The situation was truly a devil’s horror show, and I felt extremely sorry for the families who were so desperately trying to get to safety. I could see the old me, Eden, and Annalise crying in one of those cars, and that terrifying vision made me swallow hard. I just couldn’t understand why the world had to be such a cruel place, and why the innocent were tormented so, the children of God who didn’t even understand the reason for their pain. They suffered, but they still tried to smile. They cried, but they didn’t know why. They tried to understand so hard, but there was nothing to be understood. Madness couldn’t be explained, and the vile acts of man were something that made the word humanity seem like a poor and selfish choice—a choice of a man. I couldn’t understand why kindness was associated with a creature that was so nasty and sordid that it tolerated the torture of the innocent and treated them like they were unimportant, worthless. It was beyond me why women and children didn’t turn their backs to that faulty creation that was, after all, the source of all the evil and misery in the world and tell him to piss off or start behaving. Why were men such bloody idiots that they still believed that physical strength was the source of their foolish might? Why were they so goddamn defective?
Brilliant men somewhere in North-Rhine Westphalia had, however, built the Brabus, and I applauded them for their fine accomplishment. The car was a true marvel of engineering and also a quite effective weapon against the increasing flow of maniacs who were driving on the wrong side of the freeway and forcing me to play a fun game of chicken with them. When they saw the angry Brabus closing in like a devil’s bullet, they yielded immediately and started to frantically steer away from me with panic burning in their terrified eyes. It was quite a unique experience for all the parties involved, especially because I was driving twice as fast as the approaching vehicles. They appeared so fast and suddenly that I had to seriously concentrate to avoid a fatal accident. The Brabus, however, handled the challenge like a champion, and it reacted to my every move like it had become one with my body. I really loved that car, and I felt sorry for the future generations who would have to sit in the backseat with their darling smartphones and watch a boring autopilot do all the driving.
I slowed down a little when I saw two police officers trying to desperately fix a hole that someone had cut in the cable barrier separating the two freeways. They both carried shotguns to help to get a point across, but the poor servants of justice seemed to be fighting a losing battle. A nuclear storm was evidently way scarier than a cop with a gun, and manic people just kept pushing through the hole with their SUVs and minivans, almost running over the brave officers. I shrugged and slammed the accelerator to the floor, and the men in blue were soon just two uniformed dots in the rearview mirror.
The freeway was clear of suicidal maniacs again, and I figured that there were no more holes in the barrier. It was time to allow myself to enjoy the raw power of my new friend a little and do something crazy.
The Brabus was in its element at high speeds, and it didn’t even flinch when I steered it into the debris-filled shoulder and flew past three military utility trucks that had hogged the lanes like greedy steel pigs in fatigues. The powerful driving machine was tearing through the piles of freeway trash like a late-summer cyclone in a Manila landfill, and I closed my eyes instinctively when the monster reached 195 miles per hour.
The whole stunt only took a second or two to pull off, and I ticked one more box on my list of supper-happy-fun-things that were only possible when there was a fatal nuclear storm coming to a town near you. It was a hell of an adrenaline rush, no question about that, but I had to slow down because the speed was so intense that I simply didn’t have the required strength to manage it for more than a couple of minutes at a time. The speedometer settled at 130 miles per hour, and I took a deep breath.
After about forty miles of leisurely driving, the unmistakable shape of a police car appeared on the horizon. Doomsday’s finest was cruising approximately at 100 miles per hour, and I caught up with it quickly. It was time to play a little game with the fine officer.
I decreased my speed until I was side by side with the cop and glanced at his car gleefully. It was a black Dodge Charger pursuit vehicle with a Hemi V-8 engine under its sleek hood. It was a cool little thing, and its main purpose was to catch speeding maniacs in fast cars. The shiny iron officer tried to look tough in its muscular body, and I couldn’t help but think that the car looked almost adorable next to the angry Brabus. It was like a tiny mountain bunny next to a big ferocious wolf that breathed gasoline and exhaled fire. The poor Dodge was simply outmatched.
I pulled a little closer to the Charger and waved happily to the officer. He looked at me sternly, and I smiled at him like he was my best friend. The serious man wasn’t amused, and I figured that he didn’t have time to play games with idiots like me on the day before the Last Judgment. Well, that was too bad because I wanted to play regardless of his wishes, and I stepped on the gas gently. The Brabus started snarling viciously and the speedometer quickly climbed to 180. The Charger tried to stay with me the best it could, but it had no chance. It was trying to catch a beast with almost unearthly power.
I slowed down and waited for the cop to catch up with me. Then I waved at him again and lifted my thumb. He still wasn’t amused and was frantically mouthing and gesturing me to pull over. I just smiled at him and slammed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The Brabus followed my command like a good soldier, and it charged forward with the speed of a pissed-off ballistic missile. The adorable Charger vanished from the rearview mirror in a couple of seconds, and I watched the speedometer climb to 210. The cop knew that it had no chance of catching me, and I figured that he just gave up, or simply didn’t give a damn. On a normal day, he would have probably called reinforcements to greet me with a spike mat, but not on a busy, busy day like that—not when the whole world was about to ignite and burn to ashes.
I loved pushing the Brabus to its limits, but I had to slow down again after noticing that I was burning gas at an alarming rate. That kind of speed devoured gasoline so fast that I could actually see the gas gauge moving lower. It was also true that US roads weren’t built for 200-mph speeds, even if the Brabus was more than capable of handling them and then some. A concrete freeway that had more potholes than the surface of the moon wasn’t treating my dear foreign friend well, and it was getting a little tired. The Brabus was a distinguished gentleman in devil’s clothes, and it missed the smooth surface of the German autobahn terribly. That was its real home, after all, and it was sad and lonely in the foreign land where it was constantly chased, blamed, and forced to endure roads completely unworthy of its rare brilliance.
Even if I was driving slower, I was still making good progress and getting steadily closer to my destination. The unfortunate fact was, however, that I really needed to fill up the car or risk running out of gas. That made me a little nervous because I didn’t want to risk a last-minute encounter with the crazies or see the cop in the Charger. But I had no choice. The Brabus was worth less than my old shoes without gasoline running in its noble veins, and I had to feed it or die a slow death on the dirty freeway.
The unquenchable thirst of the monster from Stuttgart was something I hadn’t really considered when I had abandoned the humble Econoline. The custom-made bullet needed much more love and care than my trusted van, but I accepted that it was a price that an ambitious man had to pay if he wanted to enjoy a truly exceptional performance that made his penis tingle in just the right places—and grow a little bigger, too. High maintenance was, however, a tradeoff that I had a little experience with, and I started to understand why rich people had so many worries. I wondered what the equilibrium was of material wealth, and when that critical point was reached where the scale started to tip from the side of happiness and pride to the side of worry and pounding pain in the ass. I figured that if I were a researcher, I would have studied the subject and presented the results to a high-paying audience in Monte Carlo. M
y seminar would have been called: “How many Ferraris make you sad?”
After about twenty minutes of fuel-conscious cruising, I noticed a dirty bar on the side of the freeway. The nasty hole looked truly uninviting, but it had a solitary gas pump waiting under a dilapidated metal canopy for a customer. That made the nasty hole look extremely inviting, and I slowed down and decided to check it out. I figured that it was a better option than driving to a proper gas station because I had seen in the news that most of them had run out of gas or shut their doors entirely. It was also likely that the shitty bar still had some gas left because it was on hidden from the westbound side of the freeway, and it looked like a place where a man, or a woman, could easily get killed even on a day when the world wasn’t ending.
I approached the gas pump cautiously and saw two bearded men in faded fatigues guarding it with automatic weapons as if the goddamn thing was made of one-hundred-carat diamonds. I opened the passenger window and leaned toward the men and said politely, “Do you have gas for a lonely rambler?”
The fatter of the fat men looked at me indignantly and said, “It’s two hundred bucks a gallon.”
“Fill her up,” I said.
“Show me the money, motherfucker,” the thinner of the fat men said.
I pulled a wad of money from the hunting bag and showed it to them.
The fatter of the fat men nodded to the thinner man, and he started pushing the pump’s greasy buttons with his dirty fingers. I opened the fuel door, and the ill-mannered bastard started pumping gas into the Brabus so slowly that the numbers on the cracked display were hardly moving.
I put the Sig under my waistband, closed the window, got out of the car and locked the doors. Then I looked at the fatter of the two fat men and said, “I am going to get a drink now. I’ll pay you when I come back, OK? That thing is so goddamn slow that it will take a year to fill her up.”
The man didn’t say anything, and I walked to the bar through a dusty parking lot that had a couple of beat-up pickups carelessly parked in it. One of them had a rusty rifle resting on a gun rack that was mounted behind the driver’s seat and a dirty window decal that said “Bone Collector.” It was clear that the rednecks were on the prowl.
I opened the bar door determinedly, and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke welcomed me like the little brother of the approaching nuclear storm. The dirty joint smelled and looked exactly like I had imagined in my mind. The bar was darker than the ear canal of a West Virginia coal miner, and a handful of rough customers were drinking beer and whiskey inside its grimy walls like nothing unusual was going on in the world. They looked like local people with their own laws and rules, and I didn’t get the feeling that my presence was entirely appreciated in their exclusive church of cheap liquor and workingman’s pungent sweat. Hillbilly was the first word that came to my mind when I looked at the patrons in the bar, even though I had nothing against hillbillies. However, I did have something against hillbillies who wanted to hurt me, and it was obvious that the bar’s clientele consisted mainly of that kind. I knew that I needed to play my cards right if I wanted to enjoy a drink in peace and walk out alive.
The whole bar was now staring at me with faces so cold that they could have frozen a German graphite fire, but that didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, it was such a cliché that the whole thing amused me, and I sat down on a barstool with a smile on my face and said to the bartender, who was sporting a legitimate farmer’s tan and a stained wife-beater, “One godfather, please.”
The bartender looked at me like I was a creature from outer space and said dryly, “We don’t show movies here. There’s a pool table and a jukebox in the corner, but you have to order something if you want to play.”
I shrugged at his mindboggling lack of intelligence and said, “OK, thank you. Can I get a Miller Lite, please?”
The bartender didn’t say anything, but he reached down and pulled a bottle of Budweiser from a fridge that was hidden under the bar. Then he handed the sweating bottle to me and said, “That’s fifty bucks. If you open it, you have to pay, but you can give it back to me if you so choose.”
I looked at him and said, “It’s the happy hour, huh?”
The bartender turned stone-faced and said sharply, “Look, asshole. I have two beers left, and there won’t be any more deliveries in the near future. Everything is fucked up because of the goddamn storm. The beer is fifty bucks. Take it or leave it.”
“I understand. Give me the other beer, too,” I said and gave the man two fifty-dollar bills.
He reached down again and gave me the second bottle of beer and said, “Here, take it, and enjoy it. Thanks to you, there is no more beer in the whole fucking bar.”
I took the beer and emptied the first one with a couple of giant gulps. Then I put the other one in my pocket and got up. I was more than ready to get out of that suffocating shithole and leave the wrong kind of hillbillies at the mercy of a storm that they seemed to think wasn’t even coming. It was evident that even when the storm would rip off their filthy clothes and wash their soiled faces with devil’s water, they would still believe that it was just a little ocean breeze that that was blowing gently from the Caribbean.
As I was walking toward the door, a burly man with a faded face tattoo stopped in front of me and said in the irrational voice of a destructive alcoholic, “I don’t like you, old man. You are trouble, and you have to fucking apologize to me right now.”
I looked at him indifferently and said, “Apologize for what? There is a nuclear storm heading our way. Do you really have time for this shit?”
“Nuclear storm, my ass,” he said mockingly. “The whole thing is a government ruse. They are trying to empty the East Coast and give it to the refugees. There is a genocide going on in this country, and I think you are one of them, Athenian. You are trying to silence us because you don’t like the way we think, the way we speak. You already tried to brainwash us, but we said no. Now you know that we will never follow you or listen to your bullshit, and you want to kill us. I can see through your disguise, you worthless piece of shit.”
I looked at the idiot like I would have looked at any man who wasn’t blessed with even a single brain cell and smiled at him dryly. His irritation quickly turned into drunken rage, and he shouted, “Apologize, motherfucker! Apologize and repent, or you will die!”
I closed my eyes and started massaging my forehead with my right hand. The idiocy of the moment was simply overwhelming, and I realized that I had never encountered such an abundance of inanity in my entire life. The whole thing was almost comical in its irrationality, but it worried me a little that the people in the bar were totally deaf to any sound of reason. Trying to make them open their minds to an opposing view was as pointless as trying to convince an African rock python to become a vegetarian. The other thing was that the cruel customers were all armed to the teeth and probably had plenty of experience in shooting moving targets. It was, therefore, becoming evident that my only option was to speak the language of violence—again. That was OK, though, because I was losing my patience, and trying to convince an insufferable moron to use his dying brain was highly overrated anyway.
I pulled out the Sig and put it against the big cretin’s forehead. Then I opened my bloodshot eyes wide and said calmly, “I believe that there is a cold storm rising from the east; a storm that will kill us all. It is a merciless monster, and when you feel its wrath in your bones, you will be as surprised as you were when you saw your pet horse’s erect penis in its full glory for the very first time. Look, asshole, I know that I am going to die tomorrow or the day after that, OK? I have nothing to lose. I am not afraid of you, and I can blow your brains out right now, if you insist. After that, I will begin shooting your friends one by one, starting with the bartender, and then I will blow my own brains out. I am a dead man walking, and I have wanted to be part of a good old western bar shootout since I was a child. I think that I would actually enjoy it quite a bit, and I don’t really mind dying
here today, even if this place isn’t exactly the Taj Mahal. I am a suburban Antichrist, and you should know that I am looking forward to my time in my silver casket, buried next to your casket. So, what’s it going to be, Mr. Bad, Bad Hillbilly?”
The burly man looked at me unfazed, as I had expected, but the bartender appeared nervous and fear started whispering him instructions. He walked closer to my tormentor and said, “Rusty, let him go. I don’t want this shit in my bar, not today. Let him go, or you will never drink here again, OK? You hear me, Rusty?”
The drunken bastard looked at me with his unintelligent eyes and said, “OK, Ricky, I’ll leave Mr. Antichrist alone today, but if he ever steps into this bar again, I will throw him in a muddy hole and stone him to death. Then I will remove his eyeballs and eat them with my catfish soup, OK?”
I pointed the Sig right between his rat’s eyes and said, “Rusty, that sounds like an awful lot of work. I don’t think your ox’s heart can handle that. You will die and fall into the hole before you even get a chance to put me in there. That’s too bad, though, because I am sure you would enjoy the soup a lot. You enjoy all food that is put on your dirty plate, even eyeballs, don’t you, Rusty?”
After I had said that, a dirty shadow rose from the darkness and said in a hoarse voice, “Ricky, let me take care of this asshole for Rusty.”
I looked at the shadow and said, “You sure you want to get involved in this, padre?”
The shadow looked at me with murderous eyes and said, “I was born involved, motherfucker,” and started walking toward me determinedly, but before he had a chance to die a quick death, the bartender shouted, “Roy, sit the fuck down. I run this place, not you.”
The shadow stopped reluctantly in his tracks and thought about something for a moment. Then he lit a cigarette and sat on a chair about two feet from me and started staring at me like a sulking toddler. I looked at the foolhardy man with a mixture of contempt and pity and said, “Don’t worry, Roy, Ricky, Rusty, and all you other imbeciles whose names start with R. I won’t come back to your precious bar again. The happy hour here isn’t very happy, if I’m completely honest with you. You need to focus on your pricing, too. Not too many people can afford a fifty-dollar beer these days, OK?”
The Sapphire Express Page 22