by A. R. Braun
Sun streamed through the curtains in the motel room, sending zebra-like poles of light throughout the space. The air conditioner whined, working its ass off.
“See what on the news?” she asked.
“Velvet gave the order to use the guillotines on the back of the execution vehicles.”
“W-what?”
“You heard me. And he knows, Scout.”
Anxiety paralyzed her. “Knows what?”
“That our RFID chips are false. They can track us with it. Velvet and his minions cracked the code. They know ours is 667 instead of 666.”
Oh God. I’ll lose my mind.
“Bill and I are leaving the house now.” More silence strangled the line. “Are you sure being on the run isn’t going to drive you to a breakdown?”
“I … dunno,” she sobbed.
“You’re in a cheap motel, right?”
“Um-hmm.”
“How are you handling that? It’s summer, they probably don’t spray for bugs and you’ve likely got all kinds of critters in there.”
Scout paced faster. “Stop it! You’re scaring me!”
“Sorry.”
“I haven’t seen any.”
“All right, good. Now, Scout, Bill tells me you think you’re a spy, into espionage.”
This time, she was speechless.
“Well, like Bill said, you’re not,” Tim went on. “You’re just a radical martyr. And you need to know that.” He sighed.
“T-that’s w-what Bill said.”
“Well, Bill’s right. So quit killing. It’s only a matter of time till they chop off our heads anyway.”
She sniffled. “I need to ask you something.”
“Shoot. Well, then again don’t.” He seemed to force a laugh.
I don’t think that’s very funny.
“The whole time you and Bill have been running around with the fake microchip, what’ve you been doing?” she asked.
“As in?”
Force it out.
“Have you … killed anybody?”
“God no. Bill’s been watching the book of Revelation unfold before him, we’ve been having cookouts and I beat the shit out of my daughter for helping Mack and Lelila rape you. But, like I said, it was too late. She took the mark of the beast.”
“Oh God.”
“Thou shalt not kill, Scout.”
Trembling, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything.
“I mean, we can’t blame you, those men marrying babies and pets, but to … murder….”
“Oh shit.”
“And you can’t keep coloring and changing your hair all the time. It’ll fall out.”
“Tim, please, quit freaking me out.” She trembled.
“Sorry. All right, Bill’s got everything loaded up in the car, so I’ve … oh no! Gotta g—”
“Freeze!” Scout heard a man say that sounded like a cop. “Down on the ground!”
“Tim,” Scout cried.
Someone ended the connection.
“TIM!”
Beeping on the line.
“TIM!”
He was gone.
They’re taking them to the … guillotine … to chop off … their … heads.
Anxiety flooded her. Her mind swam, her sense of reality distorting, as if she shook her head back and forth too quickly, though she didn’t.
I’m all alone. My friends are dead.
And I’m a killer.
It was only a matter of time until they caught her and put her on the guillotine. Good thing she’d repented of the murders.
Technically, I’m a mass murderer. I killed Mack, Lelila, the man who married a child and that man who married a dog.
Good thing she’d repented, indeed.
Yet she couldn’t take being alone—that the espionage was a fallacy—and that her friends were gone. It was only a matter of time till she was.
All I wanted to do was try to kill the antichrist by putting a bullet in his head, but his deadly head wound was healed. So all I’ve done is go on a killing spree.
So much for having fun for the first time in her short life.
Fear took her mind over. She jumped up and paced the floor so fast she was sprinting.
At least the guillotine will be quick and painless, that’s the good thing about it.
Yet the horrid possibilities that always conquer a mind in fear came to her.
When my head’s cut off, maybe it will hurt, maybe my eyes will keep looking around even though my head’s in the basket. I saw a movie where a guy’s consciousness went on way after his death.
Oh God!
“No, Lord Jesus, please don’t let me have a nervous breakdown! Please, strengthen me!”
Yet He didn’t. How could He, she supposed, help someone on a killing spree?
She paced faster, wearing out the carpet in her small room.
Oh my God, this is hell. Am I freaking going to hell? Oh my God, this is hell. Am I freaking going to hell? Oh my God, this is hell. Am I freaking going to hell? Oh my God, this is hell. Am I freaking going to hell?
She squeaked out an insidious symphony as she tore the floor up. Someone might as well have set her mind on fire or filled her cranial cavity with insects.
Someone peeked into her window.
Staring through the space between the curtains where she hadn’t pulled them together tightly enough, a silhouette, picturesque in the angry sun, gawked. A wan figure—a female—with straight brown hair down to her ass. “Found ya,” she cried.
Muffy.
With wide eyes.
Smiling an evil grin.
Raising a cell phone to her ear after dialing a number.
Sirens in the distance.
Scout grabbed her hair and pulled as if to yank it out by the roots.
***
How in the hell did she find me?
Scout had run into the bathroom. Now she strained to push open the painted-shut beveled-glass window above the bathtub. Muffy was obviously furious with Scout. After her father beat her within an inch of her life, she’d tracked her down.
Scout knew how church people were. They felt obliged to help you whether you wanted it or not. But if they were hypocrites—as Muffy certainly was—they didn’t follow you around to help you. God no. They followed you around to hurt you.
And Muffy had taken the mark of the beast. In fact, Muffy had probably been watching her the whole time, following in the shadows as creepy church hypocrites tend to do, watching her when she didn’t know she was watching her. Planning her attack. Biding her time. Waiting. Not sane. Not restrained. Loyal. Satan’s infantrywoman.
Scout knew how they were. She’d been going to that Baptist church since she was born until just after she’d turned eighteen. If anyone knew how hypocrites waxed evil, she did.
Watching you when you don’t know they’re watching you.
Or peeking into your window.
The worst part? Scout couldn’t shoot Muffy. She couldn’t keep killing, or when they chopped off her head, she’d go to hell. She’d gotten a sweet doggie killed. It had to stop.
So what the hell was she supposed to do?
Scout finally got the window open, and holy shit and miracle, Muffy didn’t lurk outside … or did she? Scout climbed out, slid over the gravel and got to her feet.
Until a hand grabbed her ankle and pulled her down.
Muffy: “Gotcha!”
Scout shrieked, trying to pull away.
Muffy put two fingers into her mouth and gave a loud whistle. “Mister Police! She’s over here, in back of the motel!”
Out of reflex, Scout pushed herself up by her hands and mule-kicked Muffy in the face. The wan teen let go. Scout sprinted the hell out of there, running into a cornfield next to the cell phone tower, the leaves giving her painful “paper cuts”—pins and needles.
But running away from the cell phone tower would help them track her.
Scout moaned with terror as she hurried deeper into th
e cornfield.
Where would she go?
And, more important, would the execution vehicle be waiting for her when she got there?
CHAPTER THIRTY
Almost blind with terror, Scout checked into The Haven Motel by the high school. Now in a new town—a weird suburb named “Wampum”—the worry of nightmarish neo-Nazi skinheads tore at her, as well as the fear of Satan’s WASPs storming around the subdivision. It seemed like forever when she’d found the motel and high school after coming out of the corn and stumbling down the town’s streets. Her thoughts raced; her vision flashed in front of her with gyrating, dark shadows and her heart acted like it would explode within her. She had to calm down, but how? Satan’s guillotine awaited. It was like the ’73 film, The Wicker Man. Everyone was in on it but her.
Take it easy. I need to ask God for strength and face my martyrdom.
Likely story. She purchased a steak knife at the grocery store and sat holding it in her left hand. She had to cut off the fake mark of the beast, or they’d track her down and separate her head from her neck.
The air conditioner conked out.
Terrific.
That was the least of her worries, though. Had Muffy followed her the whole way here, hiding in the shadows with her bone-thin frame, just slight enough to blend in with the darkness? Was she outside, getting ready to peek in with her bruised face after her late father, Tim, beat her within an inch of her life?
Scout ran over and drew the curtains till they opened as infinitesimally as possible. No one lurked out there.
She ran into the bathroom and won a fight with a cockroach and a water bug for a towel, then sat down on the toilet.
She put the knife to her hand and … and … carved.
It seemed a creek of crimson blood flowed out of her right hand as the chip clanked onto the floor, and she quickly put the towel on it, holding it tight against her wound. She didn’t think a human being could bleed so much. The blood pooled around her feet. The pain threatened to drive her insane or make her pass out. She discovered herself sobbing. She took deep breaths.
When I staunch the flow of blood, I need to run out to the guillotine. They’re gonna find me anyway.
She pulled the towel off and the blood had bloomed rose-like on it. Lightheaded and dizzy, she put the towel back on her hand and pushed down hard. She closed her eyes, seeing phantoms of light writhe under the darkness of her lids.
She pulled the damned towel off again. The fucking blood wouldn’t quit flowing.
Fuck it. Let it clot.
Yeah, right. She’d probably need stiches. Scout rose on shaky legs. When was the last time she’d had a meal? Sweat beaded on her forehead. Soon her arms were slicked with perspiration. It wouldn’t be long before the heat in the room would become unbearable. And what was she to do, call the landlord? He’d just say, “Show me your microchip” like they always did. When he saw she’d cut it out, he’d turn her in. They all would turn her in.
Trembling like a trailer in a tornado, she stood in front of the dead air conditioner. Sure she’d faint soon, she grasped the appliance.
The chip, it’s on the bathroom floor! They’ll home in on it. I’ve got to get rid of it!
She ran into the bathroom and retrieved it, then wrapped it in toilet paper. Rushed to her door. Opened it a crack. No one there. She ran over to the BBQ WINGS restaurant next-door. Not far enough. She snapped her head around, left to right, wheeled, searching, anxious, frantic, about to go INSANE!
She found a small bridge over a creek. Running and playing in traffic, she dodged a few cars—like she gave a fuck if she got hit—and threw it into the creek. She watched it snatch the reddened TP and carry it downstream as she listened to the beast’s people yell at her to “Get your dyke ass out of the road.”
Buh-bye.
She ran back across the street, almost becoming a pancake as a semi blared its horn. Soon she was back in her ramshackle room.
She was livid. How could God deal her such a miserable hand? About now, she wanted to bitch at Him, to scream at the deity for giving her such a shitty go of it.
Hell of a fucking note.
Exhausted, she ended up falling back onto her bed and going into a deep sleep.
***
God showed her. What it was all about. In heaven, walking through the widest-open space she’d ever tread upon, the clouds came to her ankles and her bare feet trod on what felt like a marble floor. Scout held a palm branch and was arrayed in a white robe. Ahead of her was a giant throne, tall as a skyscraper, where God with brass feet, eyes of fire, curly-white hair and a blinding countenance sat surrounded by elders who looked like Moses after he’d come back down Mount Sinai.
Here were all the righteous people who’d been too good for this world: Mother Theresa, Apostle Paul—looking and sounding like Peterman from Seinfeld as he relayed his fights with beasts at Ephesus to a couple of young disciples with long hair and beards—and … walking up to her … her mother and father, along with Tim and Bill, all with arms wide open.
Never wanting to let go, Scout wept as she embraced them. They hugged her so tightly she thought she’d break, and she was rejuvenated. They told her they loved her and were so glad to see her, but she couldn’t speak. The opposite of anxiety reigned supreme inside her, the sedating peace of the saints, a nirvana so enchanting she thought she’d float upward into oblivion if they broke the embrace. She could go around the world a thousand times, laughing at all the fools who’d taken the true mark of the beast.
Just as she’d grabbed on to the sedation she never wanted to lose, she woke, blinking her eyes.
Scout was not in her motel room.
Doctors and nurses in black scrubs squinted their eyes at her, leaning in to get a closer look. She lay on an operating table.
“She’s come out of it,” a husky female voice called, belonging to a truck of a woman putting away a defibrillator.
A male doctor with gray hair and sky-blue eyes nodded. “Good. Chancellor Velvet is anxious to see her.”
???!!! Oh, just cut my fucking head off! I can’t take it anymore.
They helped her up and wheeled her out of the room with blinding fluorescent lights and hefted her into a hospital bed. She shut her eyes and let the chattering voices lull her back to sleep.
***
When Scout came out of it, she looked around the bland, white hospital room with a small widescreen TV screen playing some kind of monster movie. The air conditioner chilled her flesh. She noticed a doctor had given her stitches in her right hand.
Walter Emmett Velvet grinned evilly down upon her.
She sighed and looked away. “Just end it,” she almost whispered. “Cut off my head.”
When she turned to face him, his smile had turned upside down. He shook his head as he walked over to the foot of her bed, looking over her chart. “Not so chipper today, huh, young Scout?” he asked in a TV-preacher voice.
She couldn’t keep gazing at his sinister face. Something about that man made one feel like if one went off on him, death would be a relief to what he could bring about. “I don’t know what you want me to say. You know I’m not on your side now.”
He nodded. “You’ve made that abundantly clear, my dear.” The corner of his mouth rose after he pursed his lips. “I was like you once, young Scout. As a child, I didn’t know who I was. When I found out, I didn’t want to be … well, you know, who I am. Talk about a mind fuck.
“But you can get used to anything. Believe me, I know.”
Was that what was happening to her? Was she nothing more than Satan’s killing machine? Could she actually sympathize with this merchant of the kingdom of darkness? She squeezed her eyes shut, not allowing her thoughts. Unlike him, she had a soul and a choice.
When she opened her eyes—for the Antichrist could’ve done anything to her while they were shut—she spied two secret-service men watching her through sunglasses from the open door, guns in their hands.
“Call your rent-a-cops off if you wanna talk,” she let out.
He gesticulated toward them, and with furrowed brows, they stepped back and shut the door.
“I can’t help who I am,” Velvet went on. “And neither can you.”
She made herself face him again. The horned devil put her chart back, his wings flapping like flags atop a baseball stadium. She looked to her left at a partition where a shaded shape handed meds to a babbling old man. When she turned back, it was hundred-dollar haircut and Armani suit time again. “You know I won’t serve you.” She sighed. “What do you want?”
He grinned, showing his square-shaped pearly-whites. “Quite the contrary, young Scout.” He put his hands on his hips.
“Six-six-six.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Come again?”
“Your name. Each word has six letters. Six-six-six.”
He shook his head and chuckled. “Well, young Scout, the devil’s in the details, now isn’t he?”
“That’s never been truer.”
His eyes became serious again. Windows to the soul. The old cliché rang true. There was murder in those eyes. He pierced her with them. “The thing about you, young girl, is you don’t have the stomach for martyrdom. Don’t think I didn’t know where you were at all times, as well as your thoughts. I can read your mind, stupid. I showed you that. I let you throw away your Christianity to become a murderer.” He snickered at this diatribe.
She decided to dare it. What did she have to lose? “You can kiss my skinny ass.”
He morphed back into the devil—or was it a demon?—all aglow with beet-red, scaly skin; and he growled so loudly the windows rattled as his wings fluttered out to their complete span in a flap; his bulging crimson muscles rippling. She felt his roar in her teeth, that’s how powerful it was. Down into her stomach it rumbled.
Her courage failed her. She shrieked, covering her face in her hands.
“Scared little girl.” His Grandpa voice was back.
She peeked through her fingers and he was a businessman again. She shook so badly she thought she’d have a seizure.
He pulled an insulin pen out of his suit pocket, holding it next to his face. “Need a fix?”
She looked away again, now afraid now to say you know where you can stick that.