I'll Pray When I'm Dying

by Stephen J. Golds

  Insects crawling over cowering children. Ants. Cockroaches. Beetle Men.

  Ben’s eyes ripped open. Very wide. Very white. Slapping a hand to his mouth.

  He screamed and screamed into his palm. A pain like a knife blade slicing through his stomach. His bowels collapsed. Shit pouring through the fabric of his slacks.

  A child’s screams.

  Ben. The boy in the photograph.

  The ants and pale cockroaches scurrying over the boy’s small body nipping and biting. Smothering. Infesting.

  The boy from the newspaper photograph shrieking in pain.

  The music screeched, skipped, stopped.

  Bugs twisted their grotesque faces to Ben.

  The boy moaned, ants crawling from his dead eyes and gaping mouth.

  Then a sickly, naked white figure standing in front of Ben. Its bulbous stomach bulging. A human’s flaccid penis hanging vile from its body.

  “Hughes, what the fuck are you doing here?! Get out and close that fucking door! Now!”

  Ben stared at the thing’s face. Eyes too black and too empty. Horns sticking from its head a cockroach’s antennae. He stared at the masks burning in his direction. Rubber Halloween masks. A masquerade of depravity and sickness. Masks pulled too tight over faces grotesque and ancient.

  “Close the fucking door, Hughes. You were never here. You saw nothing. A single word of this and we’ll fucking destroy you, you hear me? Destroy you! We’ll see you in prison for the rest of your fucking life.”

  Ben stared at the boy in the photograph. The boy’s eyes. Cast in ink shadow. Black gaping holes. Screaming from an abyss of darkness and things that scurried naked. Eyes that were empty graves. Just a scared, lost kid. So many children missing.

  “Get the hell out of here, Hughes. Now!” the thing growled.

  The Boy screamed, reaching out a small, begging hand.

  The doors closed slowly on Ben.

  Bile exploding from his mouth, down the smooth surface of the shut doors.

  Ben screamed until his voice broke.

  Gun shots exploding.

  The child’s screams.

  The boy in the photograph.

  Ben fell backwards down the stairs. Vomited again. His hands to his knees. Staring at himself in the large mirror. The Beetle Man staring back him. It had been him all along. He was the Beetle Man. He was the Beetle Man.

  Gun shots exploding.

  IOU screaming in agony. Leary calling out for him and then silent. Connor cursing. Machine gun fire. Shattering glass.

  Ben pulled the .38 from his shoulder holster. Glaring back at the banquet room’s door and then tumbling down the rest of the stairs towards the chaos and explosions.

  Buccola, Lombardo and Calacante peered down, grinning at the arsenal spread across the mattress. The red, orange light from the sun setting over the mountains washing over the room and the weapons. Buccola had spared no expense and, like everything else in his life, opted for Italian made. A Beretta Model .38 submachine gun and a Glisenti 1910 pistol for each of the two of them. Fully loaded. Calacante spinning the car keys on his finger.

  They pulled on their coats and hats. Slapping each other on the back and wishing ‘buona fortuna’ as they left the room and quietly made their way down the stairs and out of the motel.

  Scott Kelly spat the whiskey he was drinking down the windowpane. Dropped the bottle clunking to the floor. Muttering curses under his breath. Fuck! Standing up quickly. His palms pressed against the cold glass of the window, watching two of the wops he’d seen on the stairs jogging across the street towards the Peery Hotel. Right hands buried deeply in their overcoats. The Italian fucks were trying to steal his fucking pay day. He cursed under his breath repeatedly, quickly pulling on his overcoat, grabbing the Thompson from the corner, shoving the Colt 1911 into the base of his spine.

  As he went out the door, he glanced back into the room, at the dead man in the bathtub, wondering if he was going to end up the same. Cocking the Thompson he smiled confidently, knowing it was Salt Lake City, not the hills of Okinawa and these were a handful of two-bit hoods and a failed politician he was dealing with, not the Japanese Imperial Army.

  The metallic roars of multiple machine guns ripped through the Peery hotel and out into the dying day as Kelly made his way across Broadway. The smile disappearing from his face as though it had never been there in the first place. Confidence AWOL. Heart jackhammering. Life nothing but a never-ending circle of bullshit and blood.

  IOU slumped against the wall at the bottom of the stairs gawping sadly at Ben as though a man shocked awake from a deep sleep in a puddle of blood and scattered postcards. Bullet riddled. Gun smoke drifting. Wood and marble exploded. Ben dived for cover. Piano keys chimed. Christopher still seated on the couch. The top half of his skull gone. The lower jaw pink and raw. Exposed. Ben scurried on all fours, over the bodies of Negro Paul and Connor, hair hanging in his face, diving behind the check-in desk. The gun fire coughed to a stop, fell silent. A tossed empty magazine clattered to the marble floor. The cold, metallic clicking of a machine gun being reloaded.

  “Behind the pillar on the far right, English!” Leary called out from behind the grand piano. The machine gun exploded into life. The piano played the music of a madman as bullets tore it to pieces. Leary screamed earsplitting, gurgled, then was hushed like the piano, and the gunfire too fell silent again.

  Ben wiped the damp hair out of his eyes, cocked the .38, and swung it over the counter of the desk, squeezing a couple of shots off at the pillar. Marble shattered into dust and the man hugging the structure, brandishing a Thompson machine gun, leapt down the corridor Ben and Leary had come out from earlier.

  Ben let off another shot towards the hallway, glancing around the lobby at the situation. Two dead men laying closely next to each other in front of the entrance. Bullet wounds like angry ants swarming all over their backs. Italians. Looking a lot like Lombardo and Buccola. A blood-splattered maid. Leary dead underneath the piano, his insides spread all over the floor. Ben grimaced at the sights and smells. Swallowed.

  A woman’s hysterical screaming came from the hallway the shooter had disappeared down. More gunshots in quick succession. The screams muted abrupt.

  The classical music boomed constantly from the third floor had stopped. Ben couldn’t tell when. The hotel eerily silent.

  Ben kept the muzzle of the .38 on the hallway entry. His eyes scanning for his Thompson. Still in the place he’d left it. Next to the destroyed couch.

  “Hey, Englishman!” Connor hissed, sprawled on the floor next to Negro Paul.

  “I thought you were dead,” Ben hissed back, his eyes darting from Connor to the Thompson to the hallway entrance.

  “Nah, I’ve been fucking pretending. Had to. Gonna make a run for the doors real soon.”

  “Who’s the shooter?” Ben asked.

  “A fucking white man! Buccola and Lombardo came in blasting. They fucking killed IOU and Negro. The Fucks! Then that fucking mad dog came in and started killing everyone. He killed my fucking brother,” Connor gasped, spluttered. Jutted his chin towards the corridor. “We gotta get the fuck outta here. I think he’s gone now.”

  Ben’s eyes jumped towards the machine gun again. If he could reach that. Get up the stairs, he could still save the kid. Kill all those sick fucks. Cockroaches. Ants. Save himself. Save the kid. Save his soul.

  Connor started to push himself to his feet. Nodding at Ben, gesturing him to follow. Ben shook his head ‘no, no, no’. Broke away from the check-in desk, stumble-ran towards the Thompson. Time perverted. Slowed. Seconds retarded. Ben counted steps. Four. Four steps. Sirens howling. His fingers clasping the muzzle. The soles of Connor’s shoes clapping down on marble. Four. The scream of machine gun fire. The sound of metal on stone as the killer dropped the machine gun. Connor begging, “please, please, PLEASE,’ a final POP from a small caliber weapon, something wet splashing the interior and then nothing more.

  Ben almost at the s
tairs. His hand upon the oak bannister. Touch wood. Touch wood. Touch wood. Touch wood. The stairs shattering, splintering around him. Touch wood. Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there! He wasn’t there again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away!

  Impact. A burning hot pain like hell.

  The bullet exploding through Ben’s lower back, shattering ribs, puncturing his stomach, and throwing him hard against the wall, bursting out through his abdomen like an insect leaving the chrysalis. His skull connecting dully with brick. Ben fell to his knees. Gazing up the staircase. Sirens like church bells. The screech of tires from outside. Shattered glass. More gunfire. The chaos of the hotel lobby spilling out into the streets of Salt Lake City. The boy in the photograph screaming. Or was the shrieking coming from his own jaws? Ben didn’t know. Then shadows falling like a winter rain. The woman’s face there in front of him. Weeping. Begging for forgiveness. The woman he loved who had taken everything from him that might have mattered.

  He spat her name out into the aching quiet.

  No prayers. He had no soul to pray for.

  Darkness.

  His entire life went a slick black like the body of a cockroach climbing up a light blue, cracked wall.

  Epilogue

  His eyes followed it. The cockroach. Yellow light from a lamp across the room reflecting off its smooth, disease riddled back. It ran parallel to a fine crack in the wall. Symmetry. Order. He wanted to scream but couldn’t. The stench of shit crawled down his nostrils and nested in his body. Gags convulsed from his dry throat. Could hear the nurses chattering away insanely in the hall. Blue curtains shook with a dusty draft. An old man in the bed across the way snoring. His eyes burned with tears, blurring his vision until the cockroach was nothing more than a dark smudge floating erratically in his sight. The pain in his back and guts pure hell. More morphine. He wanted more morphine. MORE FUCKING MORPHINE!!!!

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Opened them to darkness.

  Squeezed them shut.

  Opened them again to daytime.

  He watched a cockroach scurry across his baby blue sheets. Up the wall. Dancing over the fractured paint. A giant, pale, naked cockroach wearing a masquerade mask was looming over the bottom of the hospital bunk. Reading the clipboard. Tossed it on top of Ben’s numb legs. The mask fell away. His father. The top half of his forehead jagged, splintered, missing. Eyes white, rotten boiled eggs. Blood crusted lips twitching. The Chief telling Ben to keep his fucking mouth shut. Telling him he would get better. The bullet passed right through him. Up and around in no time. He’d go to Los Angeles. They needed good men out there. Just keep his fucking mouth shut. He had a lot of important friends now. Very important. Grinned with teeth pink with blood.

  Ben closed his eyes.

  Opened them again.

  Daylight streaming through a window burning his face. Aflame. Itchy.

  The cockroach gone. Just the crack on the wall like a thread of hair remaining.

  His mother washing him down with a damp cloth. Her blonde hair hanging down in coils of gold. Telling him she was a filthy girl. Not his mother. Mrs. Goodman. No, mother. The cancer that killed her leaking from the corners of her lips, thick and black. Holding a paper cup to his lips. Drink the water. Dark yellow and warm. Drink it. Mother. Her hand crawling underneath the covers towards his prick. He wanted to scream but couldn’t. He loved his mother. He was the man of the house now and big boys didn’t cry.

  He closed his eyes.

  Opened them.

  High heels stabbing at marbled flooring. Closed his eyes. The rattle of a door. The scent of her perfume. Chanel Number Five and opium.

  Opened them.

  Li Yu sitting in a chair next to his bed like a broken heart. All dressed in black. A lace veil across her face. Ben clenched his teeth and fists until he spasmed. She lifted the veil. The face of the dead child. Eyes a cloudy grey. Skin swollen. Bruised. Bloated.

  “Ben, I need your help.”

  Ben screamed.

  Authors Note

  I’ll Pray When I’m Dying is my ballad for the bad guy. In all types of media, literature, film, and so forth, the bad guy is still a character that is, in the majority of examples, used to give the protagonist/good guy something to overcome, to beat. Cannon fodder. Two dimensional characters that are bad or evil for no other reason than they just are. I wanted to make the bad guy from one of my earlier novels into the protagonist of I’ll Pray When I’m Dying so we could see a side of the story that we so rarely get to see. Why is the bad guy bad? Surely they need help more than the actual good guys, no? Here my protagonists, bad guys lead the story. They’re deeply disturbed people. More importantly they’re deeply wounded souls suffering from serious mental anguish that pushes them to do the awful things they do. Someone once said, ‘there are no bad people, just bad actions.’ That’s why I wanted to write this novel.

  In this novel I have also tried to hint at a few serious themes. One of the themes I wanted to explore was that of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which is a mental illness that has yet to be portrayed accurately within the media. We often see the same tired old tropes of characters washing their hands repeatedly. Cleanliness. When these are in fact just one small facet of OCD. I wanted to try and bring the reader’s attention to the other debilitating aspects of the mental illness. The constant, disturbing, jarring mental images that get stuck within one’s mind. The checking, rechecking that can take up a huge amount of the sufferer’s time. The frustration. The fixation on ritual, symmetry, order, symbolism. Counting to particular numbers that have meaning to feel some kind of relief only for the negativity to repeat again in cycles. The repetition of certain words and phrases to get them sounding right or ordered correctly when under stress and pressure. OCD is a multifaceted mental disability and I have attempted to shine a light on something that is still massively misunderstood.

  You may not like my characters, but I hope you’ll find yourself rooting for them regardless because as Ben Hughes says in the novel ‘it’s important to have empathy.’

  * * *

  Stephen J. Golds

  January 2021

  Acknowledgments & Thanks

  First and foremost, I would like to say thank you to a few people who championed and aided my work from the very beginning. Moy McCrory my university professor who told me to keep writing. Brian ‘Zygote in My Coffee’ Fuggett for being the first editor that I submitted my poetry to. Laura Hird for being there from day one. Rob ‘Ben Fucking Bracken’ Parker for always being there to help a struggling author out. Sean Coleman who took a chance on a stray that occasionally pisses on the rug. Martine, Barbara, Gabriel, John BN, Alec PM and Kev for your efforts, support and aid in proofreading and editing.

  I would like to say an incredibly special thank you to those whose constant love, support and help were indispensable to me throughout my writing.

  My daughters M and N for letting papa write when you wanted to play.

  M for being M. Just keep watching!

  Mother and Father, Family.

  Friends.

  Okinawa! I love you!

  The authors, editors, bloggers and beta readers who have helped me throughout. You know who you are. Much love. Thank you.

  And thanks to YOU the reader!

  * * *

  Stephen J. Golds

  About the Author

  Stephen J. Golds was born in London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing, and listening to old Soul LPs. His novels are Say Goodbye When I’m Gone, Always the Dead, Poems for Ghosts in Empty Tenement Windows and the story and poetry collection Love Like Bleeding Out with an Empty Gun in Your Hand. He is co-Editor of Punk Noir Magazine.

 

 

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