by Kevin Wright
* * * *
It was a scary public restroom, which is to say it was typical of the public restroom institution as a whole. A line of closed stalls stretched out to the wall at the far end of the bathroom. Complementing the stalls on the right side was a long line of urinals and a couple of sinks near the exit. Everything was sopping wet. Dripping wet. Puddles on the floor rippled from the constant barrage of water droplets. Graffiti covered nearly every surface, poorly spelled graffiti.
Detective Winters strode through without concern. His trombone case splashed as he dropped it by his side and took position at the first urinal, which, statistically speaking, is usually the cleanest. It was a statistic that Detective Winters followed religiously, though he knew it was false. Urinals were like life: unpredictable, dirty, made to be pissed on.
Crouching to almost a kneeling position, careful not to wet his gray trench coat, Detective Winters glanced casually under the stall doors. No legs dangled. Turning, he unbuttoned his double-breasted coat and his pants. Glancing up, he did his business, reading the profane yet insightful graffiti covering the wall above his urinal.
Behind, the restroom door opened and then closed. Footsteps splashed towards him, stopped directly behind for a second, then continued on to the adjacent stall, breaking the first rule of bathroom etiquette.
Detective Winters frowned, staring straight ahead.
The stranger, silent, hunkered up to the stall and likewise began his business.
Like a mouse in the dark, sensing a great owl gliding by overhead, Detective Winters could feel eyes upon him, studying, gauging, hunting. He was not one to be hunted.
Detective Winters leaned back and looked past the stranger and at all the open stalls beyond.
“What’s with the case?” the stranger asked, breaking the second rule; he was a thickset biker-type, a goatee and beard christening his wide, dead face.
Detective Winters zipped up, buttoned his pants, and flushed the urinal, seconds before the stranger. Saying nothing, Detective Winters snatched his trombone case, spun, and walked to the sink. Laying in the sink was a black cufflink. He turned the water on, snatched the cufflink, and punched granular soap into his hand from the dispenser. He scrubbed then punched more soap into his hand.
The stranger had followed him and now stood behind Detective Winters as he washed. Detective Winters glanced up into the mirror and was all alone.
“Son,” the biker-leech laid a paw on Detective Winters’s shoulder, “I asked you a question.”
The biker-leech squeezed.
“I am with the band.” Detective Winters turned, whipping a fistful of granular soap in the biker-leech’s eyes. He screamed.
Grasping the leech’s hand, twisting up, stepping, and locking it, Detective Winters took another step and pushed, crack, releasing. The man stumbled, smashing into the tiled wall. His arm hung like a wet dishrag.
“Any requests?” Detective Winters asked.
Regaining his balance, the biker-leech repositioned himself between Detective Winters and the exit, rubbing at his eyes, and clutching a deformed wrist.
“Ain’t going nowheres, boy,” the biker-leech sneered, his tongue playing across orange, jagged teeth.
Detective Winters looked at his watch. “I am meeting someone.”
“Oh?” the biker-leech said. “Who might that be?”
“The Count,” Detective Winters said. “Have you seen him?” He brandished the cufflink. “I know he is here.”
The man’s face dropped a bit, and he involuntarily stepped back. “Like I said, boy — UUUHHHHHHHFFFFFF!”
Detective Winters stepped forward, launching the trombone case underhand into the leech, who caught it in his gut, arms folding around it. The blur of an arm, smash, and Detective Winters pistol-whipped him across the face. Orange teeth scattered like marbles to the floor.
Stunned, but to his credit, and stupidity, the biker leech regrouped almost instantaneously and lunged forward, only to find Detective Winters’s pistol jammed into his mouth. Remaining teeth shattered inward, shoved down his throat along with the twin barrels of the gun. If he had had a gag reflex, he’d have been choking. Detective Winters cocked the hammer back with his thumb.
The trombone case fell.
Detective Winters strode forward until the back of the biker leech’s head spidered the tiled wall.
“Now, how much noise would a 12-gauge shotgun shell make if it were discharged within the oral cavity of a leech such as yourself?” Detective Winters pondered. “Enough to alert your friends? I have a hypothesis, a few theories, but that is all they are, theories. No numbers. No proof. No empirical evidence.
“What are the variables in such an experiment? Barrel length, diameter? The powder, of course. Ambient noise. Wall thickness. The density of your skull? What is your name?”
“Harro—“
“Scratch that, I do not care,” Detective Winters said. “Where is the Count? Have you seen him? I tracked him here. Really? You would not lie to me, would you? Not with my gun in your mouth. That would not be very intelligent. So unlike the man of science you have become in these last few moments of your un-life.”
The leech squirmed.
“That is what I have come to admire about you,” Detective Winters said, “you have helped me to confront, head-on, one of the questions that science fears to ask.”
* * * *
Barry Gibb screeched at the top of his lungs as Peter pushed himself up off the glowing disco dance floor. Real smooth, moron. No one saw … maybe. Glancing back out the door, the crowd seething in a wall of flesh, Carlo was nowhere to be seen. Then Peter’s view was suddenly obstructed.
“What the—?” Four women suddenly descended upon him, around him, enveloping him, four really hot babes.
Peter raised an eyebrow as they, the four babes, danced round him, seductive, twirling, spinning and dipping, graceful as swans, really hot swans, leaning forward to test the durability of the fabric that clung miraculously to their cleavage. Peter glanced around the room in wonder, the four hottest chicks in the room, in the world, dancing, with him.
Something was definitely wrong.
The blond spoke first, softly, a southern lilt to her speech audible somehow above the music. “How y’all doing?” One delicate finger of hers lit like a dove upon his chest.
She’s speaking to me.
“You’re so handsome.”
She wants me.
“My friends and I saw you over here. We wanted to ask you to dance.”
They all want me.
“We saw you trip. You okay?”
I’m an idiot.
Peter just grunted and shook his head and managed, “I’m … I’m okay, thanks.”
The music was blaring, but he could hear her soft voice nonetheless.
“Well, I for one am so embarrassed.” She placed a hand to her cheek and looked Peter up and down as though he were naked and very impressive.
He was neither but deigned not to argue.
“Why, imagine a big, strong, handsome man like you getting all hurt in such a silly lil accident. We girls can be so worrisome sometimes, I suppose. Hope you don’t mind me being worrisome?” She placed a hand on Peter’s shoulder, and his knees went weak.
“Uh, I’m okay, thanks.” Peter fought to keep his legs solid beneath him. A cyclone of voluptuous flesh, the women began to circle him again. His head turned as though possessed by Lucifer himself.
“Dude! What the fuck?” A man shouted from beyond the circle. The man, well dressed, stepped past the women and shoved Peter hard.
Arms flailing, Peter regained his balance. “What the hell?” His hand was suddenly dug into his pocket.
Behind the well-dressed young man stood three others. One cracked his knuckles. As a whole, they did not seem happy.
“Dude, what the fuck?” the first one repeated. He was a frat boy. They all were frat boys. “These are our chicks. Dude, what the fuck you doing scooping our chick
s?”
“I wasn’t … they came over to me,” Peter said through gritted teeth.
“You guys see him fall?” the second asked.
“Fucking chicks left us for a clown!” said a third.
“You a clown, faggot?!” asked the fourth.
“He’s a fucking, clown-faggot!” yelled the first, and he pushed Peter again.
The frat boys laughed.
Peter did not.
“Nice shirt, asshole!” one said. “Where’d you get that? The Salvation Army? Dude! Look at his shoes! Fucking skippies!”
In his pocket, Peter’s hand strangled the gun, his arm beginning to shiver.
“Dude, look. I think he’s jacking off!”
The music started again.
Peter’s hand was clamped, an iron claw, around the butt of his pistol, and he fought the urge to draw it free.
As the four women resumed dancing around Peter, the frat boys insinuated themselves within and circled like preppy sharks. As one they struck, tearing him apart verbally.
“Dude! He’s turning red!”
“I think he’s taking a shit!”
“Yeah, but he’s constipated!”
“I’ll loosen it — I mean, he’s stupid!”
“He’s so stupid!”
“I think he’s going to cry! Are you going to cry?”
“You fucking pussy!”
“Hey! Pussywillow!” one yelled to the blond woman.
Peter froze.
“What the fuck you see in this guy, anyway?”
“Pussywillow…” Peter glanced at the blond woman.
His eyes dilated black.
Peter’s hand flashed like lightning. Fabric tore as Peter whipped the pistol free.
“Pussywillow!” Teeth gleaming he rushed like a pit bull, casting squealing frat boys aside, tackling Pussywillow to the floor.
Writhing beneath him, her lips parted back in a tiger snarl.
He pressed the gun into her forehead. “Where is he?”
* * * *
On his way out of the bathroom, Detective Winters stopped at the bar. “I clogged one of your toilets,” he confided to the bartender.
She sneered at him in disgust.
* * * *
Like a panther, Sanjay stalked through the dark tunnel, toward the mote of light in the distance. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he stole on, aware that, for now, pursuit had ended. He had stopped running, though still he moved with purpose, listening beneath the distant music for the noise he dreaded most, footsteps behind, the gleam of steel whisking through the air.
One was dead, almost certainly. “Damnation.” He had been rushed, very unprofessional. Three more were needed to satisfy the contract. A sudden gunshot ripped through the music in the distance.
Sanjay stole on.
Within feet of the end of the tunnel, Sanjay stopped.
Disco blared. With his ruhmal, he patted away the sweat on his forehead, unsightly. With a scoop of pomade from a tin within his pocket, he fixed his hair, smoothing it out with the palm of his hand then brushing his mustache with a small comb. He fixed his ruhmal, tie, and lapels, and brushed himself off. With a mirror, he gave himself a last once over, and satisfied, pushed open the one-way mirror-door and stepped out into the disco hall.
Abruptly, he stopped as he scanned the club. His dark eyes widened. “Sleeman’s corpse,” he muttered. Casual, he turned, withdrew a cell phone, and pressed one button. It rang once before someone picked up.
“Me,” he said. “Yes, I do know; there are three left. Two stand within the disco hall right now before my eyes … yes, yes, yes … two. The third one? He will be down shortly … I know because I know. Do not question me. I am your master for now … the fourth? Dead … by my hand … I do not explain myself to you. You? I reinvented the old ways! I am King of the Stranglers! Kali-Ma graces me with her blessing and you, you are at my beck and call. Now get yourself in there and kill them, and the third when he arrives … I don’t know, shortly, I am sure. I do not care about the old ways. Shoot them, tear them, eat them. Do what you must. Just be very careful on my floors.”
A not too distant boom shot through the music and crowd like a rifle report scattering a flock of geese. Dust flittered from the ceiling. Then another boom, and another, closer, and another, as though someone very large were running closer.
Sanjay snapped his cell phone shut with one hand and slipped it into his inner pocket along with his pomade and comb.
Then he slid back inside the tunnel and closed the door. It would not do to be present any longer.
* * * *
Beneath him, Pussywillow writhed like a serpent nailed to a skillet, struggling to break his hold. She clawed and raked at his face, growling. Peter’s grip was steel, though, and he squeezed tighter. His irises bled smoldering night. The glowing checkerboard floor shattered as he drove her head through it, screaming.
“Where is he?!”
Slam!
“Where is he!?”
Slam!
Others fell upon him then, from all about, latching onto his back like wild dogs, biting, pounding, and tearing. Men and ghouls.
He noticed them not, so keen was his anger, his spite, and he cast them off.
“TELL ME!” Peter drew back the hammer on the pistol, the cylinder rotating and, click, it was ready. Peter growled, and the gun quivered as he pressed the pistol down, down, down into her forehead, steel biting deep into her dead flesh, into her skull.
“WHERE IS HE, YOU BITCH!?”
Beneath him, teeth bared in a most unladylike manner, Pussywillow spat, hissing and squirming, but Peter’s grip was iron.
The whites of his eyes burned black as soot, and he growled, his bared teeth growing sharper, longer.
She went still.
The music stopped.
Silence.
“Please, please don’t,” she whispered.
For a moment, breathing a coarse, deep growl, hatred spuming black from his eyes and mouth, Peter froze. His arm shook in his battle to not squeeze the trigger, though he wanted to, needed to. “RRRRRRRrggg!” A spasm of pain and rage jolted his body, inciting the rage and the hate, the killing mechanism, murdering his sense as Peter’s finger touched the trigger…
“Peter, stop,” a quiet, strained voice commanded, cutting through the chatter and screams of the crowd.
Glancing up for a millisecond, Peter saw the crowd, hundreds frozen in fear, caught between running and crying. In the midst of them, hands up and palms out, trombone case at his feet, stood Detective Winters.
“Peter, to shoot her, is to damn your father,” Detective Winters said.
“I … I can’t stop.”
“The shirt you wear,” Detective Winters pointed at the green shirt under Peter’s open coat, “bears the sigil of the Green Lantern.”
Peter growled.
“Creativity and willpower were the engines behind the man who bears the symbol you wear on your chest.” Detective Winters stood rooted to his spot. “Willpower, Peter. True strength. Master the rage. Fight it. It is not yours. Imposed upon you it is, by that which you bear. The gun, Peter. It is evil. Fight it, or it will take you. Your soul.”
“I’ll have no soul in a day, detective,” Peter snarled, “and there’s nothing I can do. I’ll be a…”
“Willpower and creativity, Peter,” Detective Winters said, steady, calm. “Willpower to master the gun, and creativity to find the cure.”
“Willpower and creativity?” Peter said. “That supposed to inspire me? You sound like a fucking guidance counselor. And Green Lantern? He went insane and killed the entire Corps.”
Detective Winters shrugged.
“Besides, why should I listen to you, anyway? You’re a cop.”
“I was recently terminated.”
“And you want to kill me.”
“Yes, but that does not mean you want to kill me, Peter.” Detective Winters took a tentative step forward.
“W
hat the hell are you talking about?”
“Do you want to kill me, Peter?” Detective Winters asked.
Peter looked down for a second at Pussywillow, masked in fear, then up, and shook his head. “No, I … I don’t want to kill you, don’t want to kill anybody.”
“Say it again, Peter,” Detective Winters said.
“I don’t want to kill anybody.” Peter glared at the gun. His eyes narrowed and the whites came back to them. He blinked.
“Now keep repeating it, Peter,” Detective Winters said. “Make it your mantra.”
“My what?”
“Fight down the rage, the hate, the killing. The long, dark path with no end in sight. Do not set foot upon it.”
Peter eased up.
Prostrate on the ground, Pussywillow made to get up.
“Just relax.” Detective Winters drew a gun from his pocket. “Peter is not a killer, Puss,” he plunked his trombone case down and leveled his pistol, “but I am.”
Peter’s hand lowered to his side, and he nearly had his gun tucked away when a loud, thoom, exploded from the next room. The very walls of the building rattled, cracking. The doors exploded in as a hurricane wind tore whipping past, knocking men and women over. It died almost instantly.
Thunder crashed then, the footsteps of a god, and then again and again and again.
Men and women screamed.
The walls shook.
The floors cracked.
Ceiling fell in chunks.
Peter fell.
Detective Winters was suddenly at Peter’s side, grasping Pussywillow by her hair. “If you believe in a god, Peter, start praying.”
* * * *
The bones of the earth split and splintered, shattering in mute agony as the Kyberwulf strode forth. Dark flames of hate and acrid smoke poured from his nose and mouth as he chewed his cigar.
Men scrambled like beetles from his path or never did. Like a great bellows, his massive chest rose and fell, spilling demon spume into the air as he moved with the destructive force of an earthquake. Stooping, he stepped through the doorway and into the disco room, cracking a stone column with his thick forearm. He took a quick hard pull on his cigar and then on his Gatling gun-arm, chambering a round. His burning eyes barely scanned the swarming crowd before he started.