Oasis.
It was the other name the now-headless avenging angel had given me.
I’d never heard of it. But a few quick calls told me it was a strip club in Dearborn, popular only with area residents, which was a wink-wink, nudge-nudge that red-blooded Americans probably weren’t welcome.
I was ready and dressed for the occasion: all black, with a thick vest beneath a black T-shirt that wouldn’t give an inch to whatever these bastards threw at me. The vest I was wearing wasn’t just for show. It had plates front and back, as well as some covering the sides. They were made with boron carbide, one of the hardest materials on earth.
There was a .45 in a shoulder rig, and one on my hip. A compact Glock 9mm was strapped to my ankle. Strapped across my chest was a pump-action shotgun with dual tube magazines currently holding eleven shells of 00 buckshot. Across my back, I had a compact submachine gun loaded with 4.6x30mm armor-piercing cartridges, forty of them, all nestled into a box magazine. Also belted to my hip was a knife with a fixed blade that was six inches long and razor-sharp.
The club was tucked away in a part of Dearborn not recognized by the tourism bureau. A strip of cheap motels, hookers, tattoo parlors and head shops.
I’d parked the Maverick right in front of the place and now I walked right under the neon sign and straight through the entrance.
Immediately, pounding rock music greeted me, along with the smell of booze, cigarettes and cheap perfume.
Two meatheads in black suits reached for their guns and I shot them both and walked right on by. Over the music, I thought I heard someone scream but it was hard to tell.
A drunk girl on stage was barely dancing and beyond I spotted a long hallway at the back of the main room. I walked past a couple of drunk guys who still had on their air-conditioning repairman shirts and reached the hallway. Two doors off to my left were the restrooms. Straight ahead, a door had just opened and inside, I’d seen some lockers and a couple of the dancers in the act of changing costumes, or maybe shooting up. It was hard to tell.
That left the door on my right marked "PRIVATE." I walked up to it, rapped on it with the butt of my gun and waited. Eventually, it opened a crack and I shot right through it, pulled the door open and walked inside. The guard was on the ground and I shot him in the head. The door slammed shut behind me.
Straight ahead of me was a tacky lounge area, with velvet couches and leather chairs. There were side tables holding ashtrays and half-filled cocktail glasses. Smoke hung in the air.
Someone had just left, and quickly.
I moved quickly through the lounge, and into the bar area. A girl was hiding underneath the bar. “Get out,” I said.
She squirmed out and ran past me.
To the right was a hallway with two rooms branching off from it. The first door was half ajar. Standing to the left of the door, using the wall as a shield, I reached forward and gave the door a quick push.
It exploded simultaneously with the sound of multiple gunshots. Heavy rounds. A revolver. After the sixth shot I pivoted into the doorway with my shotgun and fired three rounds in a burst straight into the chest of a man who was literally blown off his feet and straight back into the wall. He slid down, leaving a giant smear of blood on the beige paint.
Just to be sure, I walked in and looked at his face. He was the one on the other playing card.
Which left Jibril. Or Gabriel. The most powerful angel ever.
Yeah, well, I thought. I’m the angel of death and Gabriel’s time is running out.
At the next door, I switched from the shotgun to the submachine gun.
“Come in, August High,” a voice called. “I am unarmed.”
The door slowly swung open and there he was. Jibril. Head of the ALM. He was almost as big as me with a thick beard and hairy arms. The room was empty, save for a table and a packing crate. There were blocks stacked neatly in some kind of latex sheath. Waterproof no doubt.
I entered the room and moved to the right. His eyes tracked me.
“You do not disappoint,” he said. “A drink?”
In the silence that followed, he shrugged. “You can join us. Or fight me with your bare hands. Or, the obvious choice, shoot me like a coward.”
He did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, to show he didn’t have a weapon.
Calmly, I reached back, closed the door and locked it.
“Yes, you are honorable!” he cried out.
I put down both of the long guns and set them on the floor, along with both of my .45s and I shrugged off the vest, also dropping it to the floor. Finally, I tossed my knife onto the pile, along with my ankle gun.
Jibril took a step toward me, his movements fluid and controlled, like a predator sizing up its prey.
In retrospect, his strategy had a flaw. It was clear he expected some kind of final epic fight that in movies, would go on for a good ten minutes. Hundreds of punches that never seemed to do any damage, bodies being thrown through windows, kicks to the head that never knocked anyone out, lots of corny dialogue and finally, a sweaty, exhausted winner.
To be honest, I never was a big fan of those types of movies.
In my head, a totally different scenario unfolded. Pops would have been pissed off at me but I didn’t care.
All I could think about was Holla strung up like a deer, Lee Robson staked to the wall, and Monroe. Beautiful, sexy, smart Monroe.
So I walked straight into his punches.
Oh, he hit me. And they were solid, powerful shots. One cracked me right on the cheekbone, another just below my ear, and yet another, right in the solar plexus.
They didn’t slow me down one bit.
Now I was inside him and he rocked my body with short hooks. Left. Right. Left. Right. But by then, I was on him. Pops had been right. I’d been the biggest baby in that orphanage. Everything about me was huge.
Including my head.
The average human head weighs around eleven pounds.
Mine might not be double that, but it probably wasn’t far off. If anyone deserved being called a bonehead, it was me.
So when I snapped my neck forward and crashed my oversized cranium right into his nose, it did some serious damage.
He was tough, though, I’ll give him that. He tried to hook a leg behind mine and push me over but that was never going to happen. Good idea. Impossible to execute.
My left hand shot to his throat, my fingers able to touch at the back. Jibril’s eyes widened, thinking I was going to choke him.
Wrong again.
I turned slightly and crashed a short right into his already broken nose. Something strange happened then. It looked as if most of his nose, which was sizeable, had been actually driven inside his face. It looked almost concave. A spurt of blood and goop erupted from his left eye.
The same right hand hit him in the same spot.
And then again.
And again.
And again.
After the fifth punch, my giant fist came away dripping blood and a bunch of other stuff.
Jibril’s face was pretty much gone. A mangled, bloody, pulped ball of meat sat atop his neck, which I had crushed in my grip.
At that point, of all the dead people I’d seen, he looked the deadest.
I turned, still holding his neck and threw him across the load of drugs. I retrieved my knife to cut a length of rope tied around the crate. I looped one end over an exposed beam in the ceiling and the other around Jibril’s ankle, which I then carefully knotted. It wasn’t difficult at all to hoist the dead man up. I tied off the other end to the shipping crate itself, which probably weighed twice as much as Jibril.
The big man now hung in the center of the room. I reached out, held his body still, and sliced off his shirt, revealing his bare torso. Next, I plunged my knife into his lower stomach, just above the belt, and pulled downward until I felt it hit his sternum. I pulled the knife out, and most of Jibril’s guts came with it.
Taking a step back to avoid the blood, I heard something behind me.
I turned and standing in the doorway, the key hanging in the door, was the young man from the convenience store.
Malik.
In his hand was a revolver, pointing at the ground.
He began to raise it and I could see his hand shake as he did so.
I stepped toward him, raised the knife and threw it. The big blade buried itself in Malik’s throat. His hand must have reflexively clenched because he squeezed off a shot that went into the floor five feet from me.
He stumbled, and then fell.
Quickly, I shrugged on the vest, got all of my weapons back into place, went to Malik and dug my knife out of his throat, making sure to cut it all the way open.
“Should have stuck to working in retail,” I said to his corpse.