Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1

by Vernon, Steve

  That gray woman opened her smile wider, like the pearly Jordan gates. I pushed towards her. That smile opened like she was the queen of all kingsnakes, getting ready to swallow a fresh caught rat.

  She slithered like chimney smoke, slipping and sliding as the stars glittered around her like glittery scales.

  She turned herself into a giant flying snake, her mouth open wide enough to swallow a whole chainful of men. I tried my damndest to turn back but I was caught in the current of her all burning hunger.

  I tried to kick away. She laughed at my effort. Her laughter was the booming of the wind in a sail, the drumming of summer thunder, the chuffing of a great gray locomotive yonderbound.

  Then I was in, and I heard her teeth slamming like a gallow door behind me. I expected to feel my flesh torn from my bones by the gnashing of her teeth; but there was only the long slow mudslide down her gullet, only the long tunnel ride down towards forever, feeling the burning of her stomach fluids and hearing the far off screams of lost souls drifting up ahead of me.

  It would be a long hard road from here, a long hard road down the gullet of a forever kind of snake that lead me winding on down towards hell knows where.

  Only I got a feeling when I finally get there old Olan Walker's gonna be waiting to tell me the law of the land.

  TWO FISTED NASTY

  Table of Contents

  LEFTOVERS – A Novella

  STATISTIC

  SOUL SURVIVOR

  DOPPLE DRIBBLE

  LEFTOVERS

  A Novella

  CHAPTER 1

  * a purple jesus acid wash *

  Don't let this collar fool you.

  I'm not one of the good guys.

  A good guy wouldn't be caught dead standing outside of a man's office at this time of night.

  A good guy couldn't conceive of the kind of nightmare I've schemed up.

  It was raining. I didn't mind. If you ignored the rain for long enough it usually went away. Everyone but Noah said that.

  The man I was waiting for stepped outside. His name was Lucius Cartland Maugham. He was a portly man, with a slight side-to-side swagger. He wore a sport coat that had been carefully tailored to hide the milk fat, and a pair of equally tailored acid washed jeans.

  Acid washed jeans. I never did understand that concept. Paying extra up front to make sure your new pants looked old. It is amazing what people will pay money for.

  I stood in the shadow of a dead oak, dressed in a tattered pea coat and black denim jeans. He didn't see me at all. That was the beauty of living in homelessness. People learned to ignore you or curse you just like the rain.

  I stepped out and grabbed my chest, falling toward him. I couldn't remember which arm was supposed to hurt while experiencing a heart attack. Left? Right? Fuck it.

  He didn't catch me like he was concerned. He caught me sort of gingerly, like he was afraid I would dirty his hands. I grabbed his arm as he reached out to catch me. I let myself sag a little, feeling him take my weight. I swung up fast, getting a lot of hip into it, driving two hard hooks deep into the soft of his belly. He lashed out once, tagging me on the right eye. He didn't do too badly for a fat man.

  I sank a third hook. It was his turn to bend over. I felt his belly heave up like a jellyfish that hadn't been stomped quite hard enough. I prayed he didn't puke on me. I guess there was a lot of fastidiousness going around tonight.

  When I was sure he wasn't going to regurgitate his last box of Krispy Kremes, I caught his head by the ears and brought my knee straight up. I nailed him right on the chin. His teeth came together with a satisfying click.

  Then I dragged him back into his office.

  Lucius Cartland Maugham's face turned the tight purple-blue of a frozen violet, until I loosened the double width duct tape gag that covered his nose and mouth. The video camera hummed contentedly.

  "If you try to scream," I said. "I will replace the duct tape and you will asphyxiate. You may have heard that asphyxiation is a painless way to die. It can be a bad mistake to believe everything you hear."

  He tried to scream. I resealed the duct tape. Then I waited a moment for that tight, panicked shade of blue to re-emerge.

  Perfect.

  I loosened the gag and repeated my warning. He was a slow learner. I repeated the process twice before he was conditioned. I didn't think any less of him for being so obtuse. Panic is not conducive to the reasoning process.

  "You have to try and remain calm," I warned him.

  I inserted the transfusion needle into his arm. It went in smoothly. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want him to squirm and cause me to miss the vein. This whole job was carefully planned out. I didn't want him to spoil it.

  "Remain calm."

  Repetition is soothing to horses and dogs and small children. An asphyxiating man is far less easy to calm.

  "Listen. I'm poking an open needle into your arm. If you squirm too much I might accidentally force an air bubble into your veins. Do you know an air bubble in your bloodstream will kill you quicker than any bullet? Please don't make me kill you too quickly."

  His eyes opened wide. He calmed visibly, staring up at me from behind his duct tape gag.

  "Are you ready to cooperate?"

  He nodded.

  I didn't believe him. I retightened the gag. Then I brought out the transfusion gear.

  "Exsanguination is a simple operation," I assured him. "The Red Cross and ten billion mosquitoes perform it every day. You need to hold still while I drain your blood. Remember that air bubble? Killing you accidentally is the last thing on my mind."

  It was the truth. I try to never tell a lie. It makes things easier for me when I have to. Besides, if never-tell-a-lie was a good enough motto for George Washington, it was good enough for me.

  Lucius ceased his struggling and began to breathe in short breaths. Then, as the transfusion proceeded, his movements weakened.

  "Steady, steady." I chanted. Patience is a wonderful magic. With a bit of patience and a lot of Vaseline, a full grown man could successfully sodomize a horsefly.

  I felt him relax. It was time for my sermon.

  "Shall I tell you what you did to deserve this treatment?"

  He stared up at me, apparently too weak to nod.

  "You know what you did, don't you?"

  I think his eyes nodded. Or maybe they just rolled back into his skull.

  I kept on talking. "Michael Leyburg. Do you remember the name? You should, you know. You ruined his life. You didn't think his blood was pure enough, did you? You didn't want your daughter marrying a Jew, did you?" I shook my head impatiently. How could such a prejudice exist in the twenty-first century? We hadn't learned all that much since the Inquisition, had we?

  Any answer I had was laying on the ping pong table before me, half dead from blood loss. I wondered why you would need a ping pong table in your office. Was it for stress release? Was it for weight loss? Did he stage impromptu tournaments? Or was he maybe a closet Forrest Gump fanatic?

  "Don't die. I'm not through with you yet. Just wait a minute while I begin the transfusion."

  I had pulled the transfusion gear from out of the car trunk and I had it mounted on a hospital IV stand, ready to go. It took me three days of volunteer work at the Red Cross to get the technique down. I was proud of my effort. You wouldn't believe that I flunked my high school science fair.

  "You ruined his life. You paid to have him raped. You wanted to punish him. To hurt him. To break his spirit. Did you know that one of the bastards you hired was HIV positive? I bet you did, didn't you?"

  Lucius tried to shake his head. He made a small strangled noise beneath the gag. He might have wept, but there wasn't enough moisture left in his body.

  "You gave him HIV. You stole his pride. You ruined his life."

  I tried to keep my voice even. I wanted to shout at him. That wouldn't do. Shouting would only spoil the soundtrack.

  "Did he tell you about his brother? Did you even
try to get to know him? You ought to get to know someone before you destroy them, don't you think?"

  I noticed the picture on the wall of Lucius and a woman, presumably his wife, standing in front of the ping-pong table wielding a pair of ping-pong paddles. So Lucius was presumably a happily married man. Too bad for him. There was a young girl standing in front of them, looking as if the two of them were about to offer her to the gods of ping pong.

  Too bad for her.

  I knew everything I needed to know about Lucius. I knew he was a fat and greedy man who needed to learn a lesson.

  "He had a brother, you know. A brother who loved him nearly as much as Michael loved your daughter. A brother who'd done quite well in the commodity market. I suppose that part doesn't surprise you, does it? Jews are good at that sort of thing, aren't they?"

  I held my anger like a knife and used it, working it into him one inch at a time.

  "That's the problem with perceptions. You look at someone and see one thing, and then you make up the rest."

  He started to glaze out. I slapped him hard enough to regain his attention.

  "Michael's brother did quite well. He made quite a bit of money. Enough to hire me."

  His eyes rolled up like bubbles of sea foam, waiting to be popped.

  "He hired me to punish you. To hurt you. Don't let the collar fool you. I don't give a damn about your spirit. If you have any soul left I'm going to burn it out of you."

  I watched as the blood in the second bottle drained into his veins. I kept talking to him. The sermon wasn't over yet.

  "Blood in, blood out. Isn't that what they say? A total blood transfusion. I've emptied out every bit of your blood and I'm replacing it with a brand new supply. There are athletes who pay money for this sort of treatment. They claim it invigorates them. That it gives them fresh new strength." I smiled. "It's amazing what people will pay money for."

  More blood flowed out. It was calming, like watching the seas recede.

  "Are you invigorated yet, Lucius?"

  More blood flowed. My calm deepened.

  "Of course it all depends on where you get the blood from, now doesn't it? It doesn't do to pump low grade gasoline into a brand new Ferrari, now does it?"

  He made a little sound around the duct tape gag. I waited for the fear and sense of consequence to set in. It didn't take long. I think he was weeping. I thought about his daughter. I wondered if she would weep, too.

  "Shall I tell you where I got this blood from? Have you ever heard the term Purple Jesus? It's a college thing. You go to a frat party, and there's a big vat of grape Kool-Aid in the center of the room. I don't know why it has to be grape. Maybe it's a pagan thing, like Bacchus."

  More blood flowed. Blood was like sea water that way. Mostly water and salt. I wondered if the moon really moved as some folks believed.

  "Then everyone brings a bottle of some cheap rotgut and dumps it into the vat. It's a frat house thing. At the end of it you see God, and he's purple."

  Lucius gave me a wet, pleading-eyed stare, like a sheep begging for slaughter. He was almost gone. I wouldn't let it end that fast. Not yet.

  "Do you know how I've spent my last two weeks?"

  He stared blankly.

  "I've spent them on the street. I've spent them in every soup kitchen and alley in the city. Spent them in every whorehouse and flop joint. I've spent a lot of Michael's brother's good money in the process."

  I smiled. I was enjoying myself.

  "I spent it on blood. I've been gathering blood from every wino and whore who was desperate enough to sell it. Do you have any idea how far down the road a whore has to go before she gets that desperate? How many men she might have had inside her body?"

  He's glazing out. Settling. It could be shock, his body rejecting all those mixed blood cells, but I didn't think so.

  "And not all of those whores were women, Lucius."

  He felt that. He showed it to me, deep inside his eyes. I've seen it before. That look that the dying get when they feel the pit bull of despair gnawing at what's left of their guts.

  "So there you have it. A Purple Jesus party, just for you. You ought to be honored. My soup making is renowned. I've pumped you full of a soup d'jour teeming with every sexually transmitted microscopic bacteria and disease ever imagined. All of those impurities swimming inside your veins."

  He started to kick. He made angry sounds beneath his gag.

  "Of course, it wasn't all tainted blood. That would be inhuman. I made certain to include a couple of pints of good clean blood to cut the contamination. I got it from a rabbi on the Lower East side. I told him I needed it to save a Catholic child, whose parents couldn't afford the hospital bill."

  He squirmed. I smiled. I was enjoying this. I wasn't feeling the least bit guilty.

  "Do you know what he said when I asked him if the child's faith mattered to him, Lucius? He said that blood knows no faith, no border, no discrimination. Isn't that a pretty thought, Lucius?"

  I finished the transfusion. I watched him get his strength back. I watched his anger and rage build. He was pissed with me on principle. He'd spend the rest of his life hating his own blood. The whole story was a lie, of course. I'd just pumped his own blood back into him, but he didn't need to know that.

  I loosened the gag. He spat at me. I resealed the gag.

  "We're not through yet."

  I hooked up the last transfusion bottle. It was a heavy, clear thing of solid glass.

  "You don't like what I've done for you, do you Lucius? You don't like your new blood? You don't think that it's clean enough for you, do you?"

  I hooked the last bottle up. I carefully held the poke needle poised over the largest vein I could find.

  "Let me cleanse it for you, Lucius," I smiled in what I hoped was an appropriate beatific manner. Then I jammed the needle in, careful not to spill any on my fingers. It wouldn't do to spatter sulfuric acid on my hands.

  "This'll clean you out, good and proper."

  It took him five minutes to scream the duct tape gag loose. Another ten to stop screaming. I read him his final unction as fast as I could, keeping the camera running through the whole thing.

  The screams stopped at 9:28. Punctuality was a virtue.

  I think he felt the whole thing, the whole time.

  At least I prayed he did.

  Jacob Leyberg was a tall man with sad eyes that glinted hopefully as I handed him the tape.

  "He's paid for his crimes?"

  "He's paid for his sins," I corrected.

  Jacob's eyes shone. He honestly thought this would make things better. I knew it wouldn't help at all. Closure sounded easy, like closing a door, but grief was the uninvited party guest that didn't know when to leave. Sometimes you had to throw it out. Sometimes you had to nail the door shut. And sometimes, nothing worked.

  "I've edited the whole thing into the middle of a Japanese horror movie. There's no danger of embarrassing questions being asked if the wrong person sees the tape."

  "You had no trouble with continuity?" He smiled when he asked that. He was cracking a joke. I took that as a good sign.

  "It's Japanese horror," I explained. "Low budget and a bright red imagination. Plot is secondary to gut wrenching imagery. Hideo Nakata would definitely approve."

  He took the video tape from my hands, clutching it as if it were a sacred relic. Vengeance and retribution were all that he had left in his life. As idols went there wasn't much hope, but you worked with whatever you were given in this life. I knew he hoped that watching this tape would somehow erase the image of his brother's corpse swinging from his kitchen ceiling fan with the pre-timed pot of breakfast coffee, perked and merrily waiting.

  We shook hands.

  "Thank you, Father Simon."

  I didn't correct him. He had enough mistakes to bear, his brother's and his own. Besides, he was sort of right. I checked myself in the mirror. The eye had moused over blue-black from where Maugham tagged me. I still looked lik
e a priest, though. I still wore the collar.

  Behind the mirror glass, soft like a half whispered prayer, I saw the acid-burned face of Lucius Cartland Maugham staring out at me.

  This kind of work has its price.

  Fuck it. It was time to make the soup.

  CHAPTER 2

  * the making of soup *

  Soup is where leftovers go to die.

  That was my job in The Shambles kitchen. I made the soup. I made it from whatever was left over from our food bank donation. I made it from last night's supper, and sometimes dinner and breakfast. I made it so you could count on feeding a small army of hungry men. They called me the soup-man, and sometimes Superman but mostly they called me Father Simon.

  It was good soup tonight. Jacob Leyburg's money bought an awful lot of fresh supplies, and I souped up some of it while Montezuma fried a legion of pork chops. For vegetables we had several huge pots of mashed potatoes, and crisp green beans. We smothered the entire mess in a thick mushroom sauce, to fill the leftover cracks and crannies. Hot coffee and fresh bread perfumed the dank kitchen air. The Shambles smelled like a hand-me-down heaven.

  I didn't build The Shambles. It was here when I arrived. No one was sure when The Shambles began. I think it kind of grew here, like mold or weeds. I think some unknown bum spent the night here, sleeping under a hangman's oak, and The Shambles grew out from beneath him like a filthy, contagious shadow.

  The Shambles was a kind of accidental monument. Everybody knew about it or had heard about it, but nobody talked about it. I stumbled in here about six years past with blood on my hands. Nobody cared. The Shambles opened its dirty, cankered arms and took me in.

  A lot can happen in six years. Like World War II, for instance. A baby can advance from a single ambitious egg into kindergarten. The human body can damn near forget its past sins and remake itself, cell by cell.

  At least in theory.

  The Shambles was low and flat and as undeniably real a structure as could be imagined. There was a sense of hardness to it, as if the building were solid clear through. Poured concrete and brick laid with an inarguably specific geometry. If the universe ever collapsed, I was certain it would swallow itself down until nothing remained but The Shambles.