1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Local

by Ryohgo Narita

  Realizing that the conversation was weirdly failing to mesh, the mafiosi quietly stopped the fists they’d raised.

  “So, please, Donny, not yet, please wait, wait for them, I’m begging you, please, I know these guys are gonna put down their guns for u-hu-huuus!”

  “Donny? Huh? Whozzat?”

  The leader stared hard at Jacuzzi’s face And then he noticed.

  The guy’s eyes weren’t focused on him. They were looking at something behind him, over his shoulder.

  In the instant the air went tense, he heard it.

  Grunch.

  The second Jacuzzi heard that sound, he screamed and covered his ears. He was trembling hard.

  The leader let go of Jacuzzi, violently sharpening all five of his senses. During the moment it took him to turn around:

  His eyes took in his subordinates, who had spotted something and were standing stock-still.

  His ears picked up the sound that came on the heels of the unpleasant noise from a moment ago: a sound like something hard being scraped together.

  His nose caught the scent and the chill of the freezing air.

  His tongue tasted the bitterness and acidity of the gastric juices that were working their way up his throat.

  And the instant he’d completed his turn, his arm took a direct hit from the worst pain he’d ever experienced.

  “Ghakh… Aaaaaaaaaugh!”

  A sudden impact. When he looked at the affected area, giant fingers that seemed several times the size of a normal person’s were wrapped around his fist, the one that held his gun. His wrist was twisted at an unnatural angle; the flesh had split in places, and dark red liquid was spurting out in time with his heartbeat. Somehow managing to hold his pain-dazed head together with logic, the leader looked at the something in front of him.

  It was a giant shadow with the moon at its back.

  It was about six feet tall. The huge man, who was cloaked in shadows, had twisted and broken one of the leader’s hands with his own right one. Meanwhile, his left hand was high in the air, violently choking the throat of one of the other mafiosi. The big man’s grip had warped the man’s neck, and his head and body hung, unnaturally limp, from either side.

  The moon was directly behind the monster’s head, and he couldn’t see his expression in the shadows. In the place where his face would ordinarily have been, there was nothing but deep, still darkness.

  “Muh, muh, monsteeer!”

  His terror was greater than his pain. Desperately, he flung his hand up into the air; its nerves had already shorted out. Without any particular resistance, the big man released his right hand from its restraint.

  Set free, the leader took aim at the giant in front of him and attempted to pull the trigger. However, naturally, the muscles in his fingers were in no condition to take orders.

  “Wh-wh-wh-what are you doing, men?! Hurry, fill this guy with lead!”

  He fired off an order to his subordinates, but nobody moved. Not only that, their eyes weren’t even focused on the giant. They were wandering through the surrounding darkness, moving this way and that.

  At that point, the poor leader finally noticed them: the many shapes in the darkness around them, picked out by the light of the moon. He and his men stood around Jacuzzi, and their group was surrounded by kids about twenty years old with glaring eyes. Each of them wore clothes that had nothing in common with the others, but the made men immediately realized what they had to be. It was the group of punks they had to wipe out—the foot soldiers of the crybaby in front of them.

  On both sides of the alley, in the shadows of the telegraph poles, at the edge of the fence that surrounded the road, they easily numbered more than fifty. They had the area surrounded, and with extraordinary slowness, they were closing in on the criminals.

  “What…What are you?!”

  When he turned to look at his men a second time, in an attempt to break out of the situation somehow, the leader lost his voice yet again.

  What he saw was the faces of his subordinates. They were still standing frozen.

  However, two things were different from what they had been a moment ago.

  One was that they’d tried to fire at the big man or the surrounding human wall, or at Jacuzzi.

  The other was that their eyes were no longer moving, and the life had completely drained from their faces.

  Before the leader even had time to blink, his men fell to the ground, one after another. A sharp silver knife towered from the back of each head, dully reflecting the moonlight.

  As the leader stared dazedly at the corpses of his men, he realized that several men and women were standing beside him.

  “How are you feeling, sir?”

  Abruptly, the woman who stood in the center spoke to him. She was young, probably about the same age as Jacuzzi. The woman was distinguished by the large scar on her face and the rough eye patch that covered her right eye. The fact that she wore a pair of glasses over the eye patch made her abnormal appearance all the more striking.

  Even though it was winter, she wore clothes that exposed her arms, and both arms had countless scars on them as well.

  Struck by the illusion that he’d heard a human voice for the first time in years, the leader—or no, the man who had been a leader, and who had now lost all of his subordinates—gradually regained his presence of mind at the sound of the woman’s voice. At the same time, the violent pain in his right wrist returned. In rhythm with his pulse, the heat of the blood and the pain assailed his brain.

  “What is this?! What the hell are you people?! When did you get this—?”

  He broke off in midsentence. A man who’d been beside the woman had struck him in the cheek with an iron pipe.

  “Ah, ah, ga-ga, gwaah!”

  “No one inquired about your circumstances! Well? What was it I just said to you? I inquired how you were feeling, you minuscule, putrefied maggot Wasn’t that it?”

  A polite version of the words he’d barked at Jacuzzi a moment ago came right back at him. Dammit, were these guys here the whole time?! This rotten bitch led me—us—into a trap. He tried to say the words and cuss her out, but the blood that streamed from his mouth wouldn’t let him.

  When he looked around, a human wall had formed around him, unnoticed. As they watched the bloody show that was unfolding here, some showed no change of expression, others jeered, and still others looked at him with pity in their eyes. He hadn’t managed to grasp the true nature of this group, but one thing was clear:

  There was really and truly no escape.

  The mafioso had been reduced to a mere thug; his back was against the wall. Remembering the words Jacuzzi had sobbed earlier, he immediately took action.

  Shaking the gun free from the mangled right hand that had been wrapped around it, he shouted a plea at Jacuzzi at the top of his lungs.

  “I put down the gun! I put down the gun, I swear! I don’t have a weapon anymore! Tell your friends not to kill me! Okay?! You don’t want to hear bones breaking or see blood, right? So…”

  When he’d screamed that much, he realized that Jacuzzi wasn’t moving.

  With both hands still over his ears, his eyes had rolled back, and he was frothing at the mouth.

  “He seems to have fainted. How unfortunate for you.”

  The woman with the eye patch spoke coolly.

  He was completely out of ideas. All that was left was to try to force his way through. On that thought, using his left hand, the mafioso reached for the gun he’d just thrown down—but failed to pick it up. The giant’s foot, clad in a thick leather boot, stomped down on his hand, gun and all.

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit! Little punks like you— Dammit, dammit, dammit, as if we’d let you punks make fools out of us, damn yooooooooou!”

  Completely cornered, he dragged his left hand and the gun out from under the boot by force. He felt the pain of skin peeling off, and of divots of flesh being dug out here and there.

  Even s
o, he paid it no attention. He turned the gun on the weakest-looking part of the human fence: the woman with the eye patch. Entrusting all his remaining chances to the index finger of his left hand, he loaded all his hopes into the bullet.

  However, in the end, the bullet was never fired, and his chips ran out right there.

  He saw the woman throw something. Something small and round that hissed and smoked.

  Then, with an abrupt noise, the thing burst.

  “A bomb?!”

  By the time he caught on, it was too late. In terms of force, it wasn’t much more than a firecracker with chest hair, but at the roar, he involuntarily covered his eyes.

  Through the space between his arms, which dripped with blood, the last thing he saw…was countless silver flashes flying from the men who stood on either side of the woman. The knives reflected the moonlight, and their trajectories were all converging on him. Ahh, how lovely and terrifying and hideous.

  It was the most—and the last—emotionally moving thing in his life.

  Gazing at the man, whose body had sprouted countless knives, the woman heaved a deep sigh and muttered:

  “You should have just begged us for your life directly.”

  Then, as if she’d lost interest, she turned to look at Jacuzzi, who had been woken up by the giant.

  “Wah, hic, they’re dead, they’re all dead, and the blood’s red, and their faces are white, and it’s creepy…”

  Ignoring his whimpers about the mafiosi’s corpses, the woman directed words of appreciation at her boss. In a complete change from what she’d used with her enemies, her tone was casual and friendly.

  “Great work, Jacuzzi. It happened just like you said it would: They walked right into our trap.”

  “Wah, but, but, but, you didn’t have to kill them all!”

  “There was no help for it. From where we were, it looked like they were going to kill you any second. Besides, all the survivors said these were the exact same men who killed Kenny and the others. That, and I couldn’t forgive them for hitting you.”

  “Isn’t that just a personal grudge…? I’m a little happy, though. Thanks, Nice.”

  Jacuzzi smiled quietly at the woman he’d called Nice, creating a mood that seemed to ignore the corpses. However, as if he’d remembered, he turned back to the bodies, and tears spilled from his eyes yet again.

  “What’s the matter? What are you afraid of now?” Nice asked. She sounded worried.

  Jacuzzi circled around behind her; he was shaking like a leaf.

  “No, it’s just, well, I felt sort of like, you know, like the corpses might get up and come to kill me. I-I mean, a little while ago, I read about it in a book. It said corpses get up and drink the blood of the living and kill them…”

  “You’ve got to learn to tell reality from fiction, Jacuzzi. That could never happen.”

  Just then, suddenly, a roar went up behind them.

  “Rrraaaaarrgh… Corpses, get up, drink blood, trouble, scary.”

  “Oh, you think so, too, Donny? I’m glad it’s not just me…”

  “Luh, leave it to me.”

  The big guy he’d called Donny thumped his chest. His brown skin and halting English marked him as an immigrant who’d just come up from Mexico.

  “I-I’ll, kill ’em, real good.”

  No sooner had he spoken than the big man’s foot stomped down on the pile of bodies. Dull sounds and sharp sounds formed a weird ensemble that echoed across the area. At the impact, the corpses bounded up almost as if they’d been alive, and the knives that had been stuck in them all fell out at once. In time with the impact of the next few stomps, blood geysered out from the holes left by the knives.

  “Waaaaaaaaugh! D-Donny, stop it! You’ve got to treat dead people politely!”

  Jacuzzi hastily checked his subordinate. As if trading places with him, Nice walked up to the pile of corpses. Then she took several long, thin cylinders from inside her shirt and began to dress the strings that sprouted from their tips.

  “Um, Nice? What are you doing?”

  He had a truly awful premonition. The unease was clearly audible in Jacuzzi’s question. In response, Nice—smiling—took out a Zippo lighter.

  “No, don’t tell me, you wouldn’t really, would you? Nice. …Nice? Niiiiiiice!”

  Before he could stop her, Nice had set fire to the fuses. They began to spark vigorously.

  Gazing raptly at those fireworks, as though they were a lover she hadn’t seen in a hundred years, Nice quietly laid the metal shells attached to the other end of those fuses atop the mountain of corpses.

  Then, with a smile so pleasant it was startling, she turned to address her companions.

  “Now, then. If you don’t run fast, you’ll be in danger!”

  A roar echoed through the alley. Red flares repelled the moonlight, and then the alley was enveloped in a violent flash.

  Even after that had died down, smaller lights burned here and there throughout the corridor. Fragments of something that had been sent flying by the exploding dynamite had turned into kindling, and they cast a dim glow over Jacuzzi and the others, who’d taken cover at a distance.

  As she got up slowly, Nice comforted the shaking boy.

  “There, there, don’t cry. You see? The corpses are all in pieces now, so you don’t have to worry. They won’t be able to come back, so don’t cry. I did it for you, Jacuzzi.”

  As he calmed his rough breathing, the boy glared at Nice with tear-filled eyes.

  “Th-th-that’s a lie. Y-y-you just wanted to use explosives, didn’t you, Nice? You just wanted to see an explosion, right?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  She answered without compunction, giving her very best smile with the only eye she had.

  “Nuh, N-N-N-Niiiice, I’m going to hit you later!”

  “You couldn’t. You never could. You couldn’t do anything that barbaric, could you, Jacuzzi?”

  “Wah…”

  “There, you see?!”

  Watching the triumphant Nice out of the corner of his eye, Jacuzzi spoke to the one man who hadn’t taken cover during the explosion.

  “Then, Donny, you hit her instead.”

  “Mm, got it. I hit Nice, Jacuzzi happy, then I happy, too.”

  The brown-skinned giant swung his arms around happily.

  “I’m-sorry-I-won’t-do-it-again-I’ll-never-go-against-you-again-so-forgive-meee!”

  Holding her head with both hands, the one-eyed woman ran around among the flames.

  As they watched this exchange—which happened once every three days or so—their other companions laughed: “Hee-hya-ha-hee-hee!”

  “O-o-okay, guys, let’s hurry and, um, get away from here. I mean, we’ve g-g-g-got to run!” Jacuzzi panicked, his steps unsteady.

  Mystified, his friends inquired: “Huh? Why?”

  Giving up on fleeing, Jacuzzi ran in place and raised his voice:

  “L-l-listen, do you know why I told you not to use g-g-guns today?”

  His friends said whatever they wanted: “Wasn’t it ’cos you’re scared of gunfire, too?” “Because it was a waste of bullets, right?” “Hya-haah!”

  Weeping and raging at the same time, Jacuzzi stamped his feet even more furiously.

  “Because if we made too much noise, the police or the other Russo Family members would catch on! A-a-a-and you went and detonated a bomb… Hurry, hurry, we gotta get out of here! Everybody hurry!”

  No sooner had he spoken than he took off into the depths of the alley, running for dear life.

  “Oooooooooohh”

  A general cry of admiration went up.

  “Huh! Was that why!”

  “Jacuzzi’s awesome! What a smart guy!”

  “That’s our boss for ya!”

  Praising Jacuzzi, they all took off after what was probably the worst crybaby delinquent boss in Chicago.

  Illuminated by the flames, he looked for all the world like a poor little lamb being pursued by a horde of
demons.

  “B-b-by the way, Nice. About the train tomorrow…Jon says there’s only room for about five people in the cheap compartments. So that’s me, you, and Donny, and then you pick out two more likely-looking guys.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  “Y-yeah. It’s not as if we’re going to do anything with the train itself; we’re just helping ourselves to the treasure in its freight room, so it would be more unnatural to have a lot of people, wouldn’t it? Besides, Fang and Jon will be on board already.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock, then, at Chicago Union Station.”

  After saying good-bye to Nice and the others, who were going to get ready, Jacuzzi felt great unease and anticipation about the following day’s plan.

  “I wonder if it’ll go all right. I wonder if it’ll be okay. Still, to think we get to ride the transcontinental limited express, the Flying Pussyfoot… I’m already looking forward to that. I haven’t seen Fang and Jon in a while, either; I hope they’re doing well.”

  As he looked up at the starry sky, Jacuzzi thought about the friends who’d be on the same train with him, and the plan they’d be forcing through the next evening.

  The plan for their first-ever train robbery.

  PROLOGUE III

  TERRORIST GROUP

  December 29, 1931Noon

  In a wasteland a few dozen miles south of Chicago, an abandoned factory stood quietly.

  Inside, in one of its larger halls, a group of more than fifty people stood in well-ordered rows. Each of them had an appearance that was completely different from ordinary people, and their bold, cunning eyes produced a tone halfway between the military and the mafia. Surrounded by the ash gray of the floor and the dull gray of the walls, their ranks were enveloped in abnormal silence.

  Breaking that silence, one man spoke. He stood in front of the assembled, his sharp gaze holding a dark, quiet flame.

  The man—Goose Perkins—delivered a line that was truly popular in that era, the golden age of the mafia—or at least, that would seem so, given the portrayals that would arrive from the movie industry in later years: