Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  Harvey heard the pained grunts and the sound of the blows above the mutter of the Humvee’s idling engine. He glanced up, unconcerned, and then went back to his centrefold.

  Aliens were a big deal, lately. X-Files. Area 31. Star Trek. All those space movies, Independence Day, Men in Black. In Harvey’s opinion, a serious alien-hunter need look no further than the glossy pages of the muscle magazines. Some of those guys… Not to mention the women! He didn’t care how many push-ups they did, no way you could get that kind of definition and mass by gobbling steroids, or pumping a couple million tons of iron.

  Harvey was convinced that those body-builders, some of them, just weren’t human.

  *

  Wayne said, ‘Look who I just met… ‘ His voice trailed away to a whisper too faint to be captured by the human ear. The Polaroid camera rested on Rodney McGuire’s heaving chest. McGuire was conscious. His bulging eyes stared up at the white-painted ceiling as if he’d never seen a ceiling before, and believed it was some kind of optical delusion that was about to come crashing down on him.

  April pushed the needle into McGuire’s grossly swollen vein, and slowly depressed the plunger. McGuire’s face was as white as the ceiling. April withdrew the plunger and the syringe’s barrel filled with swirling blood. She depressed the plunger, forcing the blood back into McGuire’s body, sluicing the last traces of heroin out of the barrel.

  She withdrew the plunger again, excruciatingly slowly, her eyes flicking from Rodney’s face to the barrel, as it was swamped with a tidal flow of blood.

  Lewis sat quietly on the sofa, apparently blissfully unaware that his role in this little adventure was about to come to an abrupt end.

  *

  The twins, with seven previous murders between them, had a fairly polished act. In a matter of minutes, they had worked themselves into a homicidal rage.

  ‘Fuck you, Dave! It’s my turn to kick in the door!’

  ‘Wrong again, you ugly, foul-mouthed piece of crap!’

  But what if the door wasn’t locked? Dave reached for the doorknob, but Danny was a tiny fraction of a second faster. Dave’s hand closed on his brother’s. Together, they rotated the knob in a clockwise direction.

  The door swung open, and the coked-to-the-eyebrows mirror twins, warbling horrible Celtic war cries they had learned watching historical films starring Mel Gibson and Sean Connery, burst into the apartment.

  Dave kicked the door shut.

  Danny yelled, ‘Nobody move!’

  Excellent advice, but the jostling herd of pneumatic Marilyns were having none of it.

  Chapter 32

  The rottweiler’s left foreleg had been dislocated. The unfortunate creature was in considerable pain. It howled ceaselessly into the night, its great head lifted towards unseen stars. The animal’s cries of anguish were so pitiful they would have brought a tear to the eye of Imelda Marcos, had she witnessed the scene.

  The drug-squad cops, dangling hints of promotion, convinced a couple of ambitious uniformed patrolmen to transport the rottie to the animal emergency clinic on Fourth Avenue. Easier said than done. The patrolmen, all lights and sirens, were en route to the emergency ward at St. Paul’s, for tetanus shots.

  Willows and Parker, in conjunction with a rapidly growing fleet of unmarked cars, continued, with an increasing sense of urgency, to patrol the Fairview Slopes neighbourhood.

  Fairview’s original inhabits, circa 1900, had a splendid view of the Vancouver Soap Company, Gas Works, a sawmill, and two fully functional slaughterhouses. At the time, the city hoped the area would become a high-class residential district. Alas, it was not to be. Fairview had developed into a blue-collar neighbourhood, and had, despite any growls of protest you might hear from its present inhabitants, pretty much stayed true to its roots.

  During the boom years of the seventies and eighties, block upon block had been filled with cramped, architecturally uninspiring three-storey condominiums. Clever developers had begun construction at the top of the slopes and gradually worked their way down towards the flats. The lamentable but entirely predictable result was that each new building partially obliterated the costly views of the recently sold structure directly behind it.

  Because the neighbourhood had been rebuilt so recently, in strict accordance with modern building codes and requirements, almost all the parking, thousands of units, was buried underground.

  Maybe that explained why all those cops were having such a hard time locating the enormous two-point-five-ton Humvee, and its trio of gun-toting occupants.

  Or maybe not.

  Chapter 33

  The Force-10 blizzard of stimuli experienced by Danny and Dave as they bulled their way into Rodney McGuire’s apartment was identical in every respect. The mirror twins had fantasized all through their lives about double-dating another set of ‘identicals.’ The gender of these dream dates was essentially irrelevant.

  Suddenly finding themselves in an apartment stuffed to the rafters with no fewer than a dozen absolutely identical women, the twins can be forgiven if they briefly assumed they had been transported Heavenward without suffering any of the usual inconveniences.

  When the twins burst into the apartment, Rodney McGuire was dying of an overdose of heroin.

  April was busy with, alternatively, her Polaroid One-Step camera, and her Radio Shack propane torch.

  Startled by the sudden intrusion, she swung around to see what was going on.

  Unnoticed, the propane torch’s pinprick-sharp, white-hot flame settled on the over-inflated vinyl buttock of McGuire’s personal Marilyn.

  She promptly exploded.

  The twins reacted to the gunshot-like explosion and accompanying vinyl shrapnel instinctively, thoughtlessly, brutally, and with maximum efficiency.

  Assuming the classic firing-line position, they opened up with their MAC-IOS, spraying the apartment with 9mm rounds.

  The front rank of Marilyns was decimated. Many of them were killed instantly. The sound of their dying, a heavy boom similar in tone to a.45-calibre semiauto, convinced the twins their fire was being returned.

  April knew enough to keep the lowest of profiles. She lay flat as a lost coin on the cartridge-strewn carpet, and then hooked her legs around Rod McGuire’s limp body and did her desperate best to roll him over on top of her.

  McGuire offered no resistance. She felt the burden of every last ounce of his weight. If he’d ever been a gentleman, that time had passed. His arms flopped all over the place, limp and useless as the rest of him. His eyes stared blankly at the carpet. His mouth sagged open, and his tongue lapped at April’s throat. His sour breath, slow as molasses, crept into her ear, and made her shiver.

  Lewis sat on the sofa in his glamorous party suit, unscathed.

  Wayne’s view of the proceedings was largely blocked by the surging mass of Marilyns. In the initial flurry of bullets, in the scant seconds it took the twins to empty the magazines of their MAC-IOS, Wayne was shot four times.

  The first bullet struck him in the fleshy part of the thigh. The wound bled copiously but hardly hurt at all.

  The second round grazed his left forearm, and the third was a clean hit, striking him midway between elbow and wrist. Luckily, the bullet missed the bone. Even so, the wound hurt like hell, and he almost lost his grip on his revolver.

  The fourth bullet struck him in the head.

  It was this last bullet that saved his life. Stunned and bloody, he fell to his knees, escaping the lethal hail of lead that followed. From behind the sofa, he emptied the gun in the general direction of his enemy.

  For the second time in less than half a minute, the twins ejected their empty magazines, and reloaded.

  All but two of the remaining Marilyns had been slaughtered.

  The survivors had drifted away from the line of fire, and leaned gracefully, or were wedged, into a corner.

  Wayne wiped a torrent of blood from his face. His probing fingers discovered a shallow furrow in his scalp, about three inches
in length, exactly where he liked to part his hair.

  It felt as if he’d been run over by a Dinky-Toy-sized, but fully operational, John Deere tractor.

  The twins, from their positions in the living room, started shooting again.

  Wayne yelled at April to stay low. He crawled into the bathroom, snatched towels off a rack as he dove headlong into the bathtub.

  Bullets zipped through the drywall, shattered mirrors and the tub’s sliding glass shower door, chipped tiles.

  The cardboard Marilyn caught a bullet between the eyes. Had her smile faltered, or was Wayne hallucinating?

  He turned on the taps, splashed blood from his eyes, and wrapped a towel tightly around his head. He tore a second towel into strips and bound his leg and then his wounded arm.

  He’d left his shotgun in the bedroom.

  He rolled out of the tub, and crawled gingerly across the glass-and-splinter-strewn floor towards the open door.

  There was a brief lull in the shooting. He heard the distinctive, metallic clacking sound of ejected magazines, stood up, and bolted diagonally across the hallway and into the bedroom.

  Dave and Danny simultaneously shouted, ‘Get him!’

  Wayne kicked shut the bedroom door.

  The damn bed was covered in plain brown cardboard boxes and loose balls of yellowed tissue paper, and instruction booklets. Where in hell was his damn shotgun?

  Was April still alive? Had she thought to pack a pistol? He hoped so, but doubted it. Firearms were supposed to be his area of expertise.

  Over the rustle of disturbed tissue paper, he heard two muttered voices that had exactly the same tone. It was a strange effect, almost as if he was hearing one voice and an oddly distorted echo that had a mind of its own.

  Dave said, ‘We gotta get outta here.’

  ‘But we can’t leave no survivors. Except McGuire, and maybe not even him.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Better kick down that door, see what’s inside.’

  ‘Lemme do it.’

  ‘No, me.’

  ‘My turn, because I’m older than you.’

  Danny gave Dave a hard shove, the stubby barrel of his MAC-IO scraping painfully across his sibling’s bony chest.

  ‘Don’t gimme that ‘older brother’ crap! We were born simultaneous, and you know it.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘Hey, fuck you!’

  Enough idle chatter. Dave emptied his MAC into the bedroom door and adjoining wall.

  Danny kicked in the bullet-riddled door.

  Wayne’s arm was killing him. His head was hosting an exhibition of jackhammers. He couldn’t find the shotgun. He shouldn’t have cut it down, made it so small. Maybe he’d left it in the living room… The twins opened fire, shredding the bedroom door and wall. In an instant, the air was full of splinters and plaster dust.

  Wayne rolled off the bed, and landed on the shotgun. He flicked off the safety and aimed and fired. The muzzle blast scorched the sheets and set them fluttering. The load of steel shot passed under the bed, striking Danny in both legs. His left leg absorbed most of the shot; the mass of pellets struck him just above the ankle. Screaming, he fell facedown on the carpet.

  Wayne gritted his teeth. His left arm was useless. He’d fired the shotgun as if it were a pistol, one-handed, and the thunderous recoil had sprained his wrist. Pumping a fresh round into the chamber was no easy task. The towel around his head was saturated, and the left side of his face was awash with blood, blurring his vision.

  He braced himself, anticipating a fresh onslaught of pain, squinted under the bed and saw Danny’s squirming body. Wayne fired - but not accurately.

  Dave hadn’t yet been hit, not even by a solitary pellet.

  But he felt as if he’d been hit, and that was all that mattered.

  Amputees speak of the anguish of phantom limbs, of suffering pain in a leg that no longer exists.

  Dave had a not-quite-parallel experience. He and his identical twin brother were like railway tracks that had fallen prey to the inflexible rules of perspective, and actually did converge on the horizon, with cataclysmic results. Their two fates were as one. Dave was in agony, experiencing in every horrible detail the train-wreck torment suffered by his one-footed brother.

  When Danny fell screaming to the carpet, Dave involuntarily fell right alongside him.

  In the living room, April was suffocating. She had been hyperventilating, and now she could hardly draw breath. When the twins had burst into the apartment she had so feared for her life that she had rolled Rod McGuire’s drugged body over on top of her as easily as a desperate father might grab a bumper and hoist up the family car that pinned his beloved daughter to the asphalt. But then onrushing panic had, in the narrow space between heartbeats, drained her of all her energy and strength. She found herself trapped by the scant weight of McGuire’s body, and the crushing burden of her own terror.

  She wasted a double lungful of air crying out to Wayne for help. He never heard her, over the deafening roar of the MAC-IOS and the infrequent-but-telling blasts of his beloved shotgun.

  April had been buried alive by her own weight in recently deceased drug dealer. She was being suffocated to death at a pace that was excruciatingly slow, but at the same time terrifyingly speedy, and her mind was fully occupied by a single frantic, burning question. Where in hell was Wayne?

  Lewis was starting to climb down off his high. He struggled to analyse the situation. Was he experiencing a really terrible hallucination? The air stank of raw fear and scorched cordite. The carpet was littered with the remains of all those Marilyns. The two survivors, huddled into a corner not inches from a bullet-shattered lamp, stared blandly at him, their blue eyes denying the inviting warmth of their luscious scarlet smiles.

  The sight of April feebly striving to rid herself of the limp grasp of Rod McGuires chalk-white, stark-naked corpse was so improbably bizarre that Lewis’s brain flatly refused to believe his eyes.

  He tried to identify the source of the shrill screams coming from behind him. He had no Peterson’s Field Guide, or any other research material to aid him, but there was no doubt in his mind that whatever species the creature was born of, it surely wasn’t human.

  In the bedroom, Wayne yanked hard on the shotgun’s trigger. The tight-packed wad of shot struck Danny square in the chest. His irreplaceable life was blasted away in a welter of bone chips, shredded tissue, and high-flying blood. Dave’s sympathetic piercing shriek of pain was so high-pitched it almost cracked the late Rodney McGuire’s contact lenses.

  The twins lay still, belly-up, one leg twisted awkwardly, smoking machine-gun clenched in an outflung right hand, a left arm bent in what might have been a half-assed salute to the Grim Reaper.

  Both men were splattered head to foot with copious amounts of blood.

  Wayne’s leg was soaked in blood from mid-thigh to his ankle. He felt a little light-headed, but not much more so than usual. He laboured to crank another round into the shotgun’s chamber.

  Surveying the carnage, Wayne could be forgiven for believing he had killed both men - if indeed there were two of them, and he wasn’t seeing double.

  He made his way gingerly into the living room. It was slippery going. His shoes were bloody, the floor was littered with vinyl fragments of Marilyns.

  Lewis continued to sit passively on the sofa. Dozens of 9mm MAC-10 rounds had narrowly missed him, ripping the sofa’s expensive fabric to shreds and exposing the sub-strata of lightweight foam.

  But Lewis was, almost miraculously, still unscathed.

  Wayne didn’t know how he felt about that, or what, if anything, he should do about it. He decided to figure it out later, when he’d worked out what had happened to April.

  Where was April?

  Wayne glanced around. Lewis was on the sofa.

  McGuire lay on the floor by the coffee table, covered in scraps of vinyl and spent cartridges.

  But where was April?

  Under McGuire.r />
  Wayne dropped to his knees. He used the shotgun to lever the dead weight of McGuire’s corpse off his beloved April.

  Was she alive? Or dead. She didn’t seem to be breathing, and surely that was a commonly used yardstick. He tried to take her pulse, but he was shaking so hard he couldn’t keep his finger on her wrist.

  He considered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But the way she was lying there, so still, and pale, and kind of squashed-looking, as if she’d just been introduced to a steamroller, wasn’t too appetizing.

  Wayne lightly batted her cheek. His hand was bloody. Tiny red flecks spattered April’s cheek. Wayne couldn’t help noticing. It was as if she’d been instantly freckleized. He tried to wipe away the flecks and made things much worse. Now she looked as if she’d used a whole lot too much makeup. It reminded him of her lapdancing days, and he was instantly depressed. His energy level plummeted.

  He blew into April’s face so hard her eyelashes fluttered. ‘April? April, honey? Are you okay, baby?’

  For all the response he got, Wayne might as well have been cross-examining his neighbour’s palomino, as it lay stone dead in the driveway, waiting to be picked up by a crane-equipped flatbed truck direct from the glue factory.

  *

  In the bedroom, Dave lay on the blood-and-gore-soaked carpet, thinking as hard as he knew how. Was he alive, or was he dead? It should have been an easy question - but it wasn’t. A close-range shotgun blast to the chest causes its own special brand of irredeemable havoc. Danny had been so promptly and gruesomely dispatched that the violence of his passing must surely have set a benchmark for all to follow. But how could Dave be alive if his twin was dead? Their umbilical cords, confounding the attendant delivery-room quacks, had shared the same placenta. During all the years of their lives - and they were only a few days short of their thirtieth birthday - the brothers had been no less inseparable than they’d been in their mother’s womb.

  Now Danny was dead, and Dave wasn’t. Neither brother believed in God. The concept of life after death was as alien to them as, for example, a random act of kindness.