With executive thoroughness, Toad and Badger, Lumpy and Benway, situated bundles of gum strategically about the club; at the entrances to the upper and lower floors, the VIP entrance up above and the main entrance off the street, doing their best to blend in with the mopes and early gawkers, hip-hop baggy-pantsed and clean tee-shirted thugboys staking out their territory for the night. Then the two separated, parting ways to more effectively bribe the lanky twink boys to spread gum throughout the club. Lumpy hugged them hard, whispered in their ears, stuffing wads of cash in their jeans. Benway palmed them the money, keeping a nervous distance.
Weapons came next, which, of course, was the reason for their basement entrance in the first place. They had to prepare for a meet with the Muscle of the Ork. Both of them knew just what kind of meet this would be, and it wouldn't be a tensely peaceful sit-down.
No, this was going to be a whack-out fest.
Lumpy taped a 30-clip AR-15 pistol under the main table in the cramped and velveteen VIP room, taped curved buck knives under each seat and a Taurus 709 nine-millimeter atop the liquor cabinet that held whatever it was the club treated as private stock.
Benway had a French serrated edge switchblade in each pocket, squeezing the ceramic handles of the knives as he walked the club, pacing out of place and stodgy, reeking of being either a narc or some pervo-creep way out of his depth. Actually Benway was in his element—that buffer zone of prescient sureness just before the chaos storm of violence hit. And he had a core of calm to cling to just as he clung to the handles of his knives, knowing the Ork wanted their renegade soldier/enforcer/garage-torturer Filmore Lakeworry much, much more than they wanted the dweeby, reedy mad chemist, architect of the flawed and useless gum. Benway was a nuisance who failed to make them the money promised and brought down Boston's Finest Slime in Blue upon them—true—but Lumpy, well…
Lumpy was a threat.
And the gum itself was a mystery they had yet to figure out but would soon.
Lumpy danced, bumping twinkboys with his wide hips while Benway paced and fretted, and then the muscle of the Ork petered in.
They had no fear of making it a gun show. The cops were bought down to the one undercover blending in at the Men's room to roust out a twink or two for Ex or coke, amyl nitrate or crack. Roscoe Blank—the biggest of them—brandishing a Ruger forty-five nine mil. Special, nodded to a manager conspicuously using a tablet to track the scene, who waved them over to the VIP room. The muscle of the Ork elbowed and shouldered their way through the awkwardly moving crowd doing their warm-up trance dance and filed into the private room, weapons unholstered and drawn before they shut the door to block out the synth whine sex thump dance noise.
They got the knives and AR 15 under the seats, no problem.
Lumpy grabbed Benway off a panting, sweating twink boy who seemed to be having a panic attack and gave Benway a panic attack all his own. He nevertheless still had it in him enough to stuff the twink's pants pockets and waistband with shiny packets of the gum.
“What the fuck?” keened Benway over the music.
Lumpy spoke slow but loud. “Is it time to be sociable yet?”
Pushing out of Lumpy's grip, and whining: “They're here to whack us out, genius. There's NO good time to be sociable.” Benway dusted himself off as if Lumpy carried a contagion, like anthrax or typhoid.
“No, no, you're the genius, Benway boy. And you know exactly what I mean. When the fuck does it kick in?”
“They get the kick in about ten minutes and I'm armed, by the way, so don't get cute like that again.”
Together they coolly ascended steps to the parapet where they hung at knife point with a very nervous geriatric twink boy DJ until Benway gave the sign it was about to break. “We better get in there soon, hombre, or there may not be any way of getting out.” Lumpy nodded and they hustled back down to the VIP room, bracing two of the muscle on their way, Lumpy with short a punch to the abdomen and Benway with a curved German Solingen steel blade up the gut, taken back as fast as it was delivered.
Another of the muscle was blustering through the crowd but was stopped by a wave of fists and rubber-soled feet.
The dance crowd was breaking into small riots.
Something was building; the air was electric and copper-tinged as if with blood.
At that exact moment Lumpy chose to kick in the door, weaponless, Benway dragged along and trembled behind.
“Hey, it's party time, chief!”
Roscoe set the terms. “Get the fuck in here and give us the rest of that gum and whatever cash you got from trying to turn it, and maybe Malek won't make you revisit Gary Lee Obidowski's garage to eat a drill-bit sandwich.” They each held up a knife like a candle, smiling, and Roscoe drew down at the door with the assault rifle. “We found that you left us these, you fucking mutant dwarf Indian moron. Party favors just for us?”
“Yeah”, said Lumpy, grinning. “You'll get what's coming, believe me.”
“Give us what's left of the gum, that fuck Benway, who screwed it all up anyway made, and get the fuck outta the district. Hit the Canadian trail.”
“Hey, where's that fuckin' party?” Lumpy asked with jacked up faux innocence.
“The party's up your whore mother's fuckin' ass where my dick was last night.”
Screaming and banging erupted during the pause, and the door to the room, though locked, sounded as if it might jiggle open at any second.
“This was the sitdown, the meet, and this is how you handle it?” Lumpy lamented. “What's the goal? Money and drugs, but what do you get? A gay club fart. But sometimes, guys, just for playing, there's a consolation prize, you know. Lucky you.”
Benway, hiding on his knees at the back end of the table behind his partner, had his own Bushmaster AR 15 set between Lumpy's legs and let loose under the table with a 60-clip, blowing away feet and knees and groins and hanging guts. Then the door burst open and a sea of angry, ranting bloody-faced twinks, rentboys and hip-hop Harrys, pants down at their knees and below, swirled into the room, pushing Lumpy back to where the Taurus assault rifle lay taped at the private stock cabinet. He grabbed the barrel, thrust himself atop the cabinet and gutturally squealed with delight, “Motherfucker, ain't we got fun!”
Then he sprayed the room with nine-millimeter exploding Teflon rounds.
The Muscle of the Ork was quickly reduced to a ghastly sort of human mush, a collage of medical surgical debris.
Benway was flat on the floor, his bird-cage chest heaving, breathing hard, clawing linoleum, and Lumpy grabbed him up by the wrist. “Twinkle-toes, you and me gots to book!”
The club had suddenly twisted into a fleshy tornado of violence, blood, piss and flesh flying this way and that. There was simply no way to get through it without being ground down to a pulp by its sheer weight, volume, and force. So they didn't go through it. They slid under it. They dropped back down to the basement, angling their way out the same way they came in, each hoisting up rungs to the back alley through the still-open bulkhead. Then a gentle tableau: Toad and Badger, stooped over and cautious under the sharp white light of the arched street lamps, scampering across the Fenway toward the dark, rich wood of the Fens, disappearing with barely a rustling of leaves back into the deep, black sheltering shade of the bowing trees.
“I am going to give you back your humanity.”
Malek the Mallet, sitting alone in his darkened office, jerked forward as if from a dream at the sound of this intruding voice. His amblyopia was bad today, so the dark provided scant comfort, even while he wore his amber wraparound eye visor with the opaque left lens. The sparse Danish modern furnishings seemed a fanciful blur, like a stage setting of a kind, remote and sliced away from the action at their center.
“It's a gift you can't refuse.”
Malek lit a smoke, tossed the match at where he guessed the source of the voice was, and missed.
“Take your gift and shove it up your ass. In fact, give me time and I'll do that for you.”
“You should be grateful.”
Malek spat. “You should be dead.”
“I am,” Null said dully.
“Don't get poetic with me, Pally. You're breathing. You're still acting like a boil on my ass.”
“Is a virus really alive, Malek—a coelenterate or an amoeba, for that matter?
Malek growled with contempt, phony philosophy, doggerel poetry. He growled loudly, with spittle in contempt: “Get the fuck in here and whack this fuckstick, already, would ya!!”
“They're busy, Malek.”
There was knocking and thudding, sliding, but no entry, no kicking in of the door, just a short burst of scuffling along the ground, then more thudding.
Malek was astonished: “They should be in here already, giving you a good goddamn rip-ass party!”
“First come first served, Malek,” wheezed Null. Would you like to look outside for an accounting?
“What fucking accounting?”
“Two knee-cappings, a sucking chest wound, severed arm and foot, one evisceration. I think there was at least one decapitation.”
Malek bolted up, pulled a Sig-Sauer, and squeezed off some rounds that flashed in the shadows until he started losing his breath, choking and making guttural grunts. The Sig-Sauer flopped down noisily to the table.
Null's fingers had met and crossed atop Malek's considerable Adam's apple and then squeezed in unhesitatingly. His struggling knocked the yellow wraparound visor clattering to the floor.
Pounding the table, Malek coughed out: “How is killing me going to restore my humanity?”
He spat blood.
Null released him, stepped back into the shadows.
Malek scrambled for the Sig-Sauer, shot twice behind him.
There was palpable silence, deafening after the explosions of the rounds.
“No, death won't restore your humanity to you—your sensitivity, empathy, vulnerability. Death is the sure cure for all that, even as I am surely cured of all that—the cure and the disease it leads to from which you suffer.”
“Me too. So the fuck what?” Malek squeezed off more shots and missed.
“You see?” asked Null, wide eyed. “It's happening already.”
“Suck my dick.”
“You're afraid, which you should be. Good. It's a start—giving you back your humanity.”
“C'mere and let me shove the barrel of this Sig up your goddamn zombie ass! That'll make you human!”
Null clicked his tongue, moved tremulously into the scant light of the room and threw Malek a long, brutal procedural beating, pounding certain parts of him so hard with the butt of the Sig, that a sloshing could be heard. Then he in turn flung it across the office like refuse once his subject was cooled out and down to a twitch and a moan on the floor.
Malek keened, “My fucking meth—the gak and the cash, you…zombie…fuck!”
Null knelt down and whispered into Malek's ear, “The gak and the cash are mine, Malek. It's over, so forget it. In fact, to tell you the truth, this whole town's mine. That's over too. And that you should etch very hard into your bleeding brain.” Then he stood.
Malek sputtered some sort of sub-verbal argument. Null lit a cigarette, puffed hard, extracted it from his mouth and held it up as if to examine it.
Then he knelt back down and straight-arm smashed Malek in the mouth.
Still kneeling by him, Null produced an ice pick from his coat and casually stuck it through Malek's ribcage as if a magician skewering his assistant for show, prompting him to jerk up. Malek gaped blood out of his mouth in wide-bubbled foam, prompting him to squeal airily desperate obscenities as he reached clumsily for Null as if in total darkness. Null yanked the ice pick out fast and Malek fell backward, squirming like a grub.
Null then unrolled a bit of thin clear plastic tubing from his inside coat pocket and a companion ruddy-colored rubber bulb about fist-sized bounced on the floor. He slid one end of the tube into the bulb and the other end into Malek, sticking the end into the ice pick wound.
“Squeeze the bulb,” said Null.
“Go fuck yourself,” Malek gasped.
“Do it. It will re-inflate your lung, which I just collapsed with the icepick. Keep squeezing it and then make the call on your cell to EMS. Should take about a half-hour for them to help you. Unfortunately, there's no other help more immediately available outside your office door.”
“What-do-you-mean?” It was an actual series of croaks.
“You know just what I mean.”
“Prick!” This was rasping , like a cough.
“Sticks and stones, Malek. I told you, this is my town, and the gak and the cash are mine too. And as much as it matters so are you!”
Malek gurgled low for a response, but abruptly, just like a cheap piece of hastily ignited flash paper whose thin remnant ash drifted slowly, almost invisible to the ground. Null wasn't there anymore.
Another night.
The clawing at the bedding, the hot and cold sweat, the shakes, the broken chocolate bar on the nightstand which failed to stave off the need, the fire in the pit of the stomach no amount of cheap, store brand soda pop could quench.
The revulsion.
How many hours of the clock, how much time did she have left before they could take everything from her again. How much more could they take from her? How much more could she take of that?
Take, take, take and no give unless it was her doing the giving.
How these thoughts fall upon you in semi-sleep; regret itself became a semi-dream.
Her lungs were a bellows breathing cinders.
Her brains were beaten ragged.
Her eyes registered light despite the dark of the room, despite her eyes being squeezed shut hard.
Her ears screamed, and wrapping the pillow around her head did no good.
The screaming was real, undeniable, solid.
She dove for her phone.
Wurdalaka, droning, “LT, we got another one. Big brouhaha down at the 1270 on Boylston—freaking messy.”
“You been down?”
“No, I ain't been down, but they called me to call you, the guys that don't wanna deal with this. They said you'd love it.”
“There was gum present, wasn't there?”
“Wrappers scattered hither and thither.”
“How bad, Byron?”
“I got your numbers right here,” he said, fumbling with his new tablet.
He told her as few details as he had heard himself from slave dispatch and she gagged hard at turning on the light: Eight men out, near twenty wounded badly enough to be carried off to Boston City ER, over 100 injured, loss and destruction in the hundred thousands.”
“Pizza wagons dispatched?”
“They're already there doing the cleanup with Yonah Shimmel and his part-time student band bagging and tagging.”
She laughed a bitter, quiet laugh. Boston freaking CSI. Big time pro's. Comedy clusterfuck.
“Where are the news trucks?”
“We got three already. The night shift got no problem holding them back.”
“Let ‘em in and have Yonah preside.”
“Ya got authority for that, LT?”
“And what did they tell you, Byron? The wonks upstairs.”
“They told me they were going to try to tie the whole thing this time to Islamic Jihad, blame it all on the towel heads. Al Qaeda, Sheik Al Ahazared crap.”
“I bet they did, them and their “One Boston, Boston Strong” gang. What else they tell you?”
“We're fucking Boston Strong now we used 100 men, all contiguous police, 200 FBI flamers, enough tactical SWAT equipment to capture Switzerland to whack out one kid, corner another one half-dead holed up in a boat trailer so we can break our arms patting ourselves on the backs on such a difficult fucking collar.”
“One fucking Boston.”
“Just one fucking Boston,” replied Wurdalaka grimly. “Thank God. That's all we fucking need. Any more than that and I'll declare a fucking jihad myself!”
“You're talking heresy,” Wurdalaka.
“Who doesn't in Boston?”
“So what are we doing, Byron?” Her sweat smelled like gin, which made her stomach collapse in on itself and ache.
“Sure, LT. I'll let ‘em in. Let that faggot Yamaha boy play den mother in the carnage and debris to boot, just as you say. Anything you want. Oh, but the wonks upstairs what don't want to get involved? You remember them, don't ya?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, they told me to tell you NOT to fuck it up. We're fucking heroes these days and we need the drop dead print press, the slick back TV hacks and the dweeby genius web fairies to eat that up with a fucking spoon.”
“I'm sure that was verbatim, too, wasn't it, Byron?”
“Fuckin' A, LT.”
“Fuckin' A,” she droned, and switched off.
But not before she failed to suppress the vomiting.