breath, the burning cocaine, heroin, speed, the dried blood and urine, the jungle funk of recent sex and something altogether foreign yet unnervingly familiar. Scratch pressed up against me breathing excitedly. He could sense it too. We were nearing the kill. I still couldn’t figure out why Scratch wanted to come along on this one. Why he hadn’t just given me the location and the bitch’s description and sent me to do the dirty-work myself. Killing a crackwhore in a shooting gallery wasn’t a very glamorous assignment.

  “You hear that, Snap?” Scratch whispered nervously. His white skin seemed to glow in the near pitch darkness making his head look like a glow-in-the-dark Halloween skull.

  “I don’t hear shit. Now shut the fuck up.”

  I was still trying to place that strange smell and wondering about a new scent…burning wax, as if someone had just blown out a candle.

  “Yeah, these muthafuckas know we’re here,” I thought to myself, and then I heard what Scratch was trippin’ on. It sounded like someone trying to smother a baby’s cries. That’s when I placed the smell. It was used diapers. Somebody had a baby down here. I guess she wasn’t pregnant anymore. The thought of an infant crawling around in that house among crack vials, hypodermic needles, and broken liquor bottles sickened me.

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Scratch turned on the big halogen flashlight he had brought with him and waved it around the room. There were over a dozen people huddled there in various corners of the room. They shied away from the light as if they truly were the lifeless ghouls they appeared to be. There was an amalgam of young, old, male, female, White, Black, Puerto Rican, and even Korean crowded together on the dusty floor. Addiction did not discriminate.

  They were the living dead. Skin drawn tight to muscles atrophied to the point of near uselessness, animated only by their addiction. Bones showing through the thin layer of flesh, brittle from malnourishment to the point where each step drew pain, their souls suppurating with infected wounds that even the hardest narcotics could not remedy. They gathered around the dim flicker of lighters heating crackpipes and heroine spoons like settlers around a campfire fervently engrossed in their quotidian ritual of self-destruction. It looked like some modern day leper colony, a mirthless carnival of woe where society quarantined its diseased misfits.

  We had intended to just smoke anyone we found down here, but there were too many. Spillage from the crackhouses Scratch had already raided. This many bodies would attract too much attention after the damage Scratch had done last night. One or two crackheads dead wasn’t going to make anyone’s priority list, but a massacre like this would start tongues wagging about conspiracies and bring the heat down hard.

  I spotted the girl we were after way in the back clutching a bundle of rags to her face, trying to hide.

  “Is that the bitch right there?”

  Scratch aimed the big light at her and smiled even as he took an involuntary step backwards as if he were suddenly afraid.

  “I want all ya’ll crackheads and hypes to raise up out of here unless you’re lookin’ for a quick end to your misery,” I yelled, pointing the gun for emphasis.

  The walking dead started to scramble, shuffle, and drag their tired asses out into the street. The girl with the rags pressed to her face didn’t even bother to move. She knew that we were there for her and that she was as good as dead. Death would be no great divergence from her current condition.

  “Here, take my baby,” she said to a man who was busy gathering up his works and trying to get out of the line of fire.

  “Bitch, we ain’t gonna hurt that little bastard!” Scratch roared “Fool get your shit and get the fuck out!”

  The old man promptly complied, kicking up a trail of dust as he scurried up the basement steps.

  The woman’s
eyes were full of fear and almost looked innocent despite her addiction. But starring out from a face hardened by drug use, chapped and burnt lips, disheveled hair, sunken cheeks, reminded me that she was just another treacherous ho strung out on that shit. Still, in order to get burned by a crackwhore, you had to first be stupid enough to trust one and I couldn’t imagine Scratch being that stupid.

  “This the bitch you said played you for your shit?” I asked, staring at the notorious drug kingpin like he was the world’s biggest fool.

  “Yeah, bro, this the bitch.”

  “You must’a been slippin’ majorly for some nasty-ass hooker like this to clown you.”

  “Nigga, ain’t nobody clown shit here! The bitch slipped some shit out my ride while I was handlin’ some business with Yellow Dog.”

  “Fool, you call me nigga again and they’s gonna find two bodies down here in the dirt. I don’t play no peckerwood usin’ that word around me no matter how down you supposed to be. Ain’t no cracker ever that down. Stupid ass shouldn’t have been holdin’ in your car no how. You supposed to be a playa you should know better.”

  “You gettin’ a little too free with your tongue yourself, Snap. You forgettin’ who works for who.” Scratch walked up to me and stood with his chest swelled out against mine and his foul carrion breath steaming in my face. I put my hand out and softly but firmly shoved him back. He swatted at my hand but kept his distance.

  “I ain’t forgot shit. You just watch who you callin’ nigga and it’s all good.”

  Scratch glared at me like I was some poisonous insect that he was trying to decide whether or not to swat at the risk of being stung. My skin crawled and tendrils of ice slithered up my spine.

  “You ain’t invincible, Snap, and you damn sure ain’t bulletproof. So you better watch how you speak to my white ass. I can have you bodied as easily as anyone else.”

  “Now we both know that ain’t true and ain’t neither of us invincible so you watch yourself too, nigga!”

  This time it was I who walked up to stand chest to chest with Scratch, bumping him backwards and rotating my face inches from his as I purposely spit out my words, spraying him with minuscule droplets of saliva. I had my hand on the trigger of my nine and I would have hollowed out his chest right then if he hadn’t plead to a lesser and backed down like a little bitch. His punk ass couldn’t draw down on somebody who was set to fire back. Either that or he just didn’t consider me worth the effort.

  “See, Snap, that’s the difference between you and I. To me, you callin’ me nigga, that’s a compliment. I guess I’m just ignorant like that. Now cap this bitch and lets get the fuck up out of here!”

  She looked like the ghost of Christmas past with her skeletal frame wrapped in designer clothes that were five or six years out of date. Her faded black, pinstriped, skintight, Gloria Vanderbilts gave testament to just how long she’d been tweakin’.

  “I ain’t steal shit from this white boy! He just don’t want me to have this baby. He wants to kill my little boy!”

  “What…this your kid, Scratch? You got a thing for crackwhores?”

  “Shut the fuck up and pop this bitch!”

  “I’m just fuckin’ with you, dog. Move the kid and I’ll do this hooker for you.”

  “Naw, you pop ’em both.”

  “Fuck dat shit! I ain’t doin’ no kid!” I started to turn and leave.

  “Fine then, you pussy ass mutherfucker!”

  Scratch reached over and snatched the child from the whore’s arms. She tried to hold on to her baby but Scratch drew back and pimp slapped her. The back of his hand collided with her jaw with the sound of a gunshot. Snot flew from her nose as her head whipped around damned near three-hundred and sixty degrees and her chapped lips split and ran with blood. She fell to the ground sending up a cloud of dust.

  “Now, Nig-uh- I mean, Snap, cap this pipe smokin’ hooker!”

  “No sweat, my man.” I pointed the gun at the woman’s head…

  “Pleeeeeease!”

  …And pumped three rounds into her skull, tearing it to pieces. The top of her head went first and then the left side of her face. She laid there with her left eye staring at me in the dark from across the room and her right eye closing slowly.

  I stood in the darkness, stunned by my own cruelty. Scratch began to laugh. His huge flashlight was still trained on the woman’s brutalized corpse.

  “Oooooh shit! That was vicious, dog!”

  “Get that flashlight off her face, man! I don’t want to look at that shit!”

  “Okay, but we got to get rid of this kid though. I know how you feel, but we can’t just leave him here. It’s a mercy killing now. Would you rather leave him down here with these fiends? Yo, I don’t believe this shit! I know you ain’t cryin’ over this little crack baby?”

  But I was. I couldn’t believe it myself, but tears were streaming down my face. I was overcome with such a profound remorse that I was almost paralyzed by it. This killing raised my personal death toll to an even two dozen, but this was the first time I could recall feeling anything for the marks I took out.

  “Give me the kid.”

  “You gonna do him?”

  “Just give me the muthafucka!” I barked and Scratch obliged.

  “Forgive me,” I said, looking into the brown-skinned baby’s warm trusting eyes. The child’s eyes sucked me into them like a whirlpool, swallowing me whole and dragging me under. I drowned in them and died. I saw my whole life play out like pictures in a ViewMaster. It was all anger and pain, hatred for myself and others. I didn’t like anything I saw.

  “Forgive me,” I begged as the tears continued to fall.

  “Kill that little bastard!” Scratch bellowed. His flashlight was turned upwards to illuminate his face. His blue eyes narrowed into serpentine slits. His gold capped teeth looked like a mouthful of fangs and his white skin was the pale bloodless pallor of a corpse. In my heart, I knew that it was the face of Satan.

  I looked down at the child in my arms and it all made sense. Scratch was Satan and I was the whore of Babylon, this child, my last hope for salvation, perhaps even everyone’s last hope. Maybe this was the reborn baby Christ, and if Christ died this time then the world would belong to Scratch, and drugs, and greed, and murder. The idea sounded absurd even as I thought it, but like the chimerical voices and hallucinations of a schizophrenic or chronic drug addict, telling myself that it was all an illusion did little to dispel it. The more I stared at the pallid fright mask that danced and raged, glowing in the darkness, the stronger the idea became. I decided not to wait for him to grow horns and a tail. I pointed the gun at Scratch and pulled the trigger.

  The flashlight fell from his hands and spun off into the darkness casting shadows in every direction as he flew backwards crying out in pain. The flashlight hit the ground and continued to spin illuminating the basement in brief flashes like a strobelight. I watched as each flash of light revealed Scratch’s laborious rise from the ground clutching his bleeding chest. His muscles seemed to be reshaping, elongating and hypertrophying into something massive and powerful. Scratch’s jaw appeared to come unhinged and his gold teeth seemed to grow into long tusks. His hands curled into huge claws and his arms grew until they touched the ground even as his head touched the ceiling. Each turn of the flashlight revealed an even more horrible change. It could have been the adrenalin coursing through my veins, a trick of the light, my own guilt and fear feeding some sort of schizophrenic episode. But as far as I was concerned, Scratch had just turned into a demon before my very eyes. When Scratch charged toward me he did not look even remotely human. The roar that erupted from his throat was like the sound of an oncoming train.

  “Snap!!!”

  I took the stairs two at a time as I ran holding the tiny infant tight against me. Scratch’s voice boomed in the darkness below.

  “You’re dead, motherfucker! You hear me, fool? I’m going to kill you and everyone you ever knew!”

  I flew from
the house, down the front steps, and flung open the door to my Impala with my heart beating against my chest as if it was trying to break free and run. I was hyperventilating, trying to suck oxygen into my cramped lungs as panic and shock crushed down on me threatening to stop my heart in my chest.

  “What the hell did I just see down there? What tha fuck was that?”

  The child was still silent as I buckled him up as best I could and struggled to fit the keys into the ignition with a hand shaking violently with an overdose of adrenalin and a blood pressure that must have been in the one eighties. A bullet smashed through the driver’s side window and whistled past my nose. Scratch stood in the doorway aiming that big shiny .45 at my head. He looked normal again and he looked pissed. I ducked down and finally managed to fit the key into the ignition. More bullets whistled by over head as I started the engine and raced away from the withered crack-house with the raging white demon slumped in the doorway, his chest stained crimson, firing carelessly into the night.