Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

  Security was of utmost importance, William argued when his brother voiced displeasure at the thought of visiting the strip joint. “You and I, we gotta stick together. That’s why we’re so damn good at what we do, Tommy. You don’t want to go splitting up a dynamic duo, now. That’s just plain dangerous. We ain’t the only hitters in town, and there’s more than a couple young shitheads that’d like to see us six feet underground.”

  Two hours passed before the Zatel brothers emerged from the smoky, neon and black-light glow of the strip club. As it always was during the small hours of the morning in any Chicago suburb, the chilled air was quiet.

  Tommy poured his brother into the car, where he fell asleep. Between the shots of Crown Royal and his two hour stint with Nina in the green-room, William had effectively exhausted his need to party. Tommy shook his head, lit a cigarette, and leaned against the trunk.

  One at a time, drunks stumbled out of the establishment and to their vehicles, washing the parking lot in a haze of ruby taillights. The music stopped. The spike-haired disc jockey was likely popping lines in the back of the club with the weekend manager.

  By the time Tommy’s Camel was near the filter, the parking lot was all but deserted of cars. He cast one last look around before approaching the driver door, only to be halted by the sound of breaking glass. His ears pricked up immediately, heart quickening to match. Instinctively, he put his back to the car, examining the surrounding wooded area, which gripped the parking lot and building in an alcove.

  Alert sobriety was one of the upsides of not wasting money on seven dollar drinks at The Spindle. Tommy let his hand slip into the breast of his jacket to unbutton the catch on the holster. And then the culprit caught his eye. There, near the back side of the building, a spider web of broken glass was splayed across the asphalt. A busted bottle, he guessed. But where had it come from? Tommy took a step away from the car to peer at the shadowed rear of the faux-wood-sided structure.

  If you had asked him his thought process on the matter, Tommy wouldn’t have been hard up to explain why it was he decided to investigate the broken bottle. The honest truth was that being cooped up inside the strip joint had gotten him agitated enough to want to hurt someone. Sometimes giving out a beating did all the wonders in the world to uplift the big man’s attitude. And the fact that he’d already ended a man’s life tonight changed nothing. It wasn’t the same as actually letting his hands break down a living body. Even if it was just a drunk. And then he saw the teetering figure of a balding, dirty man round the corner. The louse was undeniably tanked. Drunks were the best. Because they never quite remembered they were supposed to stay down.

  Fortune had smiled upon Tommy, and he was never one to turn down a kind turn of chance in his favor. His knuckles grazed the grotesque necklace in his pocket and he grinned. He had a new lucky charm.

  Tommy gave one last look at his brother, snoring softly in the passenger seat and decided that, yes, this was his lucky night. Fifty yards away, the man fell to the ground, yet continued crawling. Shit, this might actually be too easy.

  A thought crossed Tommy’s mind with such quick sense that it should surely have knocked him over. He un-holstered his weapon and set it on the driver’s seat. If he got a little too carried away, it wouldn’t do anyone any good for him to lose control and get trigger-happy. He’d learned that lesson long ago.

  “Hey, shitmeat.” Tommy loosened his tie and laid his suit jacket on the hood of the Continental.

  Still a good distance away, the drunk shot his head upward, fixated on the sound of Tommy’s voice. He let out an unintelligible snarl of air.

  That’s right, Tommy thought. Time to get scared. “Yeah, you. Having a good night? Maybe a little too good, huh?”

  Feeling the blood rise in his cheeks, Tommy sauntered forward, putting on what he hoped was a menacing display of swagger. To both his surprise and excitement, the drunk actually managed to climb to his feet. The center of the parking lot, where the soused fool had stopped to sway, was ill-lit. All the better for Tommy’s purposes. Even though there was a small camera trained on the lot, this far away from the building’s single row of lights, it would be impossible to discern two men in a scuffle. Or rather, one man beating the other into a bloody mess.

  Had Tommy known what he was walking into, it is likely he would have continued onward anyway. Angry brutes and puny logical reasoning were not well-suited bedfellows. Nonetheless, disbelief still brought a confused laugh to his lips when he recognized what was left of the face of Jimmy Gums. For the briefest moment, he faltered, the film reel of his memory bringing to mind the recollection of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

  The left side of Jimmy’s face was reduced to a few tatters of oozing, blackened flesh. His hair was matted down with the blood from the exit wound on the periphery of his skull. Chunks of soft, grey material poked out and were capped off by stray bits of the morning newspaper. The man’s clothes were melted to the point of deterioration on his front side, leaving an unappealing amount of sore-covered flesh and bone open to view. His left arm hung limp at his side.

  He laughed out loud. Even in Tommy Zatel’s mind, the ludicrous similarity between this walking dead man and those fictional zombie characters was only able to muster a brief moment of fear. Even zombies (which this pathetic former hit-man assuredly was not) could be killed.

  “Gonna have to start taking pulses on you fucks before we toss ya into the pits from now on, aren’t we?”

  At some level, the words registered in the decimated ranks of Jimmy Gums’ functioning brain cells. The voice of the man who had pulled the trigger called him forward. He growled at the sight of the fat, grinning face of the man he had come to kill.

  “Not looking too good tonight, Jimmy,” Tommy said. “Say, that’s a pretty bad rash.”

  With incredible speed for an overweight man, Tommy delivered a stunted kick to the rocking man’s knee. There was a sharp snap. Jimmy crumpled to the ground without a sound, but again, made to stand. Like meaty sledgehammers, Tommy dropped both his fists in succession on the top of Jimmy’s head. They met with satisfying impact.

  “You stay down this time. You…stay…down.” Now his feet had joined the rhythm, with Jimmy sprawled and convulsing on the ground. He continued without relenting, determined to ensure the man’s complete and successful death this time.

  “When I say die, you die, shitmeat.” Eventually, his overpriced Florsheim’s were slick with blood and oily residue from the dump. He kicked on for another full minute, until his feet and ankles began to ache and the rage inside him had begun to subside.

  The man on the ground was motionless, a heavy, broken husk of his former legend. He had been stomped effectively into oblivion.

  Tommy spit on the body, grinning like a madman. While catching his breath, he realized that the man would have to be again loaded back into the car’s trunk. He looked back at William. Out like a light, he knew, and not likely to awaken until well into the morning. This was looking like a one-man job. And he needed to be quick about it.

  He grabbed an ankle out of the crumpled heap and heaved. The body of Jimmy Gums dragged behind him with the sound of heavy grit sandpaper as skin-embedded pebbles ground at the pavement in resistance. In a few moments, Tommy sat at the rear of the car, looking with disdain at the disgusting pile of bubbled flesh at his feet.

  “Shit,” he said. Tommy was by no means a small man, but even at his own two-hundred and fifteen pounds, it was going to be a whore of a chore to stuff the tooth collector back into the trunk.

  Unfortunately for Tommy, the battered and burned corpse presented him with a new problem. Jimmy, chemically numbed and unrelenting, still continued to live, even despite a multitude of broken bones and ruptured organs. He reached out and clenched Tommy’s ankle with such ferocity that a squeal of painful surprise escaped the killer’s lips.

  With his head at an unnatural ninety-degree angle, Jimmy Gums glared up at his quarry. The ravaged and
skinless left half of his face revealed a decayed rictus of chipped teeth and bone.

  Tommy struggled to wrench his foot free, but the grip on it was inhumanly strong, almost mechanical. He felt something snap and screamed aloud. In a jerking spasm, his head met the lid of the trunk. Black haze swallowed the left half of his vision and he lost the balance of his free foot. A bolt of pain surged up Tommy’s spine upon impact with the ground. But, he hardly noticed it. His foot was now alight with such pain that it blinded all other sensory input. Jimmy’s charred fingers forced themselves into the muscle of his leg with the force of pneumatic screws.

  Thanks to the aid of chemical assistance, Jimmy managed to make use of his other arm. He batted away Tommy’s protesting flails and reached intently for the man’s throat. The two large men remained locked together in stillness for the next few minutes. The lot was silent save for the crickets of the nearby copse of evergreens. Finally, one of them began to drag himself to his feet.

  William Zatel woke to the smell of vomit. The bitter stench of the vodka-tinged mess in his lap caused him to be sick again. He heaved until his chest hurt.

  “Ohfuck,” he said, fumbling with the door lock mechanism. He would never be able to stop gagging. Not while he was covered with this shit. “Ohfugh—” He leaned across the gap between door and ground unsteadily to empty the remainder of his stomach’s contents.

  “Tommy,” William said. “We need…urp…home.” There was no reply. It took a moment for this to register in his pathetic state. “Tommy!”

  William looked around. They were still at the fucking titty bar! What if Nina saw him puking all over himself like some drunken high-schooler? He shouted for his brother again before stumbling from the car. The parking lot was empty except for a few cars. William was baffled. He had to lean against the car to steady himself, trying to make sense of his newfound predicament. He reached instinctively for the heavy bulge of his gun in its shoulder holster. Drunk and without Tommy in his direct line of sight, William felt vulnerable there in the dead of night. The presence of his shooting iron at least offered some bit of reassurance.

  And then it hit him. Tommy had gotten pissed at him for getting so drunk and must have decided to teach him a lesson. He laughed at the idea. Imagine that, he thought. It was like being attempted to be outwitted by a five-year-old. Shit, how long had Tommy been waiting for him to wake up? It couldn’t have been that long, he reasoned muddily, if the parking lot still had a couple cars in it.

  “Tommy!” William shouted, making mockery of feigned distress. “Oh, Tommy boy. Where ever have you gone? What will I do?” He examined the tree line at the edge of the parking lot. His brother was hiding among them, he knew, waiting to get a rise out of him. William wasn’t falling for it. Yet, still there was no response.

  “Oh, I wish I wasn’t such a drunk asshole. I’m sure sorry about it.” This he said with slightly less sarcasm. He got up from the hood and crossed a few yards of parking lot to examine the forest’s edge. “Come on, Tom. I said I was sorry. I almost mean it, too.”

  Now he was getting irritated. The remaining booze in his system helped to shorten his temper. His mouth was raw with stomach acid and it irritated his throat to yell. “Alright man. Enough of this horseshit. I’m sorry, alright? Now get your big ass back over here and take me home so I can get cleaned up.”

  And then he realized that the ground beneath his feet was shining with wetness. He followed the slick, foot-wide trail with his eyes into the pine needle-littered ground at the end of the lot. It looked like… Puzzled, he leaned down and brought up a finger coated in crimson syrup. William’s stomach tightened.

  “Jesus,” he said. It was blood.

  The trail looked like something had been dragged out of the forest. So quick he staggered, William spun toward the car, reaching for his gun simultaneously. Indeed, the trail of bodily fluid led right back to the tail end of the continental. His heart bounced madly in his chest. William Zatel found himself wishing at that moment he’d had six or so fewer drinks that evening.

  “Tommy?” he said, softer now. Suddenly, his confidence of a practical joke waned. There was too much blood on the ground. Something big had been opened up and bled out. With his own pistol gripped tight in hand, William made his inspection of the car. Besides the large pool of blood, there was no sign of his brother. The trunk itself was empty.

  He found Tommy’s handgun on the front seat and winced. The air in his lungs felt heavy, not breathable. William could not remember the last thing that had happened that evening. He had no recollection of how he’d even got back to the car.

  The bloody path drew his eyes once again. Its very existence stirred the unsettled state of his stomach. And then he understood the error of his initial diagnosis. Something had not been dragged out of the woods. A chill nibbled at the edges of his will. What the hell was going on here? William tucked his Tommy’s gun into his belt, took a deep breath, and thinking of his missing brother, felt anger flush his cheeks.

  “I’m coming, Tommy.”

  From the road hazard kit he had so wisely purchased three months prior, William removed a small, plastic flashlight with a weak beam. In his hurry, and for the thoughts of a drunk man, it was better than nothing. At least it worked.

  Adrenaline did a fair job of rousing William toward alertness, though his head still felt a little slow. He stopped at the pavement’s end, taking one last look at the congealing trail and listening. He could see nothing in the depths of the trees. His meager light cut across the darkness in a thin, yellow strip, but showed him nothing.

  The dirt and tree leavings at his feet had been disturbed recently. He followed the tracks until they faded almost completely, hidden by the soft ground. There was no further evidence of blood, or even that of a struggle. Tommy’s a big boy, he told himself. Ain’t no puny little shit that could put his brother on the ground, much less cut him bad enough to leave such a mess in the parking lot. And then he remembered Tommy’s gun in his pants.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, trying his best not to let panic set its hooks in. It was a struggle he was not winning. “Where are you, man?”

  Unable to contain himself any longer, William shouted for his brother. He called so loudly it threw him into a coughing fit. His throat hurt terribly. He stopped and listened.

  Hearing nothing, he called again. “Tommy!” Had his brother been attacked at the car, surely his attacker would not have just left William alone, helpless and snoozing in the front seat. After all, had it been a professional job, he thought arrogantly, they wouldn’t have gone for his shit-for-brains brother. But still, perhaps they hadn’t been finished. Maybe they were coming back for him. Could they be stalking him at that very moment, listening to his clumsy footsteps and following his belligerently stupid howls?

  He spun to his rear, letting the flashlight glean what truth it could from the night’s deceiving blanket of darkness. Nothing stirred. A soft breeze whispered through the tree boughs, sending a shiver across the sweaty nape of William’s neck and tickling his spine. Atop its current, the rolling gust ushered forth imaginary whispers.

  The ghostly whispers began to grow, rising and expanding in William’s ears. He rotated in a fervor, letting the light lead his gun to the sound that now consumed his thoughts. Nothing was visible. Still, he could not see through the loitering trees. And then the harsh rasp came to a sudden stop.

  William’s hand was shaking. In all his years, he had never felt the utter despair of loneliness as he did in that very moment. This killer of men was so stricken with panic that he could not hammer down a single line of thought. Words sped round in his skull, unable to be grasped by the consciousness that would have granted them order.

  Again the rasp sounded behind William and he turned his trigger hand with lightning speed. The sight that greeted him stole his breath.

  There in the diffused darkness stood a nearly avenged Jimmy Gums. His body was ravaged and filthy. Clumped blood offered stunted refl
ection from every surface of him that was not still slick with toxic chemicals. Around his neck, he again wore his trophy string, which was now much fuller. The solitary lidless eye watched William from his monstrously wrenched head. Behind him, he hauled Tommy Zatel’s immense form by a shattered leg: the source of the whispering noise, in symphony with fallen pine needles.

  With a shaking hand, William put the light on his brother’s face. Eyes wide, frozen in a final moment of terror, Tommy’s head was a bloody pulp. No, not his head: his mouth. His jaw hung limp, torn from one mandibular hinge to rest like an empty horseshoe swinging from a bit of flesh.

  For the second time that evening, William’s stomach purged itself involuntarily. There was nothing left to give.

  “You…you fuck,” he whispered. He pointed the muzzle of his pistol at the lumbering wretch. “You sick fuck!”

  Jimmy Gums dropped with the first shot, dead to the world. But William fired until every bullet in the weapon had been spent. Then he used Tommy’s. Only when that too was emptied was he satisfied that the returned killer was dead. If the man’s body had been a bloody mess before, it now lay a pulverized mess of shredded meat. Trace amounts of the dump’s oozing sludge came to rest in fresh wounds, accelerating and reviving expired cells.

  William fell to his knees at his brother’s side, unable to bring his gaze above the Tommy’s stomach.

  “Shit, Tom. Ohshit. What’d I do?” He rested a hand on Tommy’s arm, again feeling the urge to be sick. “What the fuck were you doing out here? Why didn’t you wake me up, you fucking idiot?” He delivered a solid pound to the dead sibling’s chest and growled. “Why?” His blows intensified as tears worked their way from his eyes, rage and frustration and loss clawing their way out of him.