Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  She did not feel ready for this but imagined there would never be a time that she would. It’s either this or let them play with you for a few more days before they run out and come up here to drain you as well. Hold you down and stick needles in you and fill their bags and then their cups. Or if things had gotten that dire, they might just take straight from the source, like Felix did with Buckley. How you, by extension, did with Buckley. Felix tried to make you just as sick as them. Maybe he was successful. You are craving it, as fucked as that is to admit. But unlike them, you can get better. You just need to get out of this room. That’s step one.

  Because of the music constantly shaking the house, it was impossible to tell if someone was approaching her door until she heard a key being inserted in the lock.

  Waiting once more to hear that wonderful tick of a lock’s surrender.

  She wasn’t sure if she was actually hearing it now or if she’d been wanting to hear it so badly her mind was making her think she was hearing it.

  But then the door started to swing back. This is really happening.

  She let them get all the way into the room. Some skin-and-bones flunky with a Hitler Youth haircut, his silk dress shirt hanging open to the navel, jeans that probably cost more than Mel would net in a decade working at the diner.

  The flunky stopped in front of the bed, seemed to find it curious that the bed was now only a three-poster, and when he turned around, she swung with her cast, slashing its rusty barbs across his face. He dropped to the floor screaming. Grabbed at his shredded face. Screamed louder when he saw thin ribbons of skin had come away on his palms. He was making too much noise. Shut him up. She brought the makeshift club up, around, and down. The shock of the impact numbed her hand, taking her back to that three-week period in high school she thought she wanted to be on the softball team. The flunky, silenced, dropped, a red halo forming around his head on the guest room’s beige carpet.

  It did not take long for her conscience to recoil at what she’d just done. She put two fingers to his neck. Felt in a different place. Then another. Didn’t feel anything.

  “Oh my god,” she said, bile searing the back of her throat. “Oh fuck. I did that. I did that.”

  The door was open. No one else was coming. It was just her and this man she’d killed. She knew it was her mind going into self-preservation mode, same as the nanosecond-long flashback to high school softball practice, but telling herself that it was either her or him, that it was just plain old self-defense, it wasn’t cutting it. She thought about this person she’d killed, who must’ve had parents who loved him and were wondering where he was, wishing he’d come home for Christmas. Worse, the notion that he probably didn’t want to have his life end up this way but, maybe like herself, he was just another victim of Felix too. But then that thinking suddenly stopped as if unaware it’d been approaching a cliff. Picking up where it left off was now a shouted demand; she noticed how much blood he was letting out into the carpet, the exact word her mind volunteered on her behalf was wasting. He’s just wasting it letting it end up on the floor like that.

  Can’t you smell it? Can’t you already taste it just by looking at it? Have some, while it’s still hot. No one will know. Just a couple drops. Go on.

  It’ll make you feel better.

  * * *

  Merritt waited until the girl had left the garage and the door to the house had closed behind her before saying to Felix, “I thought maybe you and me could talk.” He watched the mondo move around in his Solo cup as he swirled it, glad for something to keep his hands busy. “We haven’t really had a chance since I got here.”

  “Maybe some other night,” Felix said. “I didn’t think this would involve so much babysitting, but here I am again, wiping asses just like before.”

  “Can I help?”

  “That’s very considerate, Merritt, but no. What I want you to do is go back inside the house and try enjoying yourself. Because, and I’m not saying this to be mean, but every time I fucking turn around, there you are. I go to the kitchen and there you are, looking at me. I decide to cut a rug for a while on the dance floor and there you are, looking at me. I try to get some shut-eye, I wake up, and who do I have lying next to me? Not Sheronda. Not Krystal with a K. Not Crystal with a C. You, giving me the puppy dogs, wanting to talk.”

  “I want to spend time with you. I thought this was just going to be us. You picked me to be the designated last man standing so I thought that after I did Brenda that’d mean you and me, we’d—”

  “Merritt. This is a party. You’re supposed to mingle at a party. Not zero in on one person and yammer at them about Cheap Trick and Supertramp and how shitty your mother is to you and your personal ranking of favorite guns and whatever the fuck else you’re too thick to realize no one wants to talk about but you. At parties, you socialize. At parties, you get fucked-up and find someone to fuck or someone who’ll fuck you. At parties, you—”

  “But I don’t know any of these people. And I don’t think many of them know you either. They’re not your friends, Felix. I am. I’m your friend,” Merritt said. “I’m sorry I interrupted you, but how do you even know these people? I never met any of them.”

  “You wouldn’t have. They’re rich. They run in different circles. Social media magnates, influencers and content creators each with a billion subscribers, app developers, lucky startup kids, real estate developers, some are silver-spooners and trust funders, gathering here to watch the world end from a good, safe, chemically enhanced distance. Because when the West is ash and the East has sunk, Merritt, it’ll be here where the rest will come running. Flyover country no more. No, sir. Sanctuary. And we’ll get to say who we let into the heartland, where it’s still warm and wet and inviting. We won’t want to scare them off so we won’t advertise this up front, but there will be a steep cover charge: every drop of your red and every penny of your green.”

  Felix removed his sunglasses. His eyes jittered back and forth; his blinks were rapid-fire, a hard contrast to how hard and emotionless he was holding his face. “And in case you haven’t noticed, you don’t fit in. So, I think maybe it’s due time you headed out.”

  “Why? I basically just got here.”

  “But it’s still time for you to leave. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

  “But I can’t go home. I tried telling you that. Mom kicked me out.”

  With a backhand, Felix smacked the cup Merritt was holding, and sent the contents against the inside of the garage doors, running down in red, syrupy lines. “What did I just fucking say, Merritt?” Felix enunciated for him as if he were dumb. “You do not have to go home but you cannot stay here.”

  “But I don’t want to leave.”

  “Tough. I want you to. So, go. Scoot boots. Hit the bricks. Go look for your ear.”

  Merritt’s eyes started to well. “But it’s Christmas.”

  Felix rolled his eyes.

  “You never said what was going to happen after it was over, Felix, but I didn’t think you’d want it to be like this,” Merritt said. “You made it sound like it was just going to be us. You said you wished I was your son and I told you I wished you were my dad. We love each other. And people who love each other don’t—”

  “Hold your horses. I’ve never once said that I love you,” Felix said. “And that wasn’t some you-have-to-win-my-affection emotionally retarded dad bullshit. The reason I never told you that I love you is because I don’t, Merritt, and I never have.”

  “Why are you saying this?” Merritt wiped his tears away, hoping Felix wouldn’t notice them. “You know it’s not true. You’re just grumpy at the strangers who keep wanting more and more from you. I’ve never asked you for anything more. Every time you were serving, I waited in line, I didn’t cut, I waited patiently. When you didn’t send me a work order for months, I never said a word, did I? I behaved myself. I was a
gentleman. And even though everybody else would make you mad, it’s always me who you take it out on and I’ve had enough of it. It wasn’t fair then and it’s not fair now either.”

  “Keep your fucking voice down. I want to get laid tonight and if the girls hear you and me going back and forth like this, it’ll put out the wrong vibe.”

  “I don’t care what they think. I don’t care what anybody thinks, nobody except you. And I think what you think you believe is wrong. You do care about me. You’ve cared about me since the day we met when I was only eight. Since I was eight, Felix. You’ve known me almost my entire life. You’ve always been there to help me and give me something to do, point me in the right direction so I can be useful. Nobody does that unless it’s somebody they care about.”

  “You were an employee. The work you did for me made me money. See how that works? You were no different to me than a piece of equipment. A tractor, a mule, a goddamn shovel. That shit I said that night when I came to your nine-to-five? That was me working you, me playing the high school virgin throwing you a squeezer now and again to keep you interested. You don’t exactly make it tough figuring out what you need. You killed the father you had so I assumed you’d probably be in the market for a replacement.” Felix spread his arms. “Ta-da.”

  “If this is how you really feel, then you’re not who I thought you were.”

  Felix let his arms drop and smiled with stained teeth. “But I always knew exactly who you were. That’s why this arrangement of ours worked as well as it did for as long as it did.”

  They stood looking at each other, eyes never quite meeting because they both had mondo in their system and the wiggle-eye was still going strong. But after a long enough standoff with neither Merritt nor Felix giving any ground, Felix jerked his head to the side, toward the open trunk of Little Bastard. “Get your shit and go. I’ll torch your Neon. Take one of the cars from the front yard, whatever you find with keys in it. I’ll make sure nobody reports it.”

  Merritt reached inside Little Bastard and grabbed his duffle bag and turned to leave.

  “If you go to the police, I’ll know,” Felix said, “and you’ll regret it.”

  Merritt continued toward the door that’d let him outside. He had his hand out to grab the doorknob when Felix said to his back, “Oh, and Merritt? Something else for you to mull while out on the open road: I still have the address of that dump your mother calls a house. You know, the one I helped her pay off? I’m sure that gun I gave her has your prints on it. I’ll ask that they use that, leave it somewhere easy for the police to find.”

  Merritt kept his back to Felix. He unzipped his duffle bag and reached inside, selecting to draw the first thing his hand found. The double-barrel. It was still loaded with one of the door-breaching slugs, the one he hadn’t killed Brenda with. He let the bag fall, spun and raised at the same time – but found Felix had gotten something out of Little Bastard’s trunk for himself. An elephant gun, the barrel longer than Felix was tall.

  “Merritt. Just keep being a good little boy like you’ve been and do as I say. Walk away.”

  The double-barrel shook in Merritt’s hand.

  Felix’s eyes could not remain steady at the other end of the raised elephant gun.

  Both a mess because of mondo, both armed, so much ruined, not much reason to not open fire and just retire together, be done with this confusion and misery.

  On the far side of the garage, the door to the house opened and one of Felix’s guests with mondo staining her lips stuck her head out. “Oh. You guys look like you’re in the middle of something. Sorry.”

  Felix kept his sights trained on Merritt. “What do you want?”

  “Me?” the girl at the door said.

  “Yes,” Felix said, “I can’t look at you right this moment but rest assured it is you to whom I am now speaking. Fuck do you want?”

  “So, that chick you were playing Russian roulette with the other night? I forget her name, but she sort of like totally got out of her room and she’s running all over the house now, acting all crazy and shit. Thought I should tell you.” When Felix and Merritt didn’t stop their staring contest, the girl said, “Okay, I’ll let you guys finish up in here,” and withdrew back into the house.

  Felix said, “What do you think, Merritt? One more work order, this one straight from me to you, no middleman, no special requests other than make her dead as dead can get? What do you say?”

  “And then what? Straight back to more of this?”

  “No. I take back everything. Buddy, it’s like Neil Sedaka said about breaking up: it’s a hard thing to do. And I’ve never exactly been that good at it. Ask any of my exes.”

  “I never liked any of those women.”

  “Turns out I didn’t either. Just took me longer than you to realize it. I should’ve listened to you, big guy. Each time. Then and now. Because you’re all I need. You and me, we’re the dynamic duo, two peas in a pod, birds of a motherfucking feather flocking together. Look, I only said all that hateful shit to you because I’m a cranky old fart who thinks he doesn’t need anybody to love him, but he does. I do. I do need you to love me and I need you to need me, just like it goes in that Cheap Trick song. Remember when we used to sing that?”

  Merritt did remember that but said nothing.

  “The day the judge said you were cleared of all charges, you and me, we got in my car and went and got McDonald’s and ice cream and we just tore around the country singing Cheap Trick’s greatest hits together. Tell me you remember that. It’s my favorite memory of me and you, big guy.”

  Merritt said nothing – and it hurt to hold it in.

  “So come on, buddy. Give me another shot. Chance. Another chance. Like you said, it’s Christmas.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Merritt blurted. “You said what you said. You can’t take it back now.”

  “Help me catch Melanie and when we’re done – Merritt, stay with me, buddy, listen to me – after we catch her, we’ll drain her and I’ll go get the karaoke machine set up. I’ll call everyone into the library, we’ll all fill up a cup, no more rationing, and you and me will get up on stage and sing, ‘Father and Son’. You know that one, right? Cat Stevens. You’re a big Cat Stevens guy if I remember right, yeah? We’ll make it a magical Christmas night, one for the books.”

  “‘Father and Son’ isn’t really a good song for doing a duet.”

  “Then ‘Islands in the Stream’, or ‘I Got You, Babe’, whichever goddamn song you want, Mr. Choosy, but if we’re going to catch her, we should quit pointing these fucking things at each other and get to it.”

  Merritt did not lower the double-barrel.

  “Come on, buddy. This heavy-ass thing isn’t getting any lighter. It shouldn’t be you I’m pointing it at anyway. It should be her, that woman. You hate those, remember? Let’s lower our guns at the same time, okay? Like we’re a couple of synchronized swimmers, nice and easy. Here we go.”

  Merritt slowly lowered the double-barrel.

  Felix lowered the elephant gun. When its long barrel clinked against the cement floor of the garage, Felix rubbed his arm and laughed. “Well, that was intense. I’m glad we could work this out between us, son.”

  Merritt watched Felix throw his leg over the door of Little Bastard and fall in behind the wheel. He started it up and revved the engine, the garage quickly filling with exhaust. Over its roar, Felix called to Merritt, “Get everyone outside. Santa’s sleigh is about to arrive.”

  A shriek of the tires on the cement floor and Felix went crashing through the garage door, skidded across the icy driveway and barreled across the front yard. After slamming to a stop on the front steps, he stood in the seat as his guests flooded out onto the front lawn, looking confused and cold, some dripping sweat from dancing, others naked having been interrupted mid-coitus. A few blinked blearily, having clearly been asleep. Merri
tt shepherded every red-mouthed partier out of the house and into the snow all the same. Once his carolers were gathered, Felix picked a gun out of Little Bastard’s trunk, and then a blood bag from the ice chest, and tossed the gifts into the crowd, then another set, another. None waited until everyone had been served before tearing into the bags. A few even got down on hands and knees to lap up what had spilled to the ground.

  “The game is simple, my insatiable reindeer,” Felix said. “If you want to drink again tonight, you’ll have to do something I doubt any of you have ever done before: put in a day’s work. But I have confidence in each and every one of you. I believe in you all. Hunt her. Hurt her. Wring her out like a rag.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Heart hammering and brain on fire and feeling no pain whatsoever anymore, Mel used the steep and narrow service stairs and found herself in the kitchen. It was dark and she could hear no one breathing or moving around. Sometime during her descent to the ground floor, the music had finally been turned off. She slipped from the stairwell, kept low, tried to ignore the overpowering smell of decay, and navigated through the trash lying all over the floor, keeping as silent as she could. Red Solo cups lay everywhere and empty blood bags squeezed clean of their last drops were piled on the counters, above the refrigerator, in the open cabinets. She found a kitchen knife that’d been stabbed into the wall, worked it free, and traded her club for it. Rolling her steps, keeping close to the wall, she passed into the dining room.

  One wall was made up of French doors, the glass panels smeared over with what looked like cooking grease, making them opaque. She scratched an opening and looked out into the backyard. It was like someone had made an ugly version of her dream to open a car lot, so many expensive makes and models parked haphazardly, most buried under the snow. She heard footsteps out in the hall and dropped to the floor and crawled under Felix’s unnecessarily long dining table – and had to choke down a scream when she bumped into a naked body there, hidden in the dark, as cold to the accidental touch as stone.