by Larry Doyle
The source of the roar was a five-ton H1 Alpha Hummer, with 300 horsepower, 520 pound-feet of torque, a MSRP of $140,796 and seating for five assholes. The earth-killing machine was painted black diamond, murkier than pure black and slightly more frightening, named for the insane ski slopes and not, as Denis might have guessed, for the moon gem Eclipso used to possess Superman in Action Comics #826 (Denis no longer collected comic books, and hardly ever went through his sixteen boxes of meticulously Mylared back issues, arranged by publisher and title, but AC #826—who wouldn’t know that?).
The Hummer was currently off-road, in the middle of the Cooverman lawn, on top of a Beauty of Bath apple tree Denis and his father had planted together that Arbor Day.
The monstrous vehicle snarled a final time and fell silent. Three doors snapped open and corresponding military figures disembarked synchronously. They wore civilian clothes, but identical civvies, a habit that was apparently hard to break. The uniform of the night was black khakis, black polos and black loafers, making the trio look like an elite unit sent into a downtown club to terminate a rogue DJ. None of them had enough hair to gel, but their heads glistened menacingly nonetheless.
Treece waved happily at her date-rapist. “Sean!”
Denis had hoped to go out with some class.
“Shaw-on!” Treece yelled much louder, waving in wide semaphoric arcs, signaling I’m here! I’m here! Oh, and here’s that guy you promised a penilectomy!
The lights went out on the upper floors of Denis’s brain, leaving the lizard in charge.
“Get down!”
Denis hugged Treece and threw them both to the floor. Treece’s body recognized this as foreplay and her lips parted in Pavlovian response.
“Everybody down!” Denis screamed in a barely audible squeak.
The three left standing regarded him with odd curiosity.
“Why?” Beth asked.
“He’s going to kill me!”
“So?” asked Cammy.
“He’s not really going to kill you.” Beth sighed. “He just likes to be scary.”
“He’s scary,” Denis confirmed.
“The most he’s going to do is maybe beat you up a little.”
Denis had been beaten up a little, thrice by Greg Saloga and once by Dawn Delvecchio, whose premature chest he had momentarily ogled in the fifth grade. Being beaten up a little meant bruising but no breaking, twisting but no tearing, and loss of less than a tablespoon of blood. Denis suspected Kevin would not adhere to these guidelines, or even, based on news reports, the Geneva Convention. Given what the military did not even consider abuse, Denis shuddered at what might constitute a little beating under the U.S. Army Code of Conduct:
27–3. Procedures applicable to ‘Beating, Light’
a. Splatter zone limited to 10 feet (3.048 meters)
b. No detachment or removal of extremities or organs;
c. Extremities or organs inadvertently detached or removed must be left with original owner for possible reattachment or implantation;
d. Extremities or organs inadvertently detached or removed and not returned to owner cannot be
(1) Fashioned into a necklace, or
(2) Devoured to gain the owner’s power, unless approved in writing by commanding officer;
e. Derisive pointing at genitals prohibited, except to aid owner in locating of same.
As usual, Denis was letting his imagination run wild, shriek and knock things off shelves. Also as usual, he was allowing this to distract him from more immediate practical concerns.
“The door!” Denis eventually realized. “Secure the door!”
Denis scurried across the floor, frantic commando crawling, looking less like a Navy SEAL than an actual seal.
“Is he always like this?” Cammy asked.
“This is new behavior,” Rich observed. “But not surprising.”
“I think it’s kinda cute.”
Cammy looked at Beth as if she had just insisted that Zuma was still a decent show.
“It is. He is,” Beth said. “Kinda.”
“Yeah,” Treece agreed, squeaking her nano mini back into place. “Like when a puppy gets so excited he pees all over everything. It’s cute and funny, but then there’s pee over everything.”
BY THE TIME HE REACHED THE DOOR, Denis had two severely lacerated forearms (the sisal carpeting was environmentally friendly but otherwise vicious) and something wrong with his pubis, a hairline fracture perhaps or a hip dislocation. He pushed aside his everyday hypochondria in deference to the greater goal of surviving to obsess another day. He lunged upward, grasping the deadbolt and turning it with what could only have been a moment to spare.
Denis fell against the door, dry heaving with relief. He sat there, eyes closed, still breathing.
He opened his eyes.
He had a perfect view of the back patio door, which was presently sliding open.
Kevin did not look very happy.
A hand appeared in front of Denis’s face. It was small and downy with sea-mint-lacquered nails; it wasn’t holding a knife. It still gave Denis a heart cramp.
“Hey,” Beth said.
She was reaching down for him. Her hair fell over her face in two silky sheets, swaying; it was lightly brushing against Denis’s face. This was the most intimate he had ever gotten with a girl, if you didn’t count Patty Keck, his secret shame, and Denis didn’t. It was obviously the worst time to be thinking about sex, but Denis hadn’t been given the choice.
“Don’t be afraid,” Beth said, correctly reading his expression but not its cause. “I’ll handle this.”
Oh, yes, this, Denis was reminded. My assassination.
Denis took Beth’s hand and she pulled him to his feet—with ease, he noticed.
“I wasn’t afraid,” Denis wanted to explain. “I was…” All the words his brain offered up were rough synonyms for fear, from pusillanimous to shitting bricks, and including epistaxiophobia, fear of nosebleeds, and rhabdophobia, fear of being beaten with sticks, two of Denis’s more reasonable phobias, and ones he was soon to have the opportunity to face (along with his agliophobia, gymnophobia, athazagoraphobia, and a few others).
“Prudent” finally popped out. “I was just being prudent.”
“Well, c’mon, Prudence,” Beth said, pulling him toward the kitchen.
KEVIN WAS A MAN IN A HURRY. He needed to get this killing done and not let it eat up his whole evening. He was flanked, in the strategic sense, by Sean, who had a bigger body but a much smaller head, and the other one.
Beth entered leading Denis by the hand.
Kevin snarled. A real snarl, like the kind a dog might make, right before biting your eyes.
Beth let go of Denis’s hand. He didn’t mind. It freed him to tremble on both sides of his body.
“Congratulations, you found me,” Beth said, asserting control of the situation with sarcasm. “Now let’s just—”
“Shut up, Lisbee.”
“Kevin,” scolded Beth. “Have you been doing coke?”
“Shut your goddamn mouth!” he responded, louder than necessary.
In a high, tiny voice, Denis said: “He’s coked up!”
Treece shook her head sagely. “That is not one of the good drugs.”
Kevin was not only coked up. He had also been drinking: vodka, bourbon, rum and a red liquid from Cambodia that came in a handblown bottle with a human tooth on the bottom. Since cocaine is a stimulant and alcohol is a depressant, the twin intoxicants should theoretically cancel each other out, but it never seems to work out that way.
The only sound in the room was Kevin’s breathing. It probably could’ve been heard even if everyone hadn’t shut his or her goddamn mouth. As it was, the seething hiss of a known killer, inhaling fear and exhaling hate, proved to be an effective mood setter.
Kevin picked up the champagne bottle on the counter and slowly upended it, tilting his head as he did so. He grunted. Denis half expected him to use a stick to try to ex
tract ants from it. Concluding that the champagne had been consumed, and that this was an attempt to lubricate his mate, Kevin became 25 percent more furious. His cobalt eyes swept the kitchen for more anger boosters, and found one on the person of Rich, who was holding a large milky balloon with a reservoir tip. Kevin stopped breathing altogether.
Later, in Denis’s dreams, Kevin’s hair bristled like the hackles of a demonic dog, and venomous saliva streamed from his canines, burning a hole in the kitchen floor. In reality, Kevin pointed a disconcertingly muscular finger at Denis and shouted:
“PREPARE TO DIE!”
Rich lived for openings like this. “Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride, Rob Reiner, 1987,” he rattled off. “Also, the same line was used by Emperor Zurg in Toy Story 2, 1999, John Lasseter, and by Marshall Teague in Roadhouse, 19—”
A heavy black object grazed Rich’s skull and embedded in the wall behind him. (For an affordable sparkling wine, Freixenet sure made strong bottles.)
“Kevin Patrick,” gasped Beth, ratcheting up to the first-and-middle maternal reprimand. “Just stop.”
Denis stepped in to aggravate matters. “This is completely inappropriate,” he said. “We just had this kitchen painted.”
Ba-GOOSH Ba-GOOSH Ba-GOOSH went two-liter bottles of Ocean Spray Cranberry Fizz, Blood Orange Faygo and Salted Mountain Dew as they burst around Denis, vividly staining the linen white walls cranberry, blood orange and morning urine.
“I need to warn you,” Denis continued in defiance of common sense, “this is willful damage to property; that’s a legal term.”
Having exhausted his supply of hurlable beverages, Kevin picked up the next available object.
Denis finally shut up when he noticed a midsize microwave oven coming at his head. He felt something hook the back of his neck and pull him to the floor. The microwave, a week out of warranty, crashed through the plasterboard above him. A dry rain of gypsum dust fell upon Denis, followed by the microwave itself, which bounced nonfatally off his head.
“Ow,” Denis said. (He did not make a sound like “ow”; he said the word ow.)
Denis was crouched, lightly powdered, facing a lightly powdered Rich, who three seconds earlier had yanked him from the path of a speeding appliance. Rich offered some advice.
“This time, truly: RUN AWAY!”
Denis ran away. Rich stayed behind momentarily, covering his friend’s retreat by heaving the inflated condom at his attacker. Kevin caught the balloon with one hand and began squeezing it slowly. Presumably he thought it would pop at some point, adding to his cool menace. When it did not, he took the thing in both hands and crushed, contorted and clawed it with diminishing menace.
Cammy to Treece, sarcastic casual: “What brand was that?”
Kevin’s jaw rippled. He backhanded the condom away and marched forward.
DENIS REACHED THE FRONT DOOR only to discover some moron had locked it. He stood for several seconds, blinking rapidly, formulating how he might pick the lock, or failing that, combine common household products into a plastique. Rich arrived at his side. “Dude, just—” he said, and reached for the deadbolt.
“Too late,” Denis mumbled, and ran up the stairs.
“You don’t run up the stairs!” Rich yelled up at him. “Have you never seen a movie? You run up the stairs, you die!”
Rich was about to cite specifics when he saw Kevin marching toward him. Kevin growled, smashed an overhead light fixture with his bare fist, then kept coming in the ensuing darkness.
Rich ran up the stairs.
“¡Arribame!”
RICH BURST INTO DENIS’S ROOM and crashed into a squadron of X-Wing Starfighters, not for the first time. He thrashed in the tangle of suspended Star Wars collectibles and, for the very first time, did not hear Denis pissing and moaning that this or that one was made specifically for the Chinese market, making it extremely rare except for the 37 million other ones in China.
Denis was preoccupied. He was rifling through his closet, tossing out Journals of the American Medical Association and Juvenile Oncology, his snorkel, copies of Famous CGI Monsters and Celebrity Sleuth: Women of Fantasy 15, an old diving mask, Hobbit Monopoly and 3-D Stratego, and a pair of big, floppy, noncombat swim fins.
Wielding the impotent fins, he whined, “Why didn’t I play baseball?”
Kevin arrived at the doorway. Sean and the other one fell in behind him.
Denis thrust his hands back into the closet, praying they would reappear holding anything resembling a weapon. A loaded revolver would be ideal, though unlikely (his mother felt hunters should be tried for war crimes and his father drove a Prius); a stick with a nail in it would be acceptable. What Denis retrieved certainly resembled a weapon; it was a 1:1-scale replica of the original Skywalker light saber with electroluminescent polycarbonate blade and ten motion-controlled digital sound effects.
Kevin barked with amusement. His troops barked exactly the same amount. A martial grin spread across his face as he reconnoitered the room: a medical school skeleton wearing a “BGHS Debate Team” T-shirt; the original Star Wars poster of Luke, light saber aloft; further charts of human muscular and circulatory systems; a poster of Professor Stephen Hawking posing with a poster of Marilyn Monroe; Futurama figurines…(In Denis’s defense, a girl hadn’t been in his room for more than ten years.)
“What a Eugene.” Kevin chortled. The laughter triggered an endorphin rush that broke his fragile concentration, and he lost his homicidal focus. Why, he wondered, did he even consider this easily snappable geek a threat, instead of an amusing nuisance to be swatted away, or lightly stepped on?
And then he saw it.
On the wall above Denis’s bed: Beth Cooper beaming down, kneeling in her cheerleading uniform. Denis had scanned the yearbook squad photo, Photoshopped the others out (digitally re-creating the portion of Beth’s skirt obscured by Treece’s knee), enlarged the image 7,000 percent, printed it in tiles, joined the tiles with an X-Acto blade and rubber cement, affixed the assemblage above his bed with wallpaper paste, and moved his bed three inches to the right to center the image. It had taken him five hours, not counting buying and setting up the scanner.
Kevin didn’t appreciate all the effort. He grabbed the pelvis of the medical skeleton and tore it off the spine.
“Dr. McCoy!” Denis gasped.
Kevin took a femur in each hand and ripped them free of the pelvis.
“Now,” Denis admonished, “that used to be a person.”
Fiendish glee best described Kevin’s expression as he approached Denis, slowly spinning the skeleton’s lower legs around the knee joints.
“That is very disrespect foo—”
Twenty-six foot bones kicked him in the ear.
Denis lifted his light saber to fend off the human nunchucks, but Kevin’s bone-fu was unstoppable. Flying phalanges of fury booted him about the face and neck.
“Dude!”
Denis turned to see that Rich was at the open window, on the other side of it, beckoning him.
“Don’t just—”
Denis took a calcaneus to the temple. He staggered backward into a corner, trapped. So this was it: boned to death in his own room. Not exactly the tragedy he had always dreamed about. He thought of his mother finding his bloody pulped remains, and then he thought of that copy of Celebrity Sleuth: Women of Fantasy 15 on the floor, lying open to topless shots of Kristanna Løken, the Terminatrix. Embarrassing. If he had time, he would try to eat the magazine before he died.
KEVIN SEEMED TO BE DECIDING. To kill or not to kill? Or how slowly? How excruciatingly? Whichever, he was relishing the decision-making process.
Something splintered against his skull. As it turned out, it was another skull. Beth stood behind Kevin, holding the jawbone of Dr. McCoy. “Now will you calm down?” she asked, grabbing his shirt.
Beth was allowed to touch Kevin in places he didn’t even allow the army doctors to touch, but his shirt was not one of those places.
“
You want some of this?” He raised a femur to her.
“Kevin.” Beth backed away, releasing the shirt. “Let’s just—”
“Do you?” Kevin asked again, in a dead, calm voice.
Beth said “No” very quietly.
She glanced past Kevin, who wheeled around to see the last of Denis going out the window. He turned back with a look of confused revulsion.
“You like this dork?”
Beth’s failure to vomit at the suggestion was taken as a yes.
“I am going to kill him,” Kevin said, dropping the bones and heading for the window. His compatriots followed.
Beth looked around Denis’s room, shaking her head. When she saw her poster, she smiled so hard she almost cried.
10.
DUMB MONKEYS
HE’S JUST DOING IT TO GET A RISE OUT OF YOU. JUST IGNORE HIM.
CLAIRE STANDISH
AS HE WAS DEFENESTRATING HIMSELF, Denis observed that the eaves outside his window were only eighteen inches wide and sloped down at a 45-degree angle. This was the sort of detail he had surely noticed before, saw every day, but didn’t attach any real importance to until it turned out to be really important. Like, for example, now.
His trajectory was going to take him past the eaves and another dozen feet straight down onto some lawn furniture that wasn’t comfortable even when you sat on it properly. Denis would have to take death-evading measures. Using his sophisticated knowledge of physics and aerodynamics, he spazzed about and managed to save himself by wedging his face into the gutter.
“Hey!”
Denis coughed up the leaves he had promised to clean out the previous fall. Rich was twenty feet away, humping the far corner of the house.
“What are you doing?”
“Drainpipe,” Rich grunted. “Shimmying.”
Rich gave Denis a thumbs-up. The drainpipe jinked as it disengaged from the gutter, and Rich held his increasingly ridiculous pose as the pipe fell away, slowly at first and progressively faster in accordance with the laws of gravity, and into the darkness.
Denis squirreled it down the eaves and peered over the edge.