by Ed Kurtz
MEAN JIM TURNER
—One—
Black Mama, White Mama
They rode long and hard, the wind at their faces and the legions of hell at their backs, sides, and front. Some twenty miles past the first sign they saw for the city, Speed’s hog ran out of gas. They ditched it on the side of the road and Arkansas climbed up behind Irma for the rest of the ride. There was a quarter tank left in Bigfoot’s ride, and neither woman knew if it would get them there or not.
Minutes before the second sign for the city came into view, the wide open spaces abruptly gave to package stores and dirty book shops, used car lots with only a few, smashed up vehicles left and burned and burning buildings that heralded the nearness of their destination. An ancient Harrellson’s department store counted among the few buildings they came across that wasn’t entirely annihilated; they pulled over and raided the place for clean threads. Irma reemerged into the sunlight in bell-bottom blue jeans and a yellow and orange floral print top. Arkansas wore a pair of small, white, ass-hugging shorts and a military green tank top.
“Civilian threads at last,” she remarked on their way back to the bikes.
“Now if only we could find a shower,” Irma said.
“Jim’ll have one when we get into town.”
“Tell me about this cat,” Irma said, using the segue to her advantage as she threw a denimed leg over the side of Bigfoot’s hog.
“Not much to tell. Mean Jim Turner, they call him—a big, gorgeous hunk of brother if ever there lived one. He knew my old man before I went to the pen, wrote me a few times that first year inside. Trust me, Jim is good people. Where we’re going is the projects, and between four towers only one of ‘em fit to live in, and that’s thanks to Jim.”
“A regular Robin Hood, huh?”
“Don’t call him no hood, honey—my man is righteous with a capital R.”
“Righteous,” Irma repeated. “Right.”
She turned the key and stepped on the foot lever. Nothing happened.
Arkansas groaned and said, “Don’t tell me.”
Irma sighed and tried it again, but there was nothing, not even a click.
“Dead,” she said.
“Shee-it,” Arkansas said.
Irma climbed back off and the two women stood together in the parking lot, staring at the long empty highway before them.
At some length, Arkansas said, “How far back was that last sign for the city?”
“I dunno, ‘bout ten, fifteen miles.”
“So there’s still at least forty miles to go.”
“Looks like it.”
“We can’t walk no forty miles, Irma.”
“No,” she agreed. “We can’t.”
“So what the hell we gonna—”
Arkansas’s words were cut short by the not-too-distant wail of a police siren. To the north, from the direction to which they were headed, a cop car leapt over the slight rise of the highway and bumped back down in a shower of sparks. The car’s bubblegum lights flared and the siren screamed louder as it careened in a zigzag path for Harrellson’s parking lot. Irma breathed a low curse and grabbed Arkansas by the arm, wrenching her away as the boxy white police cruiser sped right for them. Two seconds later the damaged front end of the cruiser smashed Bigfoot’s hog out of the way, sent it spinning wildly across the asphalt. The cop car spun out too, popped up on its right two tires, and crashed through the wide front display window of the department store in a tinkling shower of glass and sparking electrical wires.
Irma continued holding onto Arkansas while they stood at the lot’s edge, gawping at the sudden destructive path the cop car had cut mere yards in front of them. Arkansas started to speak again, but she was cut off when the cruiser’s driver’s side door creaked open and a man in a dark blue uniform toppled out. He fell awkwardly on his neck and his lower half swung out of the car like puppet’s legs. Irma let go of Arkansas and moved toward him, but Arkansas said, “Wait a minute.”
“I know he’s a pig,” Irma said, squirming out of Arkansas’s grasp, “but he’s hurt.”
“I don’t think so…”
No sooner had Arkansas said so, the policeman started to drag himself over the asphalt by his hands. He did not raise his head at all during the process, instead dragging his face over the rough surface as well. He managed to make it several feet like this before stopping and moaning plaintively. A moment later, he planted his palms on the ground and heaved himself up. His face was scraped down to a dull, pebble-strewn red. His eyes were vacant, unseeing. He dropped his mouth open and screamed at the two women.
“Oh,” Irma said, disappointed.
“Come on,” Arkansas said. “Let’s have us a look at the car.”
“What for?”
“It ain’t totaled,” she explained. “If we can get it back on its tires that sucker might still run.”
“What about…him?” Irma asked, gesturing at the shrieking dead cop on the ground as they went wide to avoid him.
“His legs is broke.”
A closer look revealed that she was right; Irma noted that the policemen’s legs were indeed twisted and crumpled, his pants shredded. She also noticed the gooey hole in the middle of his back.
“Been shot, too.”
“Yeah, by his own self,” Arkansas said. She was already peeking into the cruiser, from which she withdrew a Colt Police Positive. She sniffed at the barrel and said, “Stupid pig shot hisself in the chest. Came back on account of not doin’ it right.”
“Ugh,” Irma said.
The cop fell back onto his face, muffling his screams.
“Does it hurt, you think?” Irma asked.
“What, being dead?”
“Yeah.”
“How should I know? Help me push.”
Irma came around to where Arkansas was leaning with her back and shoulders against the passenger side of the cruiser and added her pushing power. The car groaned and tipped back down on all fours, bouncing violently on its shocks for a moment before coming to a rest. The engine was still running. Arkansas went in through the passenger door and slid over the bench seat to the wheel.
“Lights don’t work no more,” she called out. “Wipers neither.”
“Can you back it out?”
Arkansas jerked the gearshift and stood on the pedal. The backlights did not glow red but the cruiser shot backward in a hurry, its back left tire running over the dead cop’s already ruined legs and reducing them to pulp. The car squealed to a stop and Arkansas leaned out the window.
“Yeah, I can back it out.”
Irma shook her head and got in. Arkansas shifted into first and the cruiser lurched forward, hitting the cop a second time. As she switched off the siren and made a sharp right to get back on the highway, Irma turned to look back at the broad red and gray smear that was left of the policeman’s head. Only a few days earlier the sight would have induced shudders and nausea. Now she felt nothing in particular.
Arkansas brought the battered police car up to eighty-five and drove straight for the city.
* * * * *
The Wilson Arms Housing Project loomed over them like four imposing monoliths sitting in stark judgment of all they surveyed, a quadrant of concrete thirty story buildings that dominated the southeast side of town. Before they came within view of the chain-link fence that surrounded the projects, they saw the enormous banners made of bedsheets that hung from the roofs of the buildings. The banners made grim proclamations like HELL IS HERE and WHITE MEN MADE THE DEAD WALK. At the latter, Irma squirmed on her side of the cruiser’s bench seat.
“Not sure how welcome I’m gonna be in there,” she said.
“Between a living white girl and a dead cannibal, I guess you won’t look so bad by comparison.” Arkansas grinned and Irma chuckled uncertainly. “Besides, you ain’t the man, baby. You’re a jailbird like me.”
Arkansas navigated around several barricaded side streets that crawled with the dead, none of which seemed terribl
y interested in the spectacle of a moving car. The main drag was blocked off, as well, but not through official means—rather, the four lane street was lined with crazy jalopies of all colors with tricked out rims. They were parked perpendicularly from one sidewalk to the other, and bright neon graffiti covered them. Just beyond this barricade Irma and Arkansas could see the concertina wire-topped fence that encompassed the Wilson Arms PJs. The equally gray courtyard between the four crumbling buildings was asses to elbows with shrieking corpses.
Most of the graffiti on the cars in the street comprised of illegible tags or rude pictograms, but dead center was something no one could fail to comprehend:
NO TRESPASSING MOTHERFUCKERS
“Well, that ain’t nice,” Arkansas opined.
“Maybe Mean Jim don’t wanna see you, after all.”
“Shit, that’d be the day. Hold on to your ass…”
With that cryptic command, Arkansas jerked the wheel to the right and gunned the cop car for the sidewalk. The space between the last car on the right and the fence was a good foot and a half narrower than the cruiser, however, and the cruiser’s front fender got locked with the back fender of a metallic purple ’68 Plymouth. Metal crunched against metal, evoking winces from both women, but Arkansas pushed on.
“C’mon baby,” she purred. “Come on, baby!”
The side mirror on Irma’s side caught a corner in a diamond of steel in the fence. When Arkansas downshifted and stomped the accelerator again, the mirror was torn off.
“We can’t get through,” Irma said.
“Fuck yes, we can,” Arkansas snarled back.
But the police cruiser would not budge, so she threw it into reverse and sped the car backward, straight down the sidewalk, tearing the entire front fender off in the process. Irma watched the tightly packed horde in the adjacent courtyard with intense apprehension—the enormous racket they made was starting to catch the attention of the rotting throng that congregated there.
“Arkansas…”
“Keep your tits on, little sister,” Arkansas barked as she gunned it and blasted right into the Plymouth’s back end, pushing it out of the way with a loud crack and finally bypassing the barricade. She let out a wild, jubilant hoot and peeled out in the middle of street before coming to a juddering stop.
Now they were facing the fence, and no less than two and a half dozen of the jerking, screeching dead in the courtyard were mashing up against the links, raking one another with their fingers and snapping their jaws at anything that moved.
“Out of the frying pan,” Irma said.
“Hell, no,” Arkansas countered. “We’re still in the frying pan, mama.”
Before Irma could question what that meant, Arkansas grinned devilishly and stood on the gas. The cruiser lunged for the fence and Irma let out a yelp as she clambered to grab the oh-shit-handle dangling above her. The chain link fence crumpled against the cop car’s front end and rained tangles of concertina wire down on the hood and the sunken-faced cadavers scrambling to attack them. Two of the dead got sucked under the tires instantly in a thudding crunch while Arkansas twisted the steering wheel first left, then right, trying like hell to hit every corpse that she could. Somehow in the mayhem the siren went back on and she met its wail with a high-pitched wail of her own. Bodies careened off the front and sides of the car almost as fast as new ones popped up and leapt at the windows. Irma yelled and jumped when what looked like a bloody, bare skull smashed against her window and screamed at her. All of the skin was gone, but one of the eyeballs remained, all yellow and sightless. She shut her own eyes against the horror of it and prayed Arkansas wasn’t about to get them killed.
“There’s four towers in Wilson Arms,” Arkansas yelled over the piercing siren and the cacophony of terrible yowling. “My man Jim’s in Bucktown.”
“Bucktown?”
“That’s what they call his building,” she explained as an armless and legless torso split apart against the grill, spraying fetid entrails across the top of the hood. “Usta be where all the big time pimps and dealers stayed, so that’s where all the bucks was, dig?”
“But Mean Jim cleaned that up…”
“Hell yes, he did. Ain’t nobody can clean up the whole mess in a place like this, but Jim made Bucktown the only safe place to be in the projects. A place people could raise their kids, not have to worry ‘bout ‘em getting shot or all fucked up on dope.”
“Seems like the least of their worries now,” Irma said grimly.
Ahead of them, to the right, she noticed the tall, scraggly letters spraypainted in white across the entire length of a building’s in-facing wall. It read BUCKTOWN.
But someone had gone back to it with red spraypaint, X’ed out the B and added a few letters of their own. Now it awkwardly spelled out FUCKEDTOWN.
“Sounds about right,” Arkansas said, narrowing her eyes at the hundred or more putrid, bleeding, peeling bodies milling around the forbidding concrete entrance to the tower. She slammed on the brakes and the cruiser shook to an uneasy stop at the periphery of the rotting multitude. Those corpses that she hadn’t successfully run down were already catching up, beating their hands on the trunk and sides, clawing over one another in a desperate attempt to get at the living meat inside the car.
“I don’t suppose you’re gonna drive into the building,” Irma said, her voice shaky.
“Goddamn,” Arkansas groaned. “Where the hell do they all come from?”
“Look,” Irma breathed, pointing at the writhing mass of dead flesh.
Stumbling at the outer edge of the horde was a corpse far more decomposed than any they had yet encountered. It was ashen-colored, its skin flaking off like old paint, and its eyes were nothing more than deep, black pits. The corpse wore a tattered, dusty black suit and only one shoe, for its right foot was missing. The thing hobbled on the stump like it was a wooden leg.
“Holy Jesus,” Arkansas gasped. “That motherfucker was buried.”
“Then this really is it,” Irma said. “The end, I mean. The dead are comin’ up out of their goddamn graves…”
“That…that in the Bible?”
“I’m not sure,” Irma admitted, never having had much schooling in old time religion. “I think so.”
The car bounced, and two dead men crawled up onto the hood, staring hungrily at the women through the windshield. The more decayed of the two, a grayish-pink patch of brain exposed through his broken skull, reared an arm back and smashed his fist against the glass, which splintered into a spiderweb design. Arkansas jerked the stick into reverse and stepped on the accelerator, whereupon the engine coughed and died.
“We in the fire now, Arkansas?”
“Yeah…fuck…yeah, we in it.”
Her hand reached over and found Irma’s. Both of them squeezed.
A tremendous whoomph sounded and a massive ball of orange flame plumed from the center of the gathered horde. Arkansas cried out and Irma went rigid with fear. The fire spread outward like a blanket, igniting dozens of bobbing heads, and as the shrieking dead jerked away and tried in vain to scatter, the blaze only worsened. Soon there were dozens of burning corpses tearing at their clothes, scraping their own skin clean away from the bone. They burned like Roman Candles, sending great, greasy black columns of foul-smelling smoke into the gray sky.
In a blind panic Irma seized the door handle and yanked. Arkansas shouted, “No!” but the door was already open as a burning woman, whose blackened face was melted down to the skull, came hurtling at Irma, pitching an anguished squeal as she trailed smoke behind her.
“Nahh! Nahh! Nunnnhhh!” the dead woman bellowed, her entire torso engulfed with licking flames.
Arkansas grabbed Irma and pulled her back across the bench seat even as she managed to lean over and pull the door shut. The moment the door clicked the burning woman was at the window, smearing black goo across the glass from her dripping, ruined hands.
Irma stifled a sob and fell against Arkansas’s heaving che
st as another earth-shaking explosion burst from among the scrabbling dead, this time sending burning shrapnel in every direction. And this time, when the fire flattened out and the corpses spread further apart, a tall, broad-shouldered figure emerged from the oily smoke with a cigar in his mouth and what looked like a bottle of wine in his hand.
Irma wiped the tears from her eyes and stared in disbelief at the impossibly handsome black man who struck a match against his teeth and touched it to the white rag dangling from the bottle’s mouth. He then puffed at the cigar and smiled like he was on a game show, and not standing in the middle of Armageddon.
“Come and get it, you jive suckers!” he cried, and he hurled the Molotov cocktail at the nearest, thickest grouping of walking corpses as though he were throwing a game-winning pass.
Not a one amongst the group went unscathed; all of them caught flame and threw up what arms they had while they screamed in agony. The big man threw his head back and laughed heartily, the gold chain hanging on his wide, muscled chest bouncing with each chortle.
“Jesus wept,” Irma exclaimed, watching with wonder as the path between the cruiser and Bucktown’s front door cleared completely at this miraculous man’s efforts. “Who is that?”
Arkansas laughed like a little girl and put a hand to her forehead.
“Baby doll, that’s Mean Jim Turner,” she said happily.
—Two—
Bucktown
“Ho-lee shit, is that Ethel Jones?”
“In the flesh, baby.”
Irma walked a foot behind Arkansas on their way from the cruiser to the impressive bare-chested man in front of the entrance to Bucktown. Under her breath, she whispered, “Ethel?”
“Shut up,” Arkansas hissed back.
“Mama, you look too fine for the end of the world,” Mean Jim Turner said, getting an eyeful of her long, brown legs.
“I’m glad to see you, too, Jim.”
Jim and Arkansas fell into a tight embrace and, to Irma’s surprise, a deep kiss. Not wanting to stare, Irma turned away and her eyes fell upon a heap of twitching bodies, blackened with soot and groaning softly. She had never seen anything like it—this dude Jim was like a one-man army. She couldn’t help but wonder how Bigfoot Dan would have fared under the circumstances.