Doomino's_Apocalyptic Pizza Delivery_A Bizarro Grindhouse Tale

by Lucas Pederson

  He’d lost the first tire about a mile back, the front wheel digging a groove in the street as he hauled ass and fought to keep the car straight, but he was about to lose another tire any minute now. He could feel the rubber peeling loose from the driver’s side, the car swaying as the acid wore at the bonds between the rubber and steel cording. Once that went, he was screwed worse than an altar boy during Holy Cumunion. There’d be no way he could run the rest of the way and make the delivery on time.

  Obey!

  The entourage of camera crews trailing him in their souped-up media vans, the APD TV show logo plastered across the sides in absurd slashes of red and black like it was painted by an epileptic Freddie Krueger cockfighting Edward Scissorhands for the brush, would be sure to catch every nuanced moment of his fuck up. Charlie snarled at that. The hell if he’d be a part of the show’s highlight reel of failed drivers, his face splattered across the TVs of Trump’s Amerikkka, squeezed between episodes of Cops and the state-mandated reruns of The Apprentice.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he wished he hadn’t smoked that roach he’d hidden behind his ashtray. Some vato had given it to him as a tip at his last delivery for running over his old lady’s yippy-ass Chihuahua when Charlie skidded into the driveway two minutes before the deadline. It’d been months since Charlie’d been high, not since he’d fallen off the wagon and snorted a mound of parmesan cheese after getting drunk on rubbing alcohol in the storage room, and now he regretted it. Getting high and the cheese. He still caught the occasional scent of gym socks every time he farted. It was either the cheese backing up on him or Coach Vicks had lost his sweaty wristband up there when he’d fisted Charlie after catching him in the gym, sniffing the dirty jockstraps after the rest of the soccer team had gone home.

  He gunned the engine as he swung onto Verga Street, the remnants of the skunk weed making him foggy, visions of Oreos pole dancing in his brain, their creamy centers on full display. The lights of the camera crews cut through the darkness, his own personal sun, and Charlie felt a bit like Icarus. At least he’d go out with a tan.

  And then he lost the other front tire.

  The passenger side dropped with a thunk, and the nose of his Plymouth Road Runner bounced off the ground, whiplashing his head forward. His face crashed into the steering wheel, stars exploding in his vision as if the 4th of July and Liberace’s coming out party had a baby. His mouth filled with the taste of copper as if he’d deep-throated a stack of old pennies.

  Steel bit into asphalt and ripped the wheel out of his hands. The car skidded and cut a sharp right, the rear end fishtailing and jumping like a kangaroo on speed. He hit the curb, and Charlie felt the front axle snap, the Road Runner trembling as it crashed through a stone wall and slid to a jolting stop in someone’s front yard. An orgy of garden gnomes guts littered the grass. The brilliant lights of the cameras settled over, adding to the blur of Charlie’s already wavering vision. The atomic clock gleamed.

  2:14. 2:13. 2:12.

  Charlie shook his head to evict the spiders spinning cobwebs in his brain, and pawed at the door, seeking the handle. He found it at last and spilled into the yard to a chorus of curses by the homeowner, an old woman whose tits had sagged so low she’d sheathed them in her socks.

  “Bill Doomino’s, asshole,” he shouted back, ignoring the jackhammers violating his eyeballs as he raced around the car, the woman screeching at his back.

  He popped the trunk, dodging the dentures she’d thrown, which bounced off his roof, and pulled the pizza from the protective cradle that held it in place and safe during delivery. Box in hand, he darted off down the street at a full sprint, flipping off the homeowner as what he thought was her IUD careened his way. He shuddered. It was either that or a rusty tuning fork.

  1:45. 1:46. 1:45.

  Three fucking blocks.

  Charlie started to huff a half-block later, his lungs blowtorching his throat, every breath a razored case of the clap. The media vans followed, recording his every frantic step, and Charlie fought the urge to turn around and shank one of the motherfuckers with the corner of the pizza box, to go out with a bang, paper cutting a bitch.

  I can still make it, he thought.

  A block and a half left, he pushed even harder, every footfall causing the soup bowl that was his skull to slosh around. His high-top Converse slapped on the sidewalk, tears welling in his eyes as he unconsciously read off the addresses of the houses he passed.

  2110. 2106. 2102.

  He spied the house he needed, 2098, and howled with laughter at seeing the padlock holding the short gate shut. A crowd of twenty-something jocks hovered on the porch, the yellow bug light casting a jaundiced pall over the grinning crowd of Tapout-wearing muscle heads.

  “Amateurs,” Charlie shouted, ducking low and slamming his shoulder into the fence just to the right of the gate. The chain links twanged like a Conway Twitty song and the clasps holding the fencing to the pole snapped under his weight, and Charlie stomped into the yard, pizza held high, triumphant. He dodged a decrepit birdbath, kicked a deflated football aside that would have made Tom Brady proud, and circled around a beer keg that looked as if it had been last tapped when Prince was still around singing “1999.”

  I’ve got this.

  0:18, his implant gleamed.

  Charlie bared his teeth and raced for the stairs. “Punks,” he yelled while the jocks pointed and laughed. “You don’t know who you’re fucking with!” He grinned. “I’ve made a hundred deliveries and have seen everything you can throw at me, you needle-dicked gorillas.”

  Then that’s when he heard it.

  A buzz sounded in the yard, a cross between a mutant bumblebee and a Sybian on steroids. Furtive movement in the corner of his eye startled him. Charlie’s head spun about, and he spied a blur racing his direction. His brain recognized it an instant later, a remote-controlled car zipping his way.

  Maybe he hadn’t seen everything.

  He juked right, adjusting to sidestep the toy car, but it was too late.

  The miniature Camaro shot across the ground in front of him, right where Charlie’s foot came down, bearing all his weight.

  There was a loud crunch as the toy was crushed, then a battery of sharp pops as dozens of firecrackers went off at once inside the tiny plastic shell. Flames licked Charlie’s leg, and he stumbled as his pants caught on fire. The pizza flew from his hand, tumbling loose of the box, a pepperoni-black olive frisbee sailing through the air to flop impotently onto the yellowed grass like John Wayne Bobbitt’s dick on the side of the road. The ground molested his face a heartbeat later, his head bouncing off the sidewalk several times before his momentum stalled out. His forehead tapped the bottom stair, bringing him to an abrupt halt. Charlie groaned and scrambled to his knees, the world spinning around him while blood spilled down his chin. The jocks laughed, hoots and howls washing over him, a symphony of failure in #cock minor. Charlie shook his head to clear it and caught sight of the crimson sheen of the atomic clock.

  -0:02. -0:03. -0:04.

  His guts swirled.

  The jocks clumped down the stair as reality pulled a Negan and pounded its way into Charlie’s skull.

  He’d made his last delivery.

  “You’re late,” the head jock said, the waft of Coors Light making Charlie’s eyes water as the guy leaned over him.

  The dude was huge, like the fabulously birthed offspring of King and Donkey Kong. His arms were the size of cantaloupes, his clenched fists the crates they were delivered in.

  “Two seconds, man,” Charlie muttered, but he knew it didn’t matter. The law was the law.

  Delivery fail!

  “Thirty minutes or death, Motherfucker.” The jock chuckled, grabbing Charlie by the shirt and hauling him to his feet. “Your scrawny little ass is mine, Delivery Boy.”

  Charlie moaned, remembering Coach Vicks had said that exact thing.

  Unarmed, searched for weapons and contraband every time he left the Doomino’s store,
Charlie had nothing to defend himself with. The law didn’t allow it anyway. Thou shalt not harm thy customer! Not that Charlie gave a fuck about the law. If he had, he wouldn’t be a death row inmate forced to play Mr. Doom’s pizza delivery game for the entertainment of millions.

  Right then he remembered the cameras, glancing over his shoulder as a boom mic came to hover overhead. The crew gathered around, crooked smiles on their lips. “Aw…shit.” Charlie knew his face was gonna be all over the feeds tonight. He’d done fucked up. “Hi, Mom,” he said, offering a feeble wave.

  “This is your special day, Man. How you wanna go out?” the jock asked. “Quick and easy or slow and painful?”

  Charlie looked up at him. “You actually giving me a choice?”

  The guy shook his head. “No, not really.” Then the jock’s knee collided with Charlie’s face.

  There was the muffled crack of Charlie’s orbital socket shattering, and then he toppled backward with a grunt, crashing to the ground, his left eye swimming in a slow circle like a drunken goldfish. Then a bright red Jordan collided with his ribs. He whuffed and clutched his midsection as the rest of the jocks joined in, a sneaker-party extravaganza. One of the cunts even wore a pair of those toe-shoes, and Charlie sighed at the indignity. He hoped someone edited that out in the final cut.

  Crunch, snap, pop, the beating resounded in Charlie’s ears as his bones shattered and the beating turned surreal, a gang-rape of stomping feet and winging punches while the jocks pledged allegiance to the Just Bleed God, Dana White their lord and master.

  Charlie looked over at the crumpled pizza, only one eye working at this point, and mused at how much it looked like him, folded in half, it’s stuffing spewing out the sides in wet spurts.

  Speaking of spurts, Charlie’s bowels gave way and bloody feces erupted in warm, steamy bursts, running up his ass crack like a flow of chunky lava, a chocolate fondue volcano that rivaled the Pompeii. The smell hit him a second later, the Rampart of all stinks kicking in the door of Charlie’s nose and storming inside. The jocks only then realized what had happened as they splattered everything with shit, painting themselves and the steps a foul, reddish brown. They howled and screamed, and the kicking stopped, gasps and gagging sounds filling the air. Then sprays of vomit joined the pool of shit decorating the lawn, raining down over Charlie like a shroud of urine.

  The scent of rancid Coors escorting him to the afterlife, Charlie let death call him a cab, spending the last of his strength on a wry, toothless grin aimed at the cameras. Yeah, he might be fucking dead, but he had the last laugh.

  The same law that killed him said the customer was responsible for cleaning up the body.

  “Fuck…you,” he muttered and died, trying his best to keep his last thought from being that he had a kernel of corn stuck to his eyelashes.

  Three

  Spike revved the engine of her modified `57 Chevy Hearse, feeling the seat vibrating under her ass, a tickling thrill setting her to squirming. Despite everyone gathered around her, the crew prepping the delivery, the camera crews focused on her through the fence, the world watching, sitting in her car was the closest she ever came to getting off. There was no better vibrator than the rumble of a super-charged V8.

  She did her best to ignore the ugly-ass stare her manger, Jackson M. Wells, Doomino’s Store 666’s warden, and all-around rat-penis in charge, gave her through the storefront windows at her back. Spike turned her eyes from the rearview mirror and let the feelings wash over her. She stomped the accelerator again and let out a long, deep-throated moan.

  “Good thing you got on leather pants, Chica,” Javier, her delivery partner and machine-gunner, told her, ducking his head back inside the car through the hole where the antique .50 cal was mounted.

  A tiny little dude, built like a stick figure you’d play Hangman with except for a prominent pooch from too many cervezas back in the day, he swayed in the sex swing they’d bolted to the roof to keep him in place. She’d never quite understood how he survived prison, though she figured he might have doubled as a toothpick for some, a couple of the bigger guys carrying him around in their mouths without realizing.

  He had a long, pencil-thin handlebar mustache, greased so thick that Exxon paid him a visit every few months to wring out the extras so they could stay in business. If it grew any longer, he could braid it into his back hair.

  “You’d be swimming in gina-juice before we even hit the gate otherwise, and all them little crabs would rise up out your blonde little cooch cave like some 50s horror flick and snip your tits off,” he said.

  “And now you’ve ruined it, Javi.” She hit the gas again, the Chevy roaring, a shudder running through the frame, but there was no recapturing the moment, Javi’s voice a sponge that had sucked all the joy from her pussy, just like Daddy used to. Spike sighed. “Revvus-interruptus. So not cool, Dude,” she said, once again reminded of where she was as the store manager ambled over to the driver’s side window and clamped dark, gnarled fingers onto the door.

  “Break a leg, bitch. Seriously,” he told her, his voice like sandpaper raping wood, a lifetime of chain smoking unfiltered Camels giving him a perpetual rasp that reminded her of the Chevy’s exhaust.

  She glanced over at him, the leather of her bondage mask creaking in complaint, and admired the scarred and melted half of his face she’d so generously been the author of. “You’re looking crisp as usual,” she said, winking, her full lips scraping against the zipper of her mask as she smiled. “Like fresh toast. All you need is a good buttering.”

  His hand went to his cheek, unconsciously rubbing at the doughy flesh. “One of these days—” She chuckled, remembering when she’d first arrived, the very first of Doom’s wayward recruits, Jackson pushing himself on her in the empty kitchen, trying to get a warm slice, and Spike shoving his face in the pizza oven. Nothing that had come out of it since had ever smelled so good. The oven, not her slice.

  “Those days are coming to an end.”

  Her gaze shifted involuntarily to the display of her implant. {3} it read, the last of her sentence and servitude to the Doomino’s Pizza Corporation ZLC—which stood for zero liability as Spike learned early on—was down to less than a handful of deliveries. All she had to do was drop off three more orders on time and she’d be a free woman, her sentence complete, time served. On top of that, she be promoted to the franchise owner of store 666, and the shackles would be on the other wrist, Jackson Wells her bitch. She wasn’t all that comfortable with the idea of being in charge, but she sure loved lording the idea over him.

  “You been prepping your ass, Jackson? You’re gonna want it nice and loose when I take over a few days from now. I’m gonna crawl so deep inside that cavernous hole that people will start calling you Carlsbad, showing up and spending their vacation dollars just to see the bats spilling out.”

  He snorted. “Still plenty of chances for you to die before that times rolls around, Convict. I’m thinking the odds are in my favor. You’re gonna end up like stupid-ass Charlie, smeared across someone’s yard.”

  “Keep thinking that,” she said, hitting the accelerator, drowning him out until he gave in and stopped trying to talk. “They were in your favor the last 2,018 times, too. How’d those work out for you?” she shouted.

  Wells stood there a moment, glaring at her before he finally sneered and moved off, heading back into the store. Only then did she ease off the gas.

  “That dude’s going to shank you in the walk-in one of these days,” Javier said. “Stab you with a jagged piece of a chicken wing all slathered in BBQ sauce or some shit and lick your perky corpse clean.”

  “He better do it soon then,” she answered with a shrug. Just three more runs and things were gonna change.

  Javier shook his head before slipping it back through the gunner hole, his mustache bouncing as it hit the sides. “Pizza incoming.”

  “About damn time.” Spike glanced at the atomic clock in her implant and listened as the cook place
d the pizza in the webbing in the back of the hearse, strapping the box down to keep it in place. She held her breath as the door slammed shut behind her. The clock flashed twice before starting its count.

  29:59.

  “Thirty minutes or death,” she and Javier said in unison, and Spike popped the Chevy in gear, the hearse jumping forward, a monstrosity of blackened steel, orange-red flames, and gleaming chrome. The Hello Kitty bobblehead on the dashboard danced like a hooker trying to shake Johnny’s jizz from her cooch.

  Two Doomino’s employees yanked the gates open, and Spike tore out of the parking lot, bouncing into the street as she cleared the fence, tires squealing into the turn. The twin media vans assigned to her deliveries, already parked outside, engines idling, shot off after her, bright lights washing over the car.

  “Wooooooooo!” she shouted as the Chevy hurtled down Taco Bell Street. Javier bounced in the netting behind her, his Che Guevara camouflaged thong-clad ass swinging back and forth in the rearview as if he were expecting someone to shove a dollar up there. His For a Good Time, Call 911 tattoo stood out against his pale butt, fresh ballpoint ink gleaming in the wounds. “What have we got this time?” she asked. “It smells like a zombie ass-orgy in a septic tank.”

  “Fucking pineapple and double anchovies.”

  “What?” Spike let off the gas. “I’m tempted to die just on general principle to keep this abomination from being unleashed upon the world.”

  “Don’t go making a stand with me in the car, Chica. We ain’t all got your fancy ethics or stain-free leather pants. I shit myself, homeboy’s gonna know it.”