Chapter 20

Home on the Range

The curious mixture of meat fried and gunpowder fired was a smell not easily forgotten by those who experienced it at any age. It took up stubborn residence high in the nostrils, back deep in the sinus caverns. It wove itself into the fibers of shirts and blouses and handkerchiefs stuffed into back pockets and seldom-explored purse corners. They (Graveyard, Ambience, and his old friend Crankcase) weren’t enjoying the famous brunch, exactly, but instead that ever-popular meal located somewhere between lunch and dinner: a lunner. They were each eating a rimfire patty melt with smallbore sauce (the house specialty) and an order of loaded magnum fries (fan favorite).

“For hamburger mixed with saltpeter,” Graveyard said, chewing heartily, “this ain’t half bad.” He’d already enthusiastically plowed through half his sandwich and was seriously contemplating a second.

“It’s Chef Strudelstein’s personal family recipe,” said Crankcase. “The choice of weapons aristocrats everywhere. He’s from Lower WellBeGone. The eastern side.”

“It’s okay,” said Ambience. She’d taken two bites and put the burger back down on her plate. She did not pick it up again. Today she was buried inside her customary period funk, an annoying personal she wasn’t about to share with two guys, each of them strange to her in different ways. Graveyard, of course, presented a familiar strangeness. Her time in grade with him had rendered her relatively immune to his numerous assorted oddities, though he was, of course, still capable of ambushing her at any moment with some fresh and unexpected twist in the backbone of his days. This new guy, Crankcase, Graveyard’s famous bestie from high school, was something of an interesting puzzle to her. To start with, there were his looks: definitely in the lower digits on the Fuck-O-Meter. He appeared to be relatively fit, though that could be deceptive. She hadn’t seen him naked. He shaved his head, yet there wasn’t much hair to be shaved in the first place. Graveyard told her once he’d already lost most of it by his junior year in high school. Quelle horreur. Straight-ahead adolescence was bad enough without an additional comeliness crisis. And frankly, the head itself was not of sufficient shapeliness to be so glaringly exposed. It had numerous oddly placed bumps and depressions. It looked like a badly peeled potato. His dark, ferrety eyes were set exceedingly close together and basically he had no lips, just a long thin line across the lower third of his face signifying “mouth.” There were other minor problems with his ears, chin, cheeks, but you get the picture. He did have a nice nose.

He was a stranger to her because she hadn’t ever laid eyes on him until less than an hour ago. Graveyard was a stranger because she had been laying eyes on him for more than eleven years now. And she wasn’t quite convinced that all that looking and subsequent touching had taught her enough to say for sure that she knew him. And she wasn’t even certain what knowing anybody actually meant. Her life now and for almost the twelve years previous largely consisted of following Graveyard around, each day, each week, each month, always learning a little bit more but never enough. And so she had followed him here to this cheap grease joint clumsily affixed as a sort of tawdry extra enticement to the wonderful world of guns. It reminded her of another fry hole back in the War, MyHood’s BBQ Market, where you could get bullets with your meat. The day she was reminded of, her second month at play in the sandbox, was also one on which she thought, she couldn’t be sure, she had wasted her first human being. On a routine morning patrol somewhere in the Lower Jahbooty Valley they’d stumbled into a real soup sandwich. Everything everywhere just started blowing up real good. Jagged shit flying through the air. Ground littered with dominoes. Somehow she found herself flat on her stomach behind a hill or a dune or a fucking mound or whatever fucking piece of moon dust the entire colorless country was made out of. The mound was certainly of insufficient elevation to provide even minimal comfort and security while she was being shot at. The hajji shooting at her was crouched some fifty yards away behind the black carcass of a chewed-up deuce. Or maybe it had been a meat wagon. Something big that ran on wheels. He’d squirt off a few rounds, duck behind the wreckage, wait, and repeat. Ambience took careful aim at the spot where the head kept turkey-peeking. She waited. The head popped into view. She squeezed the trigger. The head disappeared in a cloud of pink mist. She waited. She waited. No more head. Maybe she had just killed a guy. Her first. Imagine that.

“Yes,” Crankcase was saying, “business has, you might say, exploded. (Pun at no additional cost.) Male and female. Teenagers and old-agers. Whites, blacks, and browns. They’re all gunning up.”

“Why?” said Graveyard.

“They’re scared.”

“Of what?”

“You name it. Seem to be afraid of pretty much everything. Mainly, of course, one another. Anyone outside the box. You know. Then there’s the whole fucking planet’s condition, for example. We, and I mean every damn one of us, no matter what we may tell ourselves and others, know totally and deep down that conservationwise we’re in serious trouble. We are shitting daily in our living room. And you know what? We don’t care. We like shitting in our living room. It’s easy. It’s convenient. It’s really fun. We don’t even have to get up off the couch. And after a while, you learn to ignore the spectacle of it and the odor of it and just enjoy the sheer pleasure of it.”

“A green gun nut,” said Ambience. “Bet you could count the number of those on your fingers.”

“You might be surprised. Not everyone is a cliché.”

“Just the folks I know?”

“It’s not who people actually are that matters. It’s what you think about them.”

“There’s another one,” said Ambience.

“Another what?”

“Pithy saying. They seem to come off you naturally. Like dandruff or something.”

“It’s a gift.”

“Ever consider posting a collection of them, say, up on the wall back of the check-in desk?”

“No, but my wife has.”

“Stuff could be quite instructive to some of your clientele. Who knows? They might even come to like them.”

“You could call the list Barrel Wisdom,” Graveyard said.

“Maybe there’s even a book there,” said Ambience.

“No, thanks. I knew a guy who wrote a book once. He barely got out of that bramble bush alive.”

But Ambience was both listening and not listening. Her attention had been waylaid by a couple in the corner booth, a probable emotional cripple and his female caretaker and sperm can. The mister looked like the kind of blob who’d beat her whenever the mood struck and then rape her good. They were the types you’d expect to find in a place like this. But then she was here, too. What did that say about her?

“So we try to keep the temp here on the down low,” Crankcase was saying. “As I was saying earlier, most everybody around these days seems to be about just one stick short of a major detonation, heads full of all sorts of primer to get riled about. Race, politics, religion, sex. You name it, you’ll get busted in the face over it. So we not only practice weapons safety, we also practice conversational safety. There are certain topics strictly off-limits, on the firing line and in the restaurant. And, holy of holies, it’s worked. At least so far. Course we’ve had to ban a few individuals permanently from the establishment, but aside from the gunfire, this is a relatively quiet zone.”

“I’m sitting here,” said Ambience, “and I hear nothing.”

“HearNoEvil baffle curtains on the range walls and all along the tunnel. Top-shelf soundproofing.”

“Amazing,” Ambience said, “the ingenuity that goes into the care and feeding of the gun beast.” The couple in the corner booth she had been steadily monitoring were now smiling giddily at each other. Then they leaned across the table and locked lips. Tightly. Enduringly. When they unglued, Ambience noticed that the woman’s shoeless right foot was jammed up into her partner’s crotch, where it appeared to be trying to work its way on up into the body itself. To her surprise, she found herself getting slightly aroused.

“We have just one hard and fast rule on the premises here,” Crankcase was saying. “The gun is always loaded. Always. Understand?”

“Live by it,” Graveyard said.

“Let me tell you, nothing leaves a more lasting impression than getting shot by your own empty weapon.”

“So I’ve read.”

“A terrible thing.”

“Ever have something like that happen here?” Ambience said. For the moment the show in the corner was over. The two PDAers were back digging into their muzzle ribs and armor-piercing fries.

“No, thank God. We’ve had our share of incidents, of course, usual noob stuff, inadvertent line sweeps, minor racking injuries, nasty ricochets, hot-brass burns, nothing really major but for the two suicides, which, lucky for me, happened on days I had off. Last month guy comes in, rents an 1844, chooses a stall, fires just one round. Into the roof of his mouth. Heard it made quite a mess. Still some remarkable stains left on the ceiling tiles. You can check ’em out before you leave. Think a girl in a cropped black Death Tourniquet shirt is in that stall now. You’ll notice her right away as soon as we go in.”

“You keep a close eye on all your clientele?” said Ambience.

“You have to. Morons with weapons. It’s a volatile combo. Just last week we had a carload of 2A fucknuggets come rolling in in their Frightened White Man’s caps, OC holsters, 5.11 pants, the whole shebang. Spent about twenty minutes preaching and grandstanding and parading around. One of ’em had a vintage LooseSmooch17 that he was creaming his jeans to impress his buds with. So after everybody gets a turn—and we’re talking a good groupie-size mob here—this assclown sets the hot gun down on the bench and decides to stroll out onto the range to see how deep the bullets are buried into the backstop or some stupid shit and while he’s out there the gun cooks off and a round tags him in the calf. He was already bragging about feeling no pain as they drove him to the hospital. That’s my favorite range story. So far.”

“Dramatic job,” said Ambience.

“Not really. I’m sparing you the hours of dull edited-out stuff, the times when I sit on my ass, inventory the stock, and contemplate.”

“Contemplate what?” said Graveyard.

“Oh, this, that, and the other. And the general idiocy of the human race.”

“Pay well?”

“The contemplation, yes. The job, not so much. But certainly better now than my first years here, when I was just another stiff on the regular crew and had to work two gigs just to pay the rent, buy the groceries, and maintain my famous elevated lifestyle.”

“What was the other job?” said Graveyard.

“Boob wrangler at Missy Pearl’s House of Muff.”

“No,” said Graveyard. “You’re kidding. I’d laugh, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop. Boob wrangler, my god. A high school boy’s dream job. How in god’s name did you land that gig?”

“Connections, how else? I do have ’em, you know. Remember ReverseMortgage?”

“The puffy kid who sold primo leaf out of his gym locker?”

“His uncle owns the joint. In fact, his uncle is Miss Pearl. Anyway, a couple years after you left town, I totaled my PikeBrat.”

“No—not the one with the BillyBuck Oversquare?”

“The very same.”

“What a loss.”

“You’re telling me. Anyway, ReverseMortgage put in the good word with Uncle HotTooth and next thing I know I’m up to my eyeballs in more half-dressed female flesh than my naive brain ever could have pictured.”

“And what were your particular duties at this fine establishment?”

“Aw, you know. Little more than a kind of a glorified, or maybe not so glorified, house flunky.”

“Ever wrangle any actual boobs?” said Ambience. Entertained by the amusing shape of the entire conversation.

“Now and then. Those show cuppers can be tricky to get into.”

“You know my next question,” Graveyard said.

“Once. Just once. Hard as it is to believe. I can’t believe it myself. What a fool I was. But I guess those girls intimidated me more than I knew.”

“How’d you ever cross the line?”

“I don’t know. Thinking had nothing to do with it. It just happened. One day I was spraying glitter on her tits. Next day I was licking it off. It’s like we knew each other, had known each other long before we even met. For a very, very long time before. She just made me feel, you know, that everything was okay, that I was supposed to be there.”

“Sounds great.”

“It was. Until her boyfriend got back from the War.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Right.”

“You knew about this guy?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. She told me about him and I heard her, but I just couldn’t quite believe the guy was actually real. I mean, how could he be? There we were, lips to lips, body to body, and between us not even the idea of another real person. And then one day there she is introducing him and I still couldn’t believe it. This is the guy? He looked like trucker number two in a direct-to-cable road movie. I was outta there in less than a week. And that’s the tale of how I ended up here at Bullets ’N’ Brunch.”

“Hope that wasn’t the end of love, too.”

“Remember Vaporine?”

“The movie-star prom queen?”

“Yeah. That one. Hottest chick in the senior class who slept with most of the senior class.”

“Never even spoke to her.”

“I married her.”

“Gremolata and stewed plums,” said Graveyard. “No, you didn’t. You dog. How in hell did that ever happen?”

All right, Ambience was saying to herself. Enough dick measuring. Enough dick tedium. She had scant patience for this game in a world that was itself a male game. And those loofahs in the next booth staring at us are soaking up every word. They’re smirking. They’re judging. We’re the afternoon’s entertainment. We’re tonight’s story of the day.

“Sounds like quite the high school you two attended,” Ambience said. “There a babelicious requirement to get in or what?”

“It’s an ultrapatriotic charter high,” said Graveyard. “It’s not about grades. It’s about how good you look.”

“And just look at us,” Crankcase said. “Graveyard and I were star graduates, and I think I can safely claim that both of us got everything we needed out of life on the basis of our good looks.”

“Almost,” said Graveyard.

A serious-looking door in the rear wall opened, and in came a serious-looking man who walked across the dining room directly up to Crankcase and waited silently until he was acknowledged. He was wearing a navy-blue short-sleeved shirt with the logo BULLETS ’N’ BRUNCH embroidered in gold thread above his right tit. He resembled almost exactly the funny fat comic who closed each episode of A Brother, a Sister, Two Wives, and a Dad with a witty recap. Except that this guy was not fat and did not appear at all funny.

“Yeah,” said Crankcase.

The man bent over and whispered in Crankcase’s ear. Crankcase’s face tightened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment. Something’s come up.” Then he stood and he and his employee walked across the room and exited through the same back door.

“So,” Graveyard said, once he and Ambience were alone, “what do you think?”

“About the range? I’ve been to ranges before.”

“The Crank. What do you think of him?”

Ambience shrugged. “He’s okay.”

“Like the rimfire patty?”

“As in, would I eat him? No.”

“All I asked was what you thought of him.”

“And I told you.”

“There’s a world of opinion between okay and not wanting to give him a blow job.”

“Well, put my assessment somewhere in there.”

“We had a lot of laughs together.”

“That’s good. Laughs are good.”

“Sorry you didn’t like him.”

“I said I did.”

“Not that much. He was my best friend back then.”

“Look, he’s the kind of guy who scores five hits of ellipsis and tells you he’s got one.”

“Harsh.”

“You asked.”

The rear door opened and Crankcase entered and came back to their booth and sat down. He did not look chuffed. “Fun times at the range,” he said. “Just had to escort UnauthorizedDuplication off the premises. Again. He’s a regular here. And a regular fortymeister. And a regular turdbucket. He was on another tear, staggering around, cursing everyone around him, firing freely into other folks’ lanes. He was absolutely untenable. We dragged him out, tossed him into the back seat of ColdCharge’s BeaverRocket, and ColdCharge drove him home. Third time this month. Anyway, so where were we?”

“High school,” Graveyard said. “Your wife.”

“Of course. Vaporine.”

“Yeah, you were saying. How’d that go again?”

So Crankcase told them about accidentally running into her one night just a couple of years ago at Trapezoid, a high-end punk club about a thousand miles away in stinky, sweaty Bel Louche, of all places, where she lived with PlasticPlatter, ex–class bully and current swimming-pool salesman who had married and impregnated her at seemingly the exact same instant and had immediately repeated the impregnation part in two quick successive years so she had a brand new husband and three brand new kids she hadn’t at all planned on back at ol’ Tip O’ The Wedge, so she was happy to meet Crankcase at this utterly timely moment and happier still to enjoy a pricey steak dinner with him the following week and a deeply satisfying afterfuck. And one thing led to another and now they were living together back in Randomburg with two brand new kids of their own and one dog and one cat and a whole squeaking family of guinea pigs. And Vaporine even got her realtor’s license and, amazingly, turned out to be pretty good at unloading houses no one really wanted onto rubes who didn’t really want to buy and sometimes on the job actually ran now and then into SideEffects, notorious throughout the property biz for being a “real shit dog.”

“No comment,” said Graveyard.

“You got any kids?” Crankcase said.

“No,” said Ambience. “And we’re not looking for them, either.”

“Of course,” said Graveyard, “if we do happen to stumble across one or two along the way, that’s fine. We’ll pick ’em up and take ’em with us.”

“From what I hear, you could hire a full care staff if you wanted to.”

“The whole town knows?”

“The whole town knows everything.”

“We’re only modestly well off,” Ambience said.

“What’s that mean: kinda rich?”

“It means,” said Graveyard, “we’re exactly as rich as we need to be.”

“My goal, too,” Crankcase said.

“Whose is it not?” said Graveyard.

“Money money money money,” said Ambience. “I’m sick of talking about it.”

“We weren’t talking about it,” Graveyard said. “Until just now.”

Ambience stared off through the front window at the bleak gray parking lot outside. Cars drove in. Cars backed out. “I’m sorry, then,” she said. “Maybe it’s just me. I can’t seem to think about anything else. I look around. I don’t see anything else. I listen. I don’t hear anything else.”

“Then done,” Graveyard said. “Rest of the day money is off-limits. We’ll enter a finance-free zone.”

“You could drive around for a bit, catch some of the local sights,” said Crankcase. “Fallen into any of the area’s numerous tourist traps yet?”

“Not a one,” Graveyard said. “We’re still trying to clean the gunk out of our hair from last week’s misadventures in the family tar pit.”

“I hear ya, buddy.”

“Thinking about taking in the big bad gorge later this afternoon. Ambience’s never seen it.”

They tried not to look at each other.

“Gotta do it, then. It’s what we’re famous for. Especially the bigness and the badness.”

“And big holes in the ground,” Ambience said, “are among the favorite sights of mine to peer into.”

“Then you won’t be disappointed,” said Crankcase. He glanced over at the bag Graveyard had carried in from the car and kept by his side ever since he’d entered the place. “Those your poppers?”

Graveyard nodded. “You assume correctly.”

“Let’s see whatcha got.”

Graveyard leaned over and unzipped the bag. Crankcase started rooting with growing excitement among the magic tangle of exotic barrels and stocks. He let out a soft whistle. “You’ve got a LipLock40A and an NB30. Fucking unbelievable.”

He picked up the LipLock. He shifted it around in his hands. He glanced at Graveyard. “Feels right.”

“Yeah, don’t it?” said Graveyard.

He put the LipLock back into the bag, traded it for another. “A goddamn Smashnikov500AK. How the hell did you ever score one of these babies? There’s supposedly only about twenty left in the whole freaking world.”

Graveyard pointed to his mouth. “Lips,” he said. “They’re sealed.”

“All right, then, be like that.” He pulled out of the bag a tricked-out assault rifle that resembled a toy water gun with enough add-ons to impress a child. “This is like Christmas morning at the Eastern District All-In Gun Club. A modified select BallBuster 480/90. I’ve only read about these. You know, you’ve got enough in here to outfit a world-class weapons museum.”

“And you get the honor of first choice,” said Graveyard. “Pick one.”

“Actually think I’m going to need a full connoisseur’s sampling. Hold on a sec.” Crankcase left the dining room, came back immediately with a fistful of rolled-up paper targets. He unrolled them carefully, as if revealing a rare selection of ancient parchment. Each displayed a photo-real life-size portrait of a zombie in one of the more colorful and grotesque end stages of full zombiehood.

“Friends of the family,” Crankcase said. “Okay, let’s make this interesting. Tell me, who’d you like to kill?”

“Me?” said Graveyard.

“You’re the one I’m looking at.”

“Well, at the moment, no one really. I’m a peaceful soul.”

“Cut the crap, Graveyard. I’ve known you too long. Everybody’s got at least one person in their life they wouldn’t mind taking a free shot at. For example, right now, if I could get away with it, I’d be happy to drill that piece of doo I just kicked out of here earlier today. Planet couldn’t help but be a more agreeable place without his nonsense in it. So right now, who’s the piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe?”

“Well, given no choice in the matter, I guess there might be a single special someone, now that I think of it.”

Crankcase spread one of the zombie sheets across the top of the table. He took a black marker from his shirt pocket and bent over. “Name?”

“He calls himself Mr. BlisterPac.”

Crankcase started printing in bold caps across the zombie’s decaying forehead.

“Leave off the k at the end,” said Ambience. “He’s the product of creative spelling.”

“I didn’t know that,” Graveyard said.

“It’s what it said on his business card.”

“Never noticed.”

“All right,” said Crankcase. “Your turn, Ambience.” He pulled out a second sheet and prepared to write.

“You know, I think I’m most comfortable with just plain Anonymous,” she said. “Anonymous Zombie.” Crankcase wrote. Then he took a third sheet and printed across the top in big block letters: LOOPHOLE. “Something personal for me,” he said. He looked around as if to check that everyone was there who was supposed to be there. “All right, now, let’s do her.” He had them put in earplugs. He had them put on earmuffs. Then he led them from the cafeteria to a door into a tunnel that led to another door and then a third door after that and at last they entered the telltale musk and crack of the range itself. They each chose a lane and a gun out of Graveyard’s bag. Crankcase, of course, opted for the Smashnikov. He let the gun settle into his arms, checked the heft and balance. “It’s a good fit,” he said.

“I’ll stick with the BoxcarSystem 20/10,” Graveyard said. His longtime favorite.

“The sniper’s friend,” said Crankcase.

Ambience chose the LampLighter 505, the weapon, incidentally, most favored by mass shooters in schools, office buildings, theaters, and churches. It did the job.

“Big firepower for the little lady,” Crankcase said.

“Why take prisoners?” she said.

They found their various ammo boxes and stepped up to the line. Crankcase clipped the individual zombie portraits to the overhead carriers and ran each one out to about twenty-five yards.

“Fire when ready,” he said. “Single rounds. Take out the head first. You know with zombies you got to go for the head.”

So they assumed their positions and began. Plink, plink. Plink, plink, plink. Very measured. Very polite. Then they stopped and pressed the buttons and the paper targets came rattling back to them. Crankcase had a nice tight cluster in the middle of Loophole’s decaying forehead. Graveyard’s BlisterPac displayed a scattered acne of lethal hits all across his livid flat face. All Ambience’s shots, however, were centered solely dead center on the hapless Anonymous’s bulging bloodshot eyes.

“Wow!” said Crankcase. “Look at little Annie Oakley here.” Both eye sockets had been completely obliterated. “Even if they’re still alive after such quality shooting, they sure as hell can’t see a damn thing.”

“I hate zombies,” said Ambience.

“When the apocalypse erupts,” Crankcase said, “I want to be on your team.”

“Sure. I’ll put you on the waitlist.”

“I look forward to the outbreak.”

They reloaded with fresh magazines. “All right,” Crankcase said. “Full automatic now. Tear the hell out of those zombies.” They took their places. They began firing. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. The explosion of sound was so abrupt, so fierce, so continuous that everyone in the room not only heard it through their ear protection, they also felt it through their skin. People in other lanes stopped their own shooting and stepped back to get a clear look at whoever could be responsible for such monstrous firepower. But they could barely see through the thick, enveloping smoke. The din didn’t cease until all the magazines were empty. And still the echo remained.

Crankcase let out a childish whoop and clapped his hands. “That was certainly something,” he said. “Let’s check the damage.” They retracted the targets. Crankcase’s and Graveyard’s zombies were completely obliterated, shreds of paper dangling uselessly in the air. They congratulated each other on their shooting skills. Then they turned to Ambience’s target. At first neither of them spoke. With the heavy LampLighter on full automatic she had managed to draw, as if with a powerful pen, a complete well-formed circle in hundreds of .308 rounds about the silently shrieking head of blind Anonymous.

“Hard-core,” said Crankcase. He couldn’t take his eyes off the mutilated photo. “Don’t want to get in a gunfight with her.”

“No,” Graveyard said, “you certainly don’t.”

And Ambience stood there quietly among two guys with guns and ever so slowly, ever so dramatically unveiled the biggest, broadest smile anyone had seen on her face since its arrival in Randomburg some eleven long days before.