by Brian Hodge
Barefoot, she avoids the deck, where the chunks of broken glass glitter like crushed ice in the twilight. She finds the front door and raps three times, then again–a polite pause between each salvo before she gives up and returns to her original business.
She has turned to leave when she hears the door unbolt and open behind her. "Hel-lo?" says a voice.
Funny, that inflection. It's meant to tell her not to rush away so quickly. The stranger's face matches his voice. Behind him, there is a taper alight on a silver stand in the middle of the room. Beyond that is the smashed door. Kayce's glance prompts him to look rearward and consider the ludicrous first impression this all must conjure. Oh, creative people, so florid.
But Kayce likes candlelight, and it is this which gets a tiny smile out of her. "Should I leave?" she says, her doubt designed to encourage him.
The man shakes his head, as though he has the craziest story in the world to tell, and answers her.
Author's Note:
This story is dedicated with love to Richard Christian Matheson and Richard Matheson.
Bad Guy Hats
The four young men in bad guy hats sauntered into the Jump Mart on a summer day of record heat and Amazon humidity. They came packing, hammers down on chambered slugs, mad whoopee dancing in their eyes.
Their bad guy hats' made them heartbreakers, life-takers. Hard partiers and dirty fighters.
Dicky's savage grin organized itself around a wooden match, the kind you could strike anywhere. This one was burnt out. Sweat ran into his eyebrows from his black brush cut. He mopped, then drew his piece from the waistband of his jeans. Stonewashed and supertight, those jeans; snug in all the right places, yet soft and broken-in as a mother's nipple. Dicky was proud of the gun. It was an S&W L-frame Combat Magnum, a 586 cut for speedloaders. It took Dicky a moment to haul all eight-plus inches of barrel out of his pants. He dipped the weight of the revolver forward to help his thumb cock it. Smooth.
He told the geezer working the counter to shut up three times. By the third time, he was screaming, and the rest of the store had fallen silent.
Zippo and K-Bar and Toots had drawn and leveled. By the time Dicky demanded money, the tableau was just like that Twilight Zone episode about the stopwatch that froze everything timelessly still.
Twilight Zone spoke to Dicky's condition.
Down through desert, they had ridden hard. Past scrub and saguaro, first Phoenix, then Tucson, look out, Cochise County, here we come.
Mexico was one potential tidbit for the future. If not, then they would ride east, to Lordsburg, New Mexico. There were convenience stores everywhere. That's why they were called convenience stores.
They faced off four versus six. Besides the old counterman there was a cowboy, a mommy with a toddler, and a teenage muscle-car metalhead with his chick in tow. The baby was riding the seat of a small shopping cart. The cowboy was furthest from the counter. The dude and-babe combo both wore Metallica tees; they faced the coolers, trying to guess whether they'd get carded for beer.
Zippo got a vantage and froze them with his mini-Uzi; hypnotized them like a snake charmer. He had used a home conversion kit to bump the weapon to full auto–fifty rounds in five seconds. Zippo was the biggest of them. He wore a yoked Western shirt, bright yellow, with no sleeves. His sunburn made his eyes seem to bulge–too white, mildly insane. His temper was as filed down as the pin on his Uzi.
Dicky snapped his fingers and pointed. Toots snatched a basket and began to round up chips, brew, you know–supplies.
The counterman fumbled. He was so shaky he could barely coax the register to pop.
K-Bar drew down on the cowboy while Zippo covered the rest. The cowboy was packing; K-Bar had spotted tooled leather and ivory grips. He ordered the cowboy to unholster, butt-first, using his fingertips. K-Bar kept his own Automag IV steady in a two-handed grip and edged closer; he thought all revolvers to be ancient history and occasionally itched Dicky about sticking with a six-shooter. Good-natured teasing to mask genuine irrational contempt.
The cowboy did as he was ordered. Nice and easy. Toots grabbed cold six-packs as the Metallica twins shrank out of his way.
Then K-Bar saw something he had never seen before, and would never see again in his life. The cowboy snapped his wrist, simple as flicking a booger. His pistol spun in a clockwise blur and landed in his grasp with the hammer back. K-Bar's ears registered the click about the time the first shot smashed through his right collarbone. He actually heard the gunshot…afterward.
Time sped up again.
The Automag became inexplicably heavy; K-Bar tried to drag it up as he fell. Zippo opened up with the Uzi. Chattergun racket drowned the store and a shelf of condiments noisily ceased to exist, ketchup and relish and mustard flying to mix like blood and bile. K-Bar fired, wild, un-aimed; he bounced from one knee back to standing and shied the Automag sideways, snapping off. His arm was no longer equal to the recoil. The cowboy sprang up half an aisle from where K-Bar fired and plugged another round through his bicep, disintegrating the bone. K-Bar dropped the Automag.
Zippo managed to hit the cowboy in the ear before the Uzi's clip ran dry. Whatever the cowboy was thinking flew all over the beer cooler in a spray. He folded and piled up on the floor. Zippo hustled over to nab the cowboy's hogleg and kick the corpse once, for macho's sake.
"Aww, dammit." His lip curled. They had never really killed anybody before.
Metallica was making huffing noises, like he was about to try something stupid. His girlfriend punched him in the arm and hissed at him to shut up.
K-Bar was wadded up on the floor, his hands making weak, grabbing motions at air. Toots parked his basket and held threatening with his pet 12-gauge, the chopped-off bore glinting a wicked silver.
"God damn that hurts!" K-Bar managed.
Zippo tried to compress K-Bar's wounds with sanitary napkins. He could not be moved; his breath was already coarsening into a whine. K-Bar was leaking his life away, and making a hell of a mess doing it.
The counterman was still fucking around. Dicky told him to step back. Crammed behind a canvas cash-drop sack, Dicky discovered a mickeymouse .32.
"Thought so. That's why you kept fading; dipping down. Wasting our time. Dumb."
Dicky shot the counterman in the forehead. Bang.
The old fellow flopped backward and cleaned off a bulletin board, going down in a hail of pushpins and for-sale cards. The mother yelped; her baby had been screaming since the cowboy's first shot. Zippo changed clips and gave up on trying to prevent K-Bar's blood from mixing with the mustard and ketchup.
"Okay." Dicky turned, gun up, from the gross-out that used to be the counterman. "Bound to happen eventually. So that's it for me and Zippo. What about you, Toots?"
Toots was watching K-Bar's eyes glaze. "Somebody's gotta watchdog, outside."
"I'll do that," said Dicky. "You do what you have to. Is K-Bar dead?"
"No," said Zippo.
"Fuck." This sort of thing pissed Dicky off.
"I guess you're up, man," Zippo said to Toots. He picked up the basket of goodies. Dicky stuffed the register cash in his back pocket and scored a couple hundred more from the open safe.
The mother had no way to stop her baby from crying; she was crying herself, by now. Toots bow-slung his shotgun and broke a Pit Bull from his shoulder rig, but did not point it.
"What's your name?" he asked the woman.
The woman, who had had the misfortune to see Dog Day Afternoon, got full up with bogus hope. "Miriam," she said between sobs.
"Okay, Miriam, I think it's time for everybody to get inside the freezer." He let the Pit Bull show the way for Metallica and his girlfriend. "No need for alphabetical order or anything like that."
The possibility for practical resistance was zero. They trooped in, but Miriam hesitated at the door, still pushing her baby ahead of her in the shopping cart.
"Please. Promise me. Promise me you boys won't hurt my baby. He's not even two
…"
"Shh," said Toots. "Don't worry so much."
When she turned, Toots shot her dead-bang in the occipital ditch. The copper-jacketed slug blew her all over the cart in a shower.
"Classic!" cried Dicky from the counter, where he had selected a baseball hat that read HONK IF YOUR HORNY.
Toots shrugged and spent his remaining seven on the Metallica guy. He only missed once.
After the baby stopped wailing, Dicky shoved the still-smoking muzzle of his six-shooter beneath Lady Metallica's trembling chin. Here in the freezer it was cooler, more reasonable.
"Skip the part where you say you'll do anything," he said. "We already know that."
Zippo kneecapped her so she couldn't kick them. They stripped her atop a stack of beer cases, and each one of them picked an orifice. By the time Dicky had his orgasm, the girl was dead.
It always took Dicky the longest.
Between all the ambulances and sheriff's cruisers, the highway patrollers and a van grimly stenciled CORONER, there was just no way for the VW microbus to nose in, so it stopped on the dirt strip bordering the highway. It was the hottest part of the day, and the stench in the parking lot of the Jump Mart was pretty ripe.
"Somebody crapped themself." Conor worked a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, over the white scar bisecting his lower lip. He plucked a blue engineer's kerchief from the visor to blot his forehead. The VW's cooling unit was on the blink again.
Grace made a face. It wasn't as though Conor had never smelled death spoor. "I sure hope they have apple juice," she said.
She dropped down her visor mirror to check how she looked, which was pretty good. She had shorn a lot of her extremely blonde hair into a rag cut that could be backswept and forgotten–tousled, casual, not sloppy. She wore a spun black bandana above Air Force pilot shades as dark as the heart of a silver mine. Grace favored gray work jumpers with a lot of zippered pockets. She was still wearing her BEAM sling; from outside the van it looked like nothing more than a pair of tangled suspenders.
Conor dismounted first. The lowers of his rough-out boots matched the dust in the parking lot. It had taken more than a year to break the damned boots in; right now his feet thought that was just fine. The uppers were tooled top-grain and the next best thing to indestructible. Conor wore very tight jeans because Grace liked very tight jeans on him. Across the breast pocket of his denim shirt he wore a row of miniature skull pins, some with crossbones, some engulfed in biker flames. He had scored them all at convenience marts.
His shoulder holster was empty as he got out. He could pick a weapon later.
A deputy was already hustling toward him, one hand riding the butt of a still-snapped automatic. He squinted in the blazing sun; his scowl suggested that the last thing in the universe he'd countenance was an interruption like Conor.
"Looks like a hit," said Conor, friendly.
"Sorry, but you folks gonna have to back on outta here; we got us–"
"A situation," Conor overrode. "Yeah, I can see that. But I truly need some gum, and my lady needs a cold drink, and it looks to me like the bad stuff here is already past tense." Conor smiled big. His nose was hawkish. His beard and mustache, though precisely trimmed, were full and burnt red. Conor could smile like a satyr.
Conor watched the deputy's eyes consider his empty shoulder holster. Practically everyone in the desert carried weapons. The deputy stuck out a hand that would have halted Conor at chest-level. Conor stopped short.
Sterner, now: "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to ask you to turn around and back on out of here and leave this area. Right now."
Conor appreciated the improvised diction.
"But I still need some gum." Conor scoped the ambulance with its doors still open. "You collected one, didn't you? One of them."
The deputy summoned his partner. "Billy? Get on over here." He unsnapped his gun strap.
Billy approached. Conor thought he looked put out. From the microbus, Grace had counted four peace officers, total.
"You don't want any trouble, am I right?" Conor drew a deep breath.
"That's right, sir, so what you want to do is–"
Viper quick, Conor captured the pistol on the updraw, plucking it right out of the deputy's hand, with his right, while clamping the deputy's throat, with his left. Conor had waited until the second deputy, Billy, was within range. Billy stopped two shots to the head before he could get his next footstep down.
While Billy's glasses and hair made a cloud of red, the deputy thrashed against Conor's death grip.
Grace had selected a loaded Steyr Aug assault rifle and clipped it to her BEAM sling. Deftly, she stepped out to cover the whole parking lot and caught the remaining two cops slow and stupid.
"No trouble, deputy." Conor hoisted him, one-handed, to tiptoe. "No trouble at all."
He let go of the pistol and punched the deputy right in the chest. The deputy's body armor split lengthwise, his ribs caved in, and his heart exploded. The impact made a sound like a tire blowing in the parking lot.
Grace opened up. The highway patroller's vests were no match for her armor-piercing tracers. She greased them and they dropped, still slow, still stupid, weapons sheathed, their viscera flash-fried by incendiaries.
Through it all, ten seconds, max, the medics played statue. By the time Grace's discharge echoes were gone, Conor was through the doors of the Jump Mart.
"You did say apple juice, right?"
Grace nodded, and kept everybody covered.
Conor quickly filled a basket. When he emerged, he headed for the ambulance.
"They took down five that I can see," he told Grace. "Five and a half, if you count the baby."
"Real bad asses," she said.
Conor picked the dead deputy's gun out of the dirt and slid it into his back pocket. He climbed into the ambulance bay, where he found K-Bar strapped to a gurney, immobilized in a traction sling and packed with freon compresses.
"You look sorta guilty to me." Conor smiled again. "Can you understand me?"
K-Bar said nothing. His eyes paid attention.
"I need the direction your friends went. All you have to do is point. If there's more than three, besides you, I want you to tell me. Okay?"
K-Bar kept his teeth clenched. He was obviously in a lot of pain. He told Conor to go fuck himself.
"Ooh, the f-word. I was afraid of that."
Conor dug around in his basket, displacing a box of fresh toothpicks and at least twenty packs of Black Jack gum. He used paramedic scissors to cut a hole in K-Bar's exposed stomach. Into the hole he poured blue drain cleaner. It fizzed.
K-Bar heaved against the straps, screaming, reopening his wounds.
"You know, I find that effervescent action is a real attention-getter," said Conor. "Now, sweetheart, before you kick, I still need to know a direction. Scream once for yes and twice for no."
K-Bar screamed a lot in the next two minutes. Conor only had to use half the can.
He stepped down from the rear of the ambulance and rubbed Grace's shoulders. "You need this one a little more than I do. I'll be okay." What he meant was that the two deputies he'd just waxed would hold him. For a bit.
Grace unclipped the Steyer Aug and Conor gave the medics a gunpoint grin. "You boys just keep on doing what you're doing. You're doing it real good." He broke out a fresh toothpick.
Grace stepped up.
K-Bar was writhing and twitching. Pallid foam lipped the holes Conor had clipped in his chest. His cognizance of Grace was elemental, reptilian.
"Poor baby," she said. "That Conor; he's such a whiz with household ingredients. But you did good. You only have to do one more thing. Don't worry–this one's easy."
She stripped her shades, unveiling laser-blue eyes. Very arresting, very Aryan. She crouched to hold K-Bar's face in both hands and spoke softly, like a lover.
"Die for me."
Conor heard K-Bar scream one last time. It was not a sound of injury or torture,
despair, loss, or even simple pain. It was the violent unmooring of life itself. Conor knew the difference.
When Grace emerged, she did, in fact, look better.
Conor felt his deputy's final heartbeats replay in his mind. Not food, but vitamins, at least. A fast-burning jolt, to see them through. He handed Grace her apple juice as they waved good-bye to the medics–at gunpoint–and re-boarded the microbus.
"I picked me up some more skulls." He showed her. "You better?"
"Better." She donned her glasses. "Which way?"
"South. Just like I thought."
"Here's to first blood."
Dicky raised his Budweiser. Toots clinked cans immediately. Zippo held back.
"Blood, yeah!" Toots was a little wasted.
"What the fuck's wrong with you?" Dicky said to Zippo.
"K-Bar." Zippo had been looking toward the floor and his own feet a lot, lately. "It cost us K-Bar."
Dicky cleaned out his can and imploded it one-handed. Easier to do, these days–crushing aluminum was like wadding paper. Dicky was not fond of recycling. He popped a fresh Bud.
"So drink to K-Bar, you fuck."
They were holding forth from a transmission shack, inside the fenced and posted confines of a desert power station somewhere south of Tucson. They drank around a brass-faced work table bolted to the concrete floor. The brass was wincingly old; they'd had to wipe off all the dust.
Tied face-down to the table with bungi cords was a woman they'd collected from the highway. Her mouth was crammed full of cinnamon hots, from the Jump Mart, and sealed with two around-the-head winds of duct tape, also from the Jump Mart. She was trussed so that all she could do was listen to the tea chat of her abductors and stare, straight down, at their case of beer.
The game was that when the last can was drunk, she would be dead chicken.