Season of the Witch

by Charlee Jacob

  “We told the bitch nice. She got nasty. She’s zoned in the back. But cops ain’t far behind us so we’re gonna hoist the uppity muff,” Rolf explained.

  Her whisper through the speakers was a breeze through wargames. He recalled the first time they’d talked to her a couple weeks ago, heard her: Yes, there is a heroes hall. You have to take out enough of the enemy—anyone who doesn’t bow to you. You’re chosen. I choose you. ‘Kameraden aus gleichem Blut.’ Comrades of one blood.

  From then one, they wanted her on other end when they called, detailing to her about this low-life trailer-trash slut they’d picked up or that dewy-eyed fag they’d gigged. She with her canticle of sea-to-shining-sea hope for all TREMORS, her nickname for them, her Teutonic Radical-Eternal Males of Racial Superiority. Damn catchy! The boys liked that. TREMORS! Yeah, movers and shakers.

  “Why toss her out?” Val-Kiree asked. “There are other ways to slow down the police. Toss her and they’ve won. They succeed in robbing you of your triumph, mein Sturmabteiling, mein TREMORS.”

  Rolf and Adolf squinted piggy blue eyes as they looked at each other.

  Adolf declared, “Shit if’n she ain’t right.”

  “Always is,” Rolf agreed. “We can do this.”

  Sirens pursued down the freeway, decibels bringing up the rear. Rolf whipped the Bird around to cut off some straw hat in a yellow pickup full of tomatoes. It was so close a shave you couldn’t’ve slipped a safety razor between the two bumpers. Pickup slammed on the brakes, did a red creme-filled donut, front end winding up swerved halfway into the next lane.

  Right into a white Corvette. The truck was catty-corner ended by a brown Dodge behind it… and then the green Toyota behind that—striking the brown Dodge—merged with the Dodge to form a metal accordion. The Corvette slammed brakes, crunched by a battered blue Chevy van that ran halfway over the top of it before the driver could stop, itself pushed forward when hit from behind by a black Tercel. This mess humped into a third lane to ambush a classic orange Pinto’s rear dead on—and the classic Pinto exploded.

  “How’s ’bout a road block, Five-O?” Adolf shouted gleefully, grinning ear to ear. “Fly over that, assholes!”

  Val-Kiree chuckled a psalm. “I’m so proud of my TREMORS.”

  Rolf’s name was really Ralph, but he’d Germanized it after the first time he’d talked to Val-Kiree. He and his buddy had been up all night watching Das Boot and Cross of Iron, crying into their Warsteiner beers and breaking into spontaneous gusty renditions of Deutschelande, Deutschelande. They’d polished off a second jar of pickled eggs, belching and farting like a pair of fine brass military band trumpets. Ralph’d adjourned to pee (during which time his piss spoke to him from the toilet). After Ralph returned, they saw the frost-blonde Aryan goddess during a commercial break, summoning them to dial 1-X-IS-THE-DARK.

  Except that the movies were on DVD. No ads. Both so drunk, they’d forgotten that fact.

  Adolf was really Adolf, at least in the middle. Maternal grandfather’s name. Paternal grandfather was Lester. Lester Adolf Schumann had always gone by Lester until that fatefully magical night.

  Rolf’s smile glittered from saliva on crooked incisors. He watched the bitch in the back through the rearview. He liked the idea of doing her as Val-Kiree listened. The other times they performed only for themselves, then called to tell her about it.

  Adolf went through their prey’s purse. “Name’s Krizenesky.”

  Rolf sneered. “Sounds Jewish.”

  “Yeah? Well, get this. She’s military. U.S. Army. A major no fuckin’ less.”

  “It’s a sign, gentlemen,” said the honey voice through the speakers. “You’re natural soldiers. You have an instinct for just who the enemy is.”

  The boys high-fived. They veered onto an overpass. A driver in a Mercedes in the lane next to them glanced over. When he saw their prisoner in the back, his eyes widened.

  “What you lookin’ at…?” Adolf snapped.

  He rolled down the window, pulling up the gun. He fired twice. The first bullet shattered the other car’s driver’s side glass. The second shot caught the man in the throat. The Mercedes went out of control, speeding toward the guard rail. When the right front fender struck, the entire vehicle somersaulted off the overpass to the highway below. They heard an explosion and saw the fireball boil upward. The smoke blended with smog hanging low in the sky.

  Adolf reached into his pocket to replace the two shells. He liked a full gun, thank you very much.

  Rolf tsked, shaking his head, appalled at the sheer waste. “Shame, good German car like that.”

  Val-Kiree purred through the speakers. “Yes, but you won’t meet him in Valhalla. He was no hero.”

  “Thanks. I feel better now,” Rolf said gratefully.

  ««—»»

  Spring heard it. The bang and noise of the freeway smash-up. She’d also heard the two shots from the Steyr and the Mercedes going over. She dogpaddled toward consciousness through peppermint fumes so caustic they almost formed scabs on the inside of her nose. Schnapps dripped from her hair, soaking her clothes with pungent, phlegm-gagging julep. She considered it a miracle she wasn’t cut, but the bottle had been heavily wrapped. Still, she had a large lump on her skull.

  More noise. Distant sirens. Cops, ambulances, firetrucks trying to reach accidents. Surely chasing these guys. She cautiously opened one eye a crack. The driver talked. Then she heard a woman…? Ah. It came from a speaker.

  “Gotta let the cunt linger, long and slow. Don’t wanna waste an inch,” the driver said.

  “Gonna give this uppity bitch her come-uppities,” Steyr-Man chittered, vehemently glancing at Spring.

  She shut her eye against him, feeling his hatred settle over her like a burning net.

  ««—»»

  “What will you do? Please share it with me.”

  The Voluspa voice on the speaker was from a 1940’s film or a Nuremberg radio broadcast, murmuring dipthongs and lispy-seductive consonants.

  Rolf muttered, “Gonna use a caulking gun in her cooze, in and out, then fill ’er up with it. Toluene and naptha, tougher than the silicone some of these bitches fill up their own titties with. I seen ’em at topless joints. It adheres to fuckin’ concrete, tile, brick, fiberglass, asphalt. It seals doors, windows, siding, sinks, downspouts, sidewalks, roofs and snatches. Gotta keep it from heat, open flames and sparks, and use only with adequate ventilation. Do not, I repeat, do not take internally.”

  Adolf burst out laughing. “Don’t try this at home, kiddies. Ya know I think we oughta punch some holes in them boobs, fill ’em up, too. She’s awful flat-chested.”

  “Sounds as if you memorized the label, Rolf,” Val-Kiree observed.

  “It’s kind of a poem,” Rolf admitted. “‘Course we gotta shave her first. Scrape with a straight razor. Little blood won’t hurt caulk none. Turn it pink prob’ly.”

  Adolf cut in. “If’n it’s gonna stick right, we gotta prepare the surface. Ya know eighty-six percent of all failures is ’cause the surface wasn’t prepared right. Rest is due to humidity. Boric acid bath oughta do it. Or a good bleach sponge-down. Then we squirt ’er. Wonder how long the stuff takes to harden?”

  Rolf eyed the road behind them. “They’re catchin’ up again.”

  “Take the next exit,” Val-Kiree whispered. “You can ditch the dogs there.”

  Without even wondering how she knew their whereabouts, Rolf barely cracked a smile as he dipped down an off-ramp.

  ««—»»

  Panic set in to Spring. She dealt with its awful crawl across her skin by indulging in contempt for these assholes. Would these pimpled, bully whelps selected her had she worn her uniform? She doubted it. What they wanted was an immediate, no-confrontation fix of smug superiority to a disenfranchised ego. How they must’ve been flabbergasted when she gave them a run for their Deutschemarks.

  And who was this creature on the phone’s other end? Some disembodied Eva Braun wannabe encouraging
them to kill, listening with sick delight in her cozy incorporeal fog as the skinheads described what Spring’s torments would be.

  ««—»»

  Detectives Larson and Poe hadn’t been on the freeway when the Thunderbird caused the first pile-up. Or for the second accident when the Mercedes went over the bridge.

  “God, you’d think a plane crashed,” Tom said, listening as the police band chattered about both events. He’d stopped whistling jazz.

  “Hope they have enough help. We’d have a helluva time in the snarl. Traffic’ll back up for miles if they haven’t already. Sounds like our mall cruisers. I’m sure of it,” Ed argued, snapping back into control. “The woman they abducted is probably still alive. Let’s get their asses before they can nest.”

  Tom smiled. “Not just one car accident, but two? I’d say they headed thataway, pardner. Shall we bet they won’t stay on the freeway? They’ve gotta be itchin’ for their show to start.”

  Tom turned off the siren but kept the red strobe he’d slapped to the car’s top. They sped up service roads and arteries. Pollution got thicker, harder to see distant objects. Tom picked up right where he’d left off humming Blue Monk—to the very note. The crappy air reminded him of a middling dust storm… or a huge dump where thousands of car tires burned in homage to the god of extinct species.

  Where were they? A movie lot?

  Back in time?

  Ed pointed. Sometimes good police work was a matter of ending up in the right place at the right moment. They spotted the gray-primered Thunderbird exiting a ramp from a quarter mile. In between smears of pollution… like sighting a wolf running in fog.

  ««—»»

  “Gonna cut off ’er arms a bit at a time,” Rolf told their phone goddess. Adolf jumped up and down in his seat. “Then torch the ends after every snip to cauterize the wounds. Don’t want ’er bleedin’ t’death. Make ’er last. She threw poor Adolf to the ground. Wasn’t ’spectful.”

  “Poor Adolf’s gonna softboil ’er eyeballs,” the other skinhead added, rubbing coarse hands together until his fingers sparked in the heat. “One at a time, so she can watch me boil the first ’un. Then I’ll poach ’er tongue in beer!”

  “We throw a party, will you come, please? Will you come?” Adolf begged.

  She laughed, deep and sultry. “Oh, I’ll be there. You can bet on it. I’ll see and taste everything.”

  Rolf slowed the O-Bird, coasting along the curb in a totally unfamiliar landscape.

  “Where are we?” he muttered. He leaned toward the speaker. “Uhhh, Val-Kiree? I don’t have a fuckin’ clue what place this is…?”

  Adolf gasped, then snorted derisively, “Rolf, you tellin’ me ya got us lost?”

  Then Adolf stared at the speaker. She’d told them to get off at the last exit.

  “I thought the sign said NUBBING COVE—next four exits.”

  “This don’t look like The Cove to me.”

  “Val-Kiree?”

  The only sound on the speakers was a dial tone.

  ««—»»

  Tom hit the siren again.

  ««—»»

  Anyone around heard tires laying rubber as Rolf stood on the accelerator, knee joint painfully locked. People came to watch. The buildings were decayed, sagging walls never shored up. No one shouted or seemed agitated that a police chase was but a few feet away. They simply stared and smiled, stared and smiled—simply. Sweat ran off their faces to splash, sizzling, on buckled concrete. It gave the TREMORS boys the creeps.

  “Rolf?”

  “What?”

  “I think an Irish gerbil done crawled up my ass and is river dancin’ up the stairway-t’-heaven of my spine.”

  ««—»»

  They were monsters. Spring had heard the news reports. About what they’d done to four women and two boys. They planned to fill her uterus with caulking compound, eating strudel as it hardened, slicing off her arms in increments.

  Prepare for a surprise, boys.

  ««—»»

  The O-Bird sideswiped a rusted bucket of a Camaro with a grating metal-on-metal shrimp peel. Strange, the outline showed it was one of the newest Camaros on the market. Rolf clung to the jerking wheel and veered, flipping a good thirty feet some white-bearded pedestrian in a kilt (a what?). At the corner they knocked either a very hairy child or a very small man in a monkey suit off a barrel.

  “Man, this is whacked!” Adolf shouted in disbelief. “I been to The Cove a million times and there was no fuckin’ castle.”

  Even Rolf admitted he’d’ve recalled a nagging little detail like a castle. Except it wasn’t all castle, just part of one. As if the building were undergoing massive renovation. Or had been destroyed by invading barbarians. He almost screeched to a halt when they both saw it a couple blocks ahead. He swerved the rogue O-Bird around a corner. Trying not to notice the geeks staring, smiling at them.

  ««—»»

  The detectives rapidly sliced up the distance between themselves and the suspects.

  ««—»»

  “Goddamn sumbitch, Rolf! Mayday!” Adolf yelled, spying their captive’s hand reaching for the door. He twisted to reach across the seat.

  Spring punched him, catching the left side of his nose. The disintegrating cartilage skewed across the right cheek with a burst of blood and snot. He shrieked, grabbing his face.

  Spring opened the rear door and leaped.

  Rolf braked hard, the O-Bird skidding sideways into a convenience store/part hermitage alcove. The open rear door snapped off, flying through the shop’s front window display. Red cream soda cans bounced everywhere, striking the hood, squirting fountains of what resembled blood but smelled nauseatingly vanilla. The O-Bird’s engine died.

  As Rolf tried restarting it, Adolf rolled the back seat with the Steyr, exiting through the rear door behind his partner. The entire right side of the car was smashed against the building, and blood and red soda ran down his oddly-flat face as he wheezed for breath.

  The engine coughed, grinding. Rolf cursed it.

  Adolf stumbled into the street’s middle. He saw her, their capture, crawl between a horse-cart and a funky stone well. He fired.

  ««—»»

  The first bullet hit the horse. It fell over, shrieking, kicking its legs, cart turning on one side. The second ricocheted off the well, hitting the bucket which plummeted down to audibly strike water.

  The third struck Spring in the meaty part of her thigh. She laughed even as the concussion of landing—after jumping from the O-Bird—bounced her against the street’s abrasive nap, scraping patches across her back and arms in a pitchy shred. Two fingers snapped. She heard ribs crack.

  (Didn’t sound a bit like PERP…)

  She’d give anything to have her personal firearm. A 1927A5 Thompson .45 caliber. “I’d show the coward what real shooting is,” she said, rolling on the ground.

  She flashbacked on her troops, on rustic villages in the Middle East that had horse-carts, wells, old buildings that Methuselah could’ve picnicked in.

  Adolf walked toward her, swaggering with righteous purpose as if he thought this was High Noon. The fourth bullet went God-knew-where, but the fifth skewered a burrowing hole through Spring’s hip, driving in agony’s lead jolt, passing through a buttock. It spattered bloody fat, exiting in a concentrically larger circle, then completely fragmented against the oily blacktop.

  “Steve!” Spring cried out, sure this was the end. Jesus, she’d come home more-or-less in one piece from three wars just to die bit-by-bit at some swastika-sucking kinder’s nearsighted hands. She tried crawling farther but felt welded to the street. She couldn’t move her leg.

  The skinhead grinned, eyes scrunched into slits so thin that no whites showed through his lashes. He stood with the sun behind him, turning the blood on him black with shadow. Without a nose, his pale face resembled a skull.

  The other still ground at the car’s engine, but couldn’t get it going.

  Spring noticed
how the civilians stood there, watching. She wasn’t sure they would’ve moved had he started shooting at them.

  ««—»»

  Adolf strolled close enough that even he couldn’t miss putting one in her damn head. He reached into his pocket and methodically replaced the five shells. Nothing felt better than a full gun. Yeah, it just became your epitaph, bitch.

  ««—»»

  The detectives’ car screeched up, siren’s peeling shriek throttling down. Ed jumped out, shouting, “Freeze!”

  This was mere formality. He didn’t hesitate before firing, sprinting through the stinky silt in the air to draw a bead on his target.

  ««—»»

  Adolf started to squeeze the Steyr’s trigger, then for some inexplicable reason, his own head blew apart.

  ««—»»

  Rolf abandoned the O-Bird.

  He spied an open doorway, and fled into the building. The cop who’d killed Adolf now shot at him, bullets snapping at Rolf’s heels.

  (The horse still screamed.)

  Dance, scumbag…went through Rolf’s mind as the bullets pummeled the ground around him, recalling a third of all the bad westerns he’d ever seen.