Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 11

  Fortunately it was still warm out, although the evening chill was coming on fast. I stripped off my shirt and tossed it into the van. I figured I had maybe a minute or two more to prepare a surprise for the three men on the roof who were doubtless heading my way with some urgency, the better to escape the police net which would soon be in place. But as I was reaching for the pipe bomb and remote detonator in my bag, the rear door of the building flew open and the three men came charging out, and there we were, standing together in a grouping one might associate more with a cocktail party than an alleyway blood fest. There was a guy in a black turtleneck and five hundred dollar alligator shoes, holding a rocket launcher. A guy in a blue silk jacket and wide brimmed fedora, a cell phone stuck to the side of his face. A guy in a green jogging suit with lots of zippers and the latest generation of Air Nike’s, clutching a gym bag. Scattered throughout the lot of them were more than a few gold chains. The cell phone guy had a pierced tongue, and a few too many earrings to suit my taste.

  The men were staring hard. I could almost hear the buzzing of their intracranial circuitry as it fired up higher and higher to the level of threat assessment required to preserve them from loss of life and limb. They were going to do something, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. It depended on how well they handled the element of surprise. When you’ve just fired a rocket into a man’s apartment, then discover he’s escaped, and you suddenly run into that same man, massive, bloody, shirtless, and angry, towering over you in a confined space, holding a very large killing knife, the very surprise of the situation can kill you. But rather than wait for them to simply die from fright, I decided to explain to them why this moment must inevitably be their last. So much violence is senseless these days. For my money, I think it’s a happier death when one knows the reason for it. I decided to spread the happiness as far as I could.

  “You killed my cat,” I said. There was a reply from the green jogging suit. Presumably in Russian or one of those languages which are primarily guttural. The reply was short, maybe only five or six words. Perhaps he said he was sorry about the cat. Perhaps not. Somehow I tend to think he said something more in the way of a suggestion as to how I could perform certain unnatural acts upon myself, or upon my Granny, or possibly upon the dead cat.

  The guy who held the rocket launcher must have had some training, because he dropped it and began backing away, at the same time reaching to his hip for some sort of weapon. The guy on the phone was frozen, looking at me in disbelief, unsure of whether or not to drop the phone and run, or report what he was seeing to the person on the other line. The guy with the gym bag reached inside it.

  I don’t watch the eyes. The eyes are the way to a man’s soul and the way is full of dark turnings and shifty feints. I’ve seen men gutted from groin to sternum while staring into the eyes of their opponent. So I never look there when it’s killing time. I watch the center body, taking a wide focus, absorbing with all my senses the play of light and shadow. I register everything but think about nothing. If you can’t learn this first lesson you’ll die in the novitiate stage from a hard kick in the balls you never saw coming.

  If ever you must fight for your life, remember this--there is somebody deep inside you who has managed to survive and reproduce in a steady line for the past six thousand years or so. Somebody who’s run the gauntlet of wild animals, both human and otherwise. Who has survived the onslaught of invading armies and the predations of robbers and thieves. You must now become that somebody. You must bring him forth, for it is only he who understands what must be done. You must turn off the sit-com of your life, remove your tie and coat, put on a bloody butcher’s apron and switch on the meat grinder.

  It was time to party. The rocket man’s handgun was coming into play. A Ruger Blackhawk, the sort of weapon designed to blast through a foot-thick elephant skull at close range. The moon had come up in the east, haloed in the night smog, casting a surreal glow round about us. A cell phone clattered, and a pointed loafer came swinging upwards towards my balls. A bag fell to the ground and a switchblade knife clicked open somewhere to my right.

  Three against one and nowhere to go. It was time for me to go to work. There is only one attitude to have at such a moment. Total contempt for the enemy. I stepped forward, toward the several hundred pounds of shifting, brightly feathered yet unredeemed humanity which needed, in my opinion, a transformation from it’s present material form, a forging and repackaging, if you will, into something fit more properly for the furnaces of hell.

  You don’t know what will happen. You only know that you are stepping into another realm, where everything you are and everything you used to be fall away under the superheated pressure of an instinct so powerful it cannot be understood. It can only be reflected upon after the fact. An image of Johnson coming out of the shadows, and the silent, feral leap of a dog. The pointed loafer swatted to one side, the ankle bone cracking under the blow of a knife butt. A guy trying to slash at my head and missing completely. The boom of a shotgun. The man with the Blackhawk revolver still standing, headless in a halo of blood mist, his body unaware that the head was gone, unable to process the information without that very head. The jaws of a massive German Shepherd fastened firmly into the groin of a green jogging suit. The Bowie’s heavy fifteen-inch blade on a full-power down stroke, cleaving the phone man’s forehead wide open all the way down to his chin, the blade wrenched right then left, cracking the skull obscenely wide open, the brains, and blood and snot spilling over my hand like hot, runny oatmeal. The crunching sound of dog jaws on tailbone cartilage.

  There’s a unique silence in the aftermath of such a thing. When it’s over, you back away and try to take it in. Had it lasted more than five seconds? I somehow doubted it. Time had no meaning at a moment like this. It was an illusion. One could imagine that this moment was the only moment there had ever been. All memories of life before the moment were but a dream from which one had finally awakened. But experience had taught me that outside of this transcendent bubble we were in, time was real, and the equally real world, offended by the fires and the noise and the bloodletting, would soon be closing in on this very tableau, where it would be analyzed carefully by sour-faced fat men with concrete souls and hearts of iron. The people of this world called those men The Force. I didn’t want to be around when The Force started asking their questions and preparing their iron cages for those whom they intended to make heartily sorry for having offended them. I retrieved the grenade launcher, which was German made, and the equipment bag, which happened to contain a half-dozen rocket grenades. Never look a gift weapon in the barrel.