Neither Stevie or I could fire our weapons. The Babe was covered in body armor and the WWII Nazi helmet protected his head. Any stray shots from Stevie would put me at risk, and any shots from me would endanger Stevie, Sarah and Duke. If I tried for a kill shot with the Colt 10mm, chances were the bullet would cut right through his body; and, even though I could surely bring him down, the bullet would keep on flying at high velocity toward Stevie, Sarah and Duke.
The Babe was in an equally awkward position. He wanted Sarah alive, so he couldn’t fire in her direction; and now with Stevie opposite me, he couldn’t fire at me, because Stevie would return fire and eventually find a soft spot.
The fat man did what I would have done were I in his position. He fired over Sarah’s head, making Stevie hit the floor behind her.
“You throw me them guns, boy,” he laughed, “or the next time I take out the dog and woman. Pussy ain’t worth dyin’ for—either for me or you.”
I whispered into my mike. “Do it, Stevie. I’ve got a couple of cards left to play.”
The assault rifle and the pistol skittered across the floor, coming to rest at his feet, adding to the pile already started by Sarah’s weapons. The Babe turned to me, a victory smile on his fat face.
“What’s it gonna be?” I asked. “A shooting or a beating?”
“Ain’t got time to fuck with you, McCall. Sure would like to make it nice and slow, but we need to be outta here.”
“One thing first. Just one question.”
He nodded.
“It’s about fat men,” I said. “I wonder if its true what the say.”
“What’s that?” he growled.
“That they got real tiny cocks. Is that true? You got a teeny little cock, Babe?”
“Yeah,” said Sarah from the other direction. “That why you like little kids, Babe? Because real grown up women laugh at your unit?”
Right on the button. My goggles couldn’t pick up color, but I could see the veins on his forehead pop up like night crawlers. His face had to be crimson. His mouth twisted in a rictus of hate; he tried to decide which of us would go down first.
As he looked between Sarah and me, trying to decide who to fire upon, I reached behind my back and grasped a two foot police model mag light. Four freshly recharged D batteries encased in a titanium tube. 20th cen police used them for clubs in addition to their main function.
“Show me your cock before you kill me,” I said. “So I can die laughing.” I flipped my NVG’s up.
The button went all the way in. He stopped thinking and started reacting, turning completely toward me and bringing both assault rifles up so they pointed at my chest. He advanced on me, bellowing his rage.
I brought the mag light up and switched it on, directing the beam straight to the the only thing I could see, the red dot on his night goggles, before he could fire. The light cut a perfect three inch circle in the darkness of the hallway, beginning at my hand and ending at his goggles. His hands flew up to the night glasses and he tore at them, bringing them off his eyes so they hung below his chin. I flicked off the flashlight, brought my NVG’s back down, and covered the 15 feet between us and smashed the light on his left wrist, hearing the bone crunch and the rifle in his hand crash to the floor before he roared in pain and brought his right arm and the M 16 crashing down on my left shoulder in a reflexive reaction to the pain.
The force of the blow smashed me into the wall on my left, snapping my head sideways into the hard surface, momentarily stunning me. I fell beneath his feet, and he began stomping furiously on my head and shoulders. Lucky for me he wore Reeboks instead of steel tips.
From behind him, Stevie, Sarah and Duke attacked in unison, crashing against his back and legs, Sarah leaping onto his shoulders and pummeling his neck and shoulders with her fists while Stevie and Duke went after his legs. I crawled back, away from his feet and readjusted my goggles. Above me Sarah was having no effect on The Babe. At nearly four hundred pounds his mass was too much for any of them to be little more than a nuisance. He turned and slammed his back into the wall, pinning Sarah between him and the wall’s unforgiving surface. I heard the air whoosh from her lungs. She loosened her hold and crumpled to the floor.
He began pumping his massive legs, running in place, the piston action throwing both Stevie and Duke off him like a horse’s shiver shooing away pesky flies. He dropped the M 16 and placed his goggles back over his eyes, focusing on Duke and Stevie, taking one huge stride and then kicking each of them, Stevie in the gut and Duke in the haunches. The blows knocked them each further down the hallway, away from the action. As he went in for more, I screamed his name.
“It’s me that’s gonna kill you, asshole,” I shouted. “They’re down, out of the play.”
He turned and looked down upon me then, realizing his main objective literally lay at his feet. I pointed the flashlight at his eyes and switched it on. He flinched. But nothing happened. The bulb had been smashed when I had crashed into the wall. The Babe smiled, stepped forward and reached down for me, stripping my pistols away and pulling me up by my Kevlar vest, using only his right hand, and bringing me directly to his face. My feet dangled above the floor as he brought me up to him, face to face, closer than I ever hoped to be to such a putrescence. He was breathing heavily from his exertions. His breath, foul and corrupt, triggered the urge to vomit.
“I’m gonna bust you up and then take you back to my camp,” he hissed, spraying my face with gluey spittle. “I got some boys that’d like fucking you in the ass for a few days. When they’re done, I’m gonna cut little pieces off you, one a day, until you just roll over and beg to die.” He pulled me closer and then flexed his gigantic arm, sending me flying ten feet through the air. I landed on my back and slid another ten.
Slowly and deliberately, exaggerating every motion, he reached over his left shoulder with his right hand and pulled his favorite weapon, the Frank Thomas model Louisville Slugger, from the rig on his back. It looked huge. He caressed it lovingly. Maybe we were right about the cock thing.
I sat up and whispered into my mike, “I think I might need some help here. Stevie, Sarah and Duke are out of commission. This guy’s pretty big.”
They all answered at once—Weasel, James, Merlin, Roberto. I pulled a few messages from the jumble of their voices.
“On my way.”
“Pinned down. Can’t get to you.”
“Can’t find you.”
“…his legs or his eyes. That’s what you’ve gotta take away, Mac.” That was Weasel. “Watch your footwork. Balance is everything. I’m coming as fast as I can,” he continued. Sounded like good advice…for a practice session… I didn’t think anything he had ever taught me would help against the monster in front of me, four or five inches taller, two hundred pounds heavier. I couldn’t begin to equal his strength.
The Babe began advancing on me then, waving the bat, mouthing obscenities.
“Home run, you little shit. Your head’s my fucking ball. Mother fucker, stickin’ your goddam nose in my fuckin’ business. You know that death dance I talked about, asshole? Split your fucking head like a melon, you really gonna spaz out. You gonna jiggle and dance like a fuckin’ retard, McCall.”
Scariest thing I had ever seen, this jumbo freak stalking me in the primal darkness of the hallway. Like being stuck in tunnel, far beneath the earth, childhood monsters crawling my way. And I was definitely stuck. If I ran, he might turn back to Sarah, Stevie and Duke. I had to stay.
Nobody’s invincible, Weasel had always told us. Find their weakness. It’s there somewhere. I back pedaled, scrambling on my palms and heels like a crab seeking a hole, looking for a vulnerable spot on his leviathan frame, one minuscule weakness in a moving wall of flesh.
His left wrist.
I had felt the bones crush under my blow from the mag light. As if reading my mind, he swung the bat with his right arm, showing me his strength and power. Almost too quick to see. But I could hear it cutting the air. You�
��ll never get close, it said.
“Talk to me, Mac.” It was Weasel on the headset. “Tell me what’s goin’ on.”
I backed up some more.
“I got an 800 pound gorilla with a baseball bat coming right at me. No guns. No left. No right. I can’t get around him. Can’t use my speed advantage. I’m fucked, Weasel.”
“You got a weapon, Mac. You always got a weapon. Think.” His voice was amazingly tranquil and soothing, reassuring. Hard to panic when someone is so calm.
“A fucking clip knife,” I answered.
Three inch blade. It would never find a vital organ through the layers of fat. We all carried one. They would cut through anything, even sheet metal. Beautiful all purpose knife. Serrated blade. Sharp as a razor. Strong as a crowbar. No help to me. I needed a samauri sword, not a fucking whittling knife.
Do the unexpected. Use what you got. Weasel’s lessons. Always work with the environment.
I had an idea.
“Stay on line,” I told Weasel. “I think I’ve got a chance.”
I shook my head and focused. Made it to my feet, still moving backwards. Use my advantages of quickness and speed. Remember Weasel’s lessons of footwork. Keep my center of gravity low. If I miscalculated the price would be high. The baseball bat would be an unforgiving force if it found my body.
He rumbled toward me, a big, plodding bear of a man, confident brute force would win the day. After all, hadn’t it always succeeded before? When I stopped backing away, he hesitated a fraction of a second, then plunged forward with greater speed, eager to get his bat into my bones and soft flesh. I switched the mag light from my right to left hand and surreptitiously pulled the knife out and thumbed it open, holding it upside down in my right hand so that the blade was hidden by my wrist.
When he was close enough to swing the bat, I feinted to his right, as if I were going to try to engage his arm to keep the bat from smashing into flesh and bone. He bought the feint and swung mightily with his right, grunting with the effort. He was almost too quick for me. As I ducked and rolled to my right, I felt the bat skim across the top of my skull, the breeze of its passing ruffling my hair. It smashed into the wall with a thud, easily blasting through the plaster, showering me with the dust.
As I rolled, I smacked his left wrist with the mag light, refreshing his memory on what a broken bone felt like. He roared in reaction to the pain. I dropped the light and rolled behind him, barely clearing his left side. As I came up, I flipped the handle of the little knife into my palm and reached out with its serrated three inch blade and sliced neatly through his fatigues at the exact point I focused on.
There’s these two little tendons behind everyone’s knees. They are about as thick as a pencil. Very similar in feel to the Achilles tendon that lies half a meter south. I don’t know what they’re called. But I do know that without them, none of our legs would work.
It was these tendons on the Babe’s monstrous left leg that the little knife sliced through. It went through them so easily that at first I was afraid I had missed, just managed to rip his pants a bit.
He must not have felt any pain. He made no noise before he toppled forward. A cut from a really sharp knife usually takes a few seconds to start hurting.
An avalanche of flesh had come crashing down. He was sprawled out a meter from where I squatted, feet closest to me. He scrambled to his hands and knees, facing me. That part of his legs worked.
“You little piece of shit,” he snarled at me. “It’s gonna go much harder on you now.”
I backed off preparing for another attack, thinking I had missed my target, the little knife hadn’t gone deep enough. It was when he tried to stand that he finally understood he was going to die. His left leg wouldn’t hold him up. He was a cripple in a world that accepted nothing but perfection.
“What the fuck you do to me?” he asked incredulously. “My leg don’t work.”
When he put both hands down to his knee, I reached out and yanked his glasses off, stepping back quickly. He was still dangerous, but without sight, his power was diminished further. I continued moving back, keeping my eyes on him. When I felt his discarded weapons, I kicked them further back with my heels. I came to Sarah and helped her stand.
“You OK?”
“Whoozy,” she said, inspecting her body. “But I think everything’s still in the right place.”
She looked down the hallway, where The Babe, without the aid of the NVG’s, sat on his double pumpkin ass and tried to find some light in the darkness. “How’d you get him down? Shouldn’t we be doing something else? How come he’s not charging us?”
I gently put my arm around her shoulder, pulling her close, taking comfort from her safety. “Get me the AUG first. Then check on Stevie and Duke. They got banged up pretty good. Story time later.”
Everyone heard our conversation through their headsets and fired questions through the airwaves simultaneously. “We’re all fine.” I had to say it three or four times before it finally got through to each of them. “He’s out of commission. Crippled. We’re done. Don’t fuck with any of the other Messengers. There’s no need to take any more risks. Meet in the basement and we mop up from there. Out.”
Sarah handed me the AUG. Down the hall, twenty feet distant, The Babe pulled a Bowie knife from behind his back and cocked his head, trying to ascertain if anyone was near enough to maim. The blade was nearly two feet long, beautifully etched with scroll designs by a 20th cen artisan. My diminutive clip knife was a minnow compared to the razor-toothed, jaw-jutted northern pike power of the Bowie knife.
I sprayed a ten round burst a few feet in front of him, kicking up dust and moldy carpet into his face.
“Slide the knife down to me,” I told him.
He complied.
“Listen, McCall,” he whined, “I gotta give it to you…all of you. You’re tougher than I figured. I was wrong about you. We can deal. I got shit you can use. Anything you want. Bitches, babies, jewelry, guns up the ass—a whole fucking army. Me and you, we can rule this place. Just the two of us. Just fix my leg up. It don’t work at all. You can do that. Right?”
“Make your deals in hell,” I said. “You’re finished here.”
Behind The Babe a hallway door slammed open and Merlin limped into the empty space. He surveyed the scene. Our target on his butt; a whimpering bag of flesh; four of us twenty feet away—Sarah, Stevie and Duke alive and moving; me with the AUG trained on The Babe.
“Mother fucker,” Merlin said, advancing on the fat man. “You really did get him. Looks like a pile of shit with a head on top.”
Merlin came up behind him and pulled a Taurus 9mm, chambering a round. Reacting to the sound, The Babe tried to shrink into the floor.
“I have a gift for you,” Merlin told the man who had sodomized him. “It’s from the children you defiled. The women you raped. The men you butchered. None of could be here themselves, being dead or sort of fucked up. So they asked me to deliver it.”
All of us heard the click of the safety on the nine as he switched it off.
“Please don’t.”
It was from behind me. Stevie’s voice, soft, yet intense. Authority behind the request. He was standing side by side with Sarah. Her good arm was around his waist. His right arm was pressing in on his left ribs. He was in pain.
“You fuckin’ nuts?” Merlin snarled at him. “This is the worst piece of filth for five hundred miles. He’s a murderer. Torturer. He fucks little girls, Stevie.”
“And little boys,” Stevie told her. “I know what he is. I lived with him. I was a Messenger for nine years. Remember?”
Merlin stared at him in shock, then understanding. He knew Stevie’s life had been tough; had recently been told of Stevie’s history with The Babe. Stevie had a claim too.
“Step back from him, Merlin,” I said. “He’s stronger than anyone I’ve ever encountered and has nothing to lose.”
He took three quick steps back, still keeping the 9mm trained
on The Babe’s skull.
“I get it,” he said. “I don’t like it, but I get it. Go ahead.” He stepped further back. “Take him yourself, Stevie. He’s yours.”
Stevie didn’t move. “You don’t really understand, Merlin,” he told him. “I don’t want to kill him. And I don’t want you to, either.”
“Why?” he screamed. It came from way down in his gut. He could give Stevie a run for his money in a pain contest. “Why can’t I kill him?”
It ran so much deeper than The Babe. I could hear it in Merlin’s voice. All of us could. In the eerie light provided by the goggles, we couldn’t clearly see his face. And his eyes were covered. But the volume and tone of his voice spoke of his despair, his hatred. This wasn’t only The Babe. This pain was ten or fifteen years old. For Merlin, he was someone else. Maybe several others.
The Babe was Merlin’s childhood. The reason he abandoned clan life to live as a recluse. The man cowering at his feet was Merlin’s own clan who had driven him out with their blind allegiance to hate, loyalty to system that demanded they forever battle with other foolish men.
He was also the man that had raped him only a few weeks ago. The man responsible for the healing wounds on his face, the bullet hole in his leg and the emptiness in his heart.
“I don’t want you to kill him because I like you,” said Stevie. “It won’t make you happy. You won’t feel better about yourself, Merlin.”
“Fuck you, Stevie,” he bit back at him. “I’m not doing it to feel better about myself. I’m doing it to feel better about him.”
Merlin spat in The Babe’s direction. The fat man remained silent. He knew the wrong word would result in a bullet in the head.
From behind Merlin, beyond the range of my goggles, a new voice entered the debate. “Listen to him, Merlin.”
Merlin whirled, pointing the nine in the direction of the voice, relaxing when he realized it was Weasel. “Scared the shit out of me,” he said. “How you do that?”
“It’s how I stay alive,” Weasel said.
“Tell Stevie to get off my ass,” Merlin told Weasel.
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 47