by Joe Hill
He slammed the hammer into the small of her back, and it was like catching a baseball bat in the kidneys, and she screamed through clenched teeth. Her insides felt smashed, jellied.
No armor there. None of the other times had been like that. Another blow like that one and she would need crutches to get to her feet. Another blow like that one and she would be pissing blood.
“You will not be riding your bike to the bar either, or to the pharmacy to get the medicine you take for your crazy head. Oh, I know all about you, Victoria McQueen, Miss Liar Liar, Pants on Fire. I know what a sorry drunk you are and what an unfit mother and that you have been to the laughing house. I know you had your son out of wedlock, which of course is quite usual for whores such as yourself. To think we live in a world where one such as you is allowed to have a child. Well! Your boy is with me now. You stole my children away from me with your lies, and now I claim yours from you.”
Vic’s insides knotted. It was as bad as being struck again. She was afraid she might throw up in her helmet. Her right hand was pressed hard against her side, into the sick, bunched feeling in her abdomen. Her fingers traced the outline of something in her coat pocket. A crescent-sickle shape.
Manx bent over her. When he spoke again, his voice was gentle.
“Your son is with me, and you will never have him back. I don’t expect you to believe this, Victoria, but he is better off with me. I will bring him more happiness than you ever could. In Christmasland, I promise you, he will never be unhappy again. If you had a single grateful bone in your body, you would thank me.” He prodded her with the hammer and leaned closer. “Come now, Victoria. Say it. Say thank you.”
She pushed her right hand into her pocket. Her fingers closed around the wrench that was shaped like a knife. Her thumb felt the ridges of the stamp that said TRIUMPH.
Now. Now is the moment. Make it count, her father told her.
Lou kissed her on the temple, his lips brushing her softly.
Vic shoved herself up. Her back spasmed, a sick flexing in the muscle, almost intense enough to cause her to stagger, but she did not even allow herself to grunt in pain.
She saw him in a blur. He was tall in a way she associated with fun-house mirrors: rail-thin legs and arms that went on forever. He had great, fixed, staring eyes, and for the second time in the space of minutes she thought of fish. He looked like a mounted fish. All his upper teeth bit down into his lower lip, giving him an expression of comic, ignorant bafflement. It was incomprehensible that her entire life had been a carousel of unhappiness, drinking, failed promises, and loneliness, all turning around and around a single afternoon encounter with this man.
She jerked the wrench out of her pocket. It snagged on fabric, and for one terrible instant it almost dropped out of her fingers. She held on, pulled it loose, and slashed it at his eyes. The blow went a little high. The sharp tip of the wrench caught him above the left temple and tore open a four-inch flap of his curiously soggy, loose skin. She felt it grinding raggedly across bone.
“Thank you,” she said.
Manx clapped one gaunt hand to his forehead. His expression suggested a man who has been struck by a sudden, dismaying thought. He staggered back from her. One heel slipped in the grass. She stabbed at his throat with the wrench, but he was already out of reach, falling across the hood of his Wraith.
“Mom, oh, Mom!” Wayne screamed from somewhere.
Vic’s legs were loose and unstable beneath her. She didn’t think about it. She went after him. Now that she was up and on her feet, she could see he was an old, old man. He looked like he belonged in a nursing home, a blanket over his knees, a Metamucil shake in one hand. She could take him. Pin him to the hood and stab him in the fucking eyes with her pointy little wrench.
She was almost on top of him when he came up with the silver hammer in his right hand. He gave it a big, swooping swing—she heard it whistle musically in the air—and caught her in the side of her helmet, hard enough to snap her around a hundred eighty degrees and drop her to one knee. She heard cymbals clash in her skull, just like a cartoon sound effect. He looked eighty going on a thousand, but there was a limber, easy strength in his swing that suggested the power of a gangly teenager. Glassy chips of motorcycle helmet fell into the grass. If she had not been wearing it, her skull would’ve been sticking out of her brain in a mess of red splinters.
“Oh!” Charlie Manx was screaming. “Oh, my Lord, I have been sliced open like a side of beef! Bang! Bang!”
Vic got up too quickly. The late afternoon darkened around her as the blood rushed from her head. She heard a car door slam.
She reeled around, holding her head—the helmet—between her hands, trying to stop the dreadful reverberations resounding within it. The world was jittering just a little, as if she sat on her idling motorcycle again.
Manx was still collapsed across the hood of the car. His harrowed, stupid face shone with blood. But there was another man now, standing at the back end of the car. Or at least it had the shape of a man. It had the head, though, of a giant insect from some 1950s black-and-white movie, a rubbery monster-movie head with a grotesque bristling mouth and glassy blank eyes.
The insect man had a gun. Vic watched it float up and stared into the black barrel, a surprisingly tiny hole, not much bigger than a human iris.
“Bang, bang,” the insect man said.
The Yard
WHEN BING SAW MR. MANX SPRAWL ACROSS THE HOOD OF THE car, he felt it as a kind of physical jolt, a sensation of recoil. He had felt much the same thing travel up his arm the day he had fired the nail gun into his father’s temple, only this was a slam of recoil into the very center of his being. Mr. Manx, the Good Man, was stabbed in the face, and the bitch was coming at him. The bitch meant to kill him, a thought as unimaginable, as horrible, as the sun itself blinking out. The bitch was coming, and Mr. Manx needed him.
Bing gripped the can of Gingersnap Spice, pointed it in the boy’s face, and blasted a hissing stream of pale smoke into his mouth and eyes—what he should’ve done minutes ago, what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been so awful mad, if he hadn’t decided to make the boy watch. The kid flinched, tried to turn his face, but Bing held him by the hair and kept spraying. Wayne Carmody shut his eyes and clamped his lips shut.
“Bing! Bing!” Manx screamed.
Bing screamed himself, desperate to be out of the car and moving, and aware at the same time that he had not dosed the boy well. It didn’t matter. There was no time, and the boy was in the car now, couldn’t leave. Bing let go of him and dropped the can of Gingersnap Spice into one pocket of his tracksuit jacket. His right hand was pawing for the pistol in the other pocket.
He was out then, slamming the door behind him and pulling out the big oiled revolver. She had on a black motorcycle helmet that showed only her eyes, wide now, seeing the gun in his hand, seeing the last thing she was ever going to see. Three steps away at most, right in his kill zone.
“Bing Bing,” he said, “time to do my thing!”
He had already begun to apply pressure on the trigger when Mr. Manx pushed himself up off the hood, putting himself right in the way. The gun went off, and Manx’s left ear exploded in a spray of skin and blood.
Manx screamed, clapped his hand to the side of his head where raggedy pieces of ear now hung from the side of his face.
Bing screamed, too, and fired again, into the mist. The sound of the gun going off a second time, when he wasn’t prepared for it, startled him so badly that he farted, a high squeak in his pants.
“Mr. Manx! Oh, my God! Mr. Manx, are you all right?”
Mr. Manx dropped against the side of the car, twisting his head around to look at him.
“Well, what do you think? I have been stabbed in the face and my ear is shot to pieces! I am lucky my brains are not running down the front of my shirt, you dumbbell!”
“Oh, my God! I am such an asshole! I didn’t mean it! Mr. Manx, I would rather die than hurt you! What do I do?
Oh, God! I should just shoot myself!”
“You should shoot her is what you should do!” Manx yelled at him, dropping his hand from the side of his head. Red strings of ear dangled and swung. “Do it! Shoot her already! Put her down! Put her down in the dirt and have done with it!”
Bing wrenched his gaze away from the Good Man, his heart slugging in his chest, ka-bam-bam-bam like a piano pushed down a flight of stairs in a great crash of discordant sound and slamming wood. His gaze swept the yard and found McQueen, already on the run, loping away from him on her long brown legs. His ears were ringing so loudly he could hardly hear his own gun as it went off again, flame shredding through the ghost-silk of the fog.
Logan Airport
LOU CARMODY CLEARED SECURITY AND STILL HAD AN HOUR TO kill, so he hit Mickey D’s in the food court. He told himself he would get the grilled chicken salad and a water, but the air was full of the hungry-making odor of french fries, and when he got to the cash register, he heard himself telling the pimply kid he wanted two Big Macs, large fries, and an extra-large vanilla milkshake—the same thing he’d been ordering since he was thirteen.
While he was waiting, he looked to his right and saw a little boy, no more than eight, with dark eyes just like Wayne’s, standing with his mother at the next register. The boy stared up at Lou—at Lou’s two chins and man tits—not with disgust but with a strange sorrow. Lou’s father had been so fat when he died that they had to pay for a special-order coffin, a fucking double-wide that looked like a dinner table with the lid shut.
“Just make it a small milkshake,” Lou told his server. He found himself unable to look at the boy again, was afraid to see him staring.
What shamed him was not that he was, as his doctor said, morbidly obese (what a qualifier, “morbidly,” as if at a certain point, being overweight were morally similar to necrophilia). What he hated, what made him feel squirmy and ill inside, was his own inability to change his habits. He genuinely could not say the things he needed to say, could not order the salad when he smelled french fries. The last year he had been with Vic, he knew she needed help—that she was drinking in secret, that she was answering imaginary phone calls—but he could not draw the line with her, could not make demands or issue ultimatums. And if she was blasted and wanted to screw him, he could not say he was worried about her; all he could do was clap his hands to her ass and bury his face in her naked breasts. He had been her accomplice right until the day she filled the oven with telephones and burned their house to the ground. He had done everything but light the match himself.
He settled at a table designed for an anorexic dwarf, in a chair only suitable for the ass of a ten-year-old—didn’t McDonald’s understand their clientele? what were they thinking, providing chairs like this for men like him?—pulled out his laptop, and got on the free Wi-Fi.
He checked his e-mail and looked at cosplay honeys in Power Girl outfits. He dropped in on the Millarworld message boards; some friends were debating which color Hulk should be next. Comic dorks embarrassed him, the dumb shit they argued about. It was obviously gray or green. The other colors were stupid.
Lou was wondering if he could look at SuicideGirls without anyone walking by and noticing when his phone began to hum in the pocket of his cargo shorts. He lifted his rear end and began to dig for it.
He had his hand on it when he tuned in on the music playing over the airport sound system. It was, improbably, that old Johnny Mathis song “Sleigh Ride.” Improbable because Boston was roughly as temperate as Venus on that particular afternoon in July; it made Lou sweat just looking outside. Not only that—the airport sound system had been rocking something else right up until the moment the phone rang. Lady Gaga or Amanda Palmer or something. Some cute lunatic with a piano.
Lou had his phone out but paused to look at the woman at the next table, a MILF who bore a scant resemblance to Sarah Palin.
“Dude,” Lou said, “you hear that?” Pointing at the ceiling. “They’re playing Christmas music! It’s the middle of the summer!”
She froze with a forkful of coleslaw halfway to her bee-stung lips and stared at him with a mixture of confusion and unease.
“The song,” Lou said. “You hear that song?”
Her brow furrowed. She regarded him the way she might’ve regarded a puddle of vomit—something to avoid.
Lou glanced at his phone, saw Wayne on the caller ID. That was curious; they had just been texting a few minutes ago. Maybe Vic was back from her ride on the Triumph and wanted to talk to him about how it was running.
“Never mind,” Lou said to Almost Sarah Palin, and waved a hand in the air, dismissing the subject.
He answered.
“What up, dawg?” Lou said.
“Dad,” Wayne said, his voice a harsh whisper. He was struggling not to cry. “Dad. I’m in the back of a car. I can’t get out.”
Lou felt a low, almost gentle ache, behind his breastbone, in his neck, and, curiously, behind his left ear.
“What do you mean? What car?”
“They’re going to kill Mom. The two men. There’s two men, and they put me in a car, and I can’t get out of the backseat. It’s Charlie Manx, Dad. And someone in a gasmask. Someone—” He screamed.
In the background Lou heard a string of popping sounds. His first thought was firecrackers. But it wasn’t firecrackers.
Wayne cried, “They’re shooting, Dad! They’re shooting at Mom!”
“Get out of the car,” Lou heard himself say, his voice strange, thin, too high. He was hardly aware he had come to his feet. “Just unlock the door and run.”
“I can’t. I can’t. It won’t unlock, and when I try and get in the front seat, I just wind up in the back again.” Wayne choked on a sob.
Lou’s head was a hot-air balloon, filled with buoyant gases, lifting him up off the floor toward the ceiling. He was in danger of sailing right out of the real world.
“The door has to unlock. Look around, Wayne.”
“I have to go. They’re coming back. I’ll call when I can. Don’t call me, they might hear it. They might hear even if I turn it to mute.”
“Wayne! Wayne!” Lou screamed. There was a strange ringing in his ears.
The phone went dead.
Everyone in the food court was staring at him. No one was saying anything. A pair of security cops were approaching, one of them with his hand resting on the molded plastic grip of his .45.
Lou thought, Call the state police. Call the New Hampshire State Police. Do it right now. But when he lowered the phone from his face to dial 911, it slipped from his hand. And when he bent to reach for it, he found himself grabbing at his chest, the pain there suddenly doubling, jabbing at him with sharp edges. It was as if someone had fired a staple gun into one tit. He put his hand on the little table to steady himself, but then his elbow folded and he went down, chin-first. He caught the edge of the table, and his teeth clacked together, and he grunted and collapsed onto the floor. His shake went with him. The wax cup exploded, and he sprawled into a cold, sweet puddle of vanilla ice cream.
He was only thirty-six. Way too young for a heart attack, even with his family history. He had known he would pay for not getting the salad.
Lake Winnipesaukee
WHEN THE GASMASK MAN APPEARED WITH HIS GUN, VIC TRIED TO backpedal but couldn’t seem to get a signal to her legs. The barrel of the gun held her in place, was as captivating as a mesmerist’s pocketwatch. She might as well have been buried in the ground up to her hips.
Then Manx stood up between her and the gunman and the .38 went off and Manx’s left ear tore apart in a red flash.
Manx screamed—a wretched cry, not of pain but of fury. The gun went off a second time. Vic saw the agitated mist swirl to her right, a very straight line of cleared air running through it to mark the passage of the bullet.
If you stand here one moment longer, he will shoot you to death in front of Wayne, her father told her, his hand in the small of her back. Don’t stand he
re and let Wayne see that.
She darted a look at the car, through the windshield, and her son was there, in the backseat. His face was flushed and rigid, and he was furiously swiping one hand in the air at her: Go, go! Get away!
Vic didn’t want him to see her running either, leaving him behind. All the other times she had failed him before were nothing to this final, unforgivable failure.
A thought lanced through her, like a bullet tunneling through mist: If you die here, no one can find Manx.
“Wayne!” she shouted. “I’ll come! Wherever you go, I’ll find you!”
She didn’t know if he heard her. She could hardly hear herself. Her ears whined, shocked into something close to deafness by the roar of the Gasmask Man’s .38. She could barely hear Manx yelling to Shoot her, shoot her already!
Her heel squeaked in the wet grass as she turned. She was moving at last. She lowered her head, grabbing at her helmet, wanting it off before she got where she was going. She felt comically slow, feet spinning furiously beneath her, going nowhere, while the grass bunched up under her in rolls, like carpet. There was no sound in the world but for the heavy drumming of her feet on the ground and her breath, amplified by the inside of the helmet.
The Gasmask Man was going to shoot her in the back, bullet in the spine, and she hoped it killed her, because she did not want to lie there sprawled in the dirt, paralyzed, waiting for him to shoot her again. In the back, she thought, in the back, in the back, the only three words her mind could seem to string together. Her entire vocabulary had been reduced to these three words.