Dependent Days

by Chris Sapp

  “I’m not Batman,” Lonesome said.

  Before Lead Rat could make sense of that, Lonesome shattered his nose with a vicious head butt. In a spectacular spray of blood, Lead Rat went down.

  Gap Tooth and Greasy Hair sprung into action, lunging at Lonesome. They were over-matched and Greasy Hair received a nut-crushing kick to the groin which sent him down to the pavement in a heap. A short blade flashed in Lonesome’s hand as the steel caught the light of the moon on its downward arc. Gap Tooth’s hand left his body and bounced into a puddle of grime in the corner.

  Gap Tooth was on his knees, screaming and staring wide-eyed at the end of his arm where his hand used to be, blood spurting from the stump. Lonesome sheathed the blade with no wasted movement, and planted his foot in Gap Tooth’s face with a spinning back kick. Gap Tooth’s gap got a little wider as two teeth flew from his mouth, skipped across the concrete and careened off the back wall like dice at a craps table.

  Not finished making bad life decisions, Greasy Hair attempted to grab Lonesome from behind. Anticipating the attack, Lonesome ducked and Greasy Hair slammed chin-first into the brick wall. Lonesome retrieved a pair of steel nunchucks from within the folds of his trench-coat and smashed both of Greasy Hair’s knees, sending him to the ground wailing in agony for a second time.

  Lonesome whirled the nunchucks over his head and then down onto Greasy Hair’s larynx, silencing him.

  With a flurry, Lonesome holstered the nunchucks back into his coat and surveyed the would be rapists. Confident that he had taken the field, Lonesome stooped down and began to rifle through the pockets of the fallen. Mindful of the dirty things street rats carried about their persons, Lonesome counted as his spoil, fifteen dollars, one tarnished gold ring, a couple of working switchblades, and a gold cross. Satisfied that he plundered all there was to plunder, he crossed to Erin’s bag and stooped to pick it up. He never made it.

  Erin slammed into him with a monster-sized hug. She was on her knees, like a child hugging a parent’s leg.

  “Oh, God! Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  Sure she’s grateful now, thought Lonesome. But in a week, when she’s ordering her ten dollar coffee in some joint I wouldn’t be caught dead in, tonight’s attack will be a distant memory, like losing your first tooth.

  When her savior didn’t say “You’re Welcome”, Erin looked up at him. To her surprise, he was no longer smiling. His face was dead and emotionless.

  “Go home,” he said, then stalked out of the alley, leaving Erin and her effects where he found them.

  If someone were to ask, and if he were in a mood to answer, Lonesome would have said, the world’s a shitty place, full of shitty people. That’s what he would have said, had anybody asked. But nobody asked.

  Back behind the wheel of his Camaro, Lonesome cranked the ignition and dropped it in reverse. He was about to hit the gas when something caught his eye, causing him to slam on the brakes. Erin, carrying her bag with one hand and holding her torn dress closed with the other, limped out of the alley. Lonesome sighed deeply as he stared through the windshield. Steeling his resolve, he leaned over and wound down the passenger side window. He was about to speak when Erin got to the edge of the curb and dropped from view. Lonesome sighed an even deeper sigh, his frustration at the level he wanted the Camaro to be, the red line.

  “Are you okay?” he said in a tone that really didn’t convey all the sincerity that usually accompanies such inquiries.

  Erin popped back up like a puppet on a string.

  “I’m good,” she said.

  She turned and began to hobble off down the street. Lonesome pinched the bridge of his nose and thought of all the sleep he was missing. He raised his head and pulled the Camaro alongside the gimpy Erin.

  Sincerity took another hit as Lonesome leaned over and called to her through the window.

  “Do you need a ride?”

  In the blink of an eye, Erin bolted to the side of the car.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  She struggled with the door handle, until Lonesome finally leaned over and opened it for her. Erin collapsed into the seat, a ragged mess. Lonesome gripped the wheel and stared out the windshield, waiting. Beside him, Erin was silent. After what seemed to Lonesome to be an interminable amount of time, he sighed.

  “So, anyway… I know where I live… “ he said.

  Erin came to herself and looked over at him.

  “Oh, yeah, right. French Quarter apartments,” she said.

  Lonesome hit the gas and sped through the streets of Bay City without saying another word. Thirty city blocks later, the silence in the car hung heavy. Erin sat in her seat and tried to act invisible. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she looked over at the side of Lonesome’s head.

  “This is a nice car,” she said.

  Lonesome’s only response was to flip on the radio and crank up the volume. “Lonely is the night” by Billy Squier blared from the speakers, squelching any further attempts at conversation.

  Five minutes later, Lonesome’s Camaro screeched to a stop outside Erin’s apartment. The French Quarter Apartments were a shabby imitation of the famous New Orleans locale. Lonesome waited for Erin to get out, but instead Erin turned off his radio, leaned over, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Thank you… again,” she said.

  Lonesome didn’t get excited. The kiss came with the territory. Half the women and a good percentage of the men he saved kissed him. Twenty five percent of the women did nothing, leaving another twenty five percent that offered a lot more. Lonesome didn’t care. He had done his thing, and like always, just wanted to go home. Lonesome stared straight ahead until Erin got the message and got out.

  She pushed the car door closed and a millisecond after the latch caught, Lonesome punched the gas and sped away, confident that his chivalrous obligations had been met.

  Sample Chapter from Alien Hunter: Genesis

  By

  Chris Sapp

  Now Available on Amazon!

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AS2OQMI

  3

  When I woke, the first thing I noticed was that my trailer had been flipped on to its side and that I was sprawled out on the front wall. I did a quick self-triage and found no major injuries. Just a few cuts and bruises, the biggest and most painful being a combination of the two on my upper right thigh. I must’ve whacked the hell out of something. I got slowly and painfully to my feet, using the bed on my left, which was now standing vertical. A strong wave of dizziness struck me and I realized that I had the biggest migraine of my life. It was located on the left side of my head but the significance of this wouldn’t be relevant until later. I waited until the dizziness passed and then I assessed the damage of my trailer. It was as totaled as my first car had been. My next step was to find a way out.

  Going out the door wasn’t an option because it was face down against the asphalt. My only other choices were the big windows. One was at the front above the sofa and twenty thousand feet away and one was at the back, five feet from my current position. You would think that the latter would be the obvious choice since I’d have to wade through piles upon piles of ruined dining ware to reach the former. I could just picture losing a toe on a shard of broken coffee mug or maybe even getting a fork in the heel. But the back window was no peach either. It had been shattered in the quake and there was shiny bits of glass everywhere.

  I was about to suck it up and tiptoe to the window when I had an idea. All of my pillows had fallen off the bed and were bunched in the corner. Mindful of where I was walked, I snagged them with my fingertips and then I laid them down on the floor like stepping-stones. Treading gently across pillows wasn’t a very manly thing to do but it sure as hell beat the alternative.

  Two minutes later, I had escaped the ruin that was my trailer and was standing on the cool asphalt in nothing but my boxers. Absurdly, I felt like an actor in a bad parody of Die Hard. The night’s breeze had a chill to it and I instinct
ively folded my arms across my chest. I didn’t know what had happened but it definitely wasn’t an earthquake. There was an enormous crater in the middle of the parking lot. It was the largest and strangest looking crater I’d ever seen. The concrete looked as if something had exploded up out of the ground, instead of being crushed inward by something falling from the sky. The other actors’ trailers were in similar conditions to mine and one of them, Erika’s I think, was actually on fire. As I trotted over to it, I kept hearing a mantra of Willie asking “Did ya squeeze her jugs?” “Did ya squeeze her jugs?” “Did ya squeeze her jugs?”

  I attempted to peek through the busted back window but all I could see was dancing orange flames. The heat was a much-welcomed change but as I continued to look (for, what, Erika’s charred body?) the heat quickly became uncomfortable. I gave up hope and backed away before the flames could lick my eyebrows off.

  I moved along to the other trailers, checking each for survivors. But all I found was a working flashlight, a golf club, a box of matches, and a package of cigarettes. I borrowed the flashlight and the golf club. But I stole the cigarettes and I didn’t even know why. I didn’t smoke. Stone did. But something told me I was never was going to pretend to be him again. A disaster of this magnitude would most likely kill production. Maybe it was for the best. Some of the trailers’ windows were already busted and the ones that weren’t I took care of, Happy Gilmore style. I found odd holes in the top of each of the trailers. The holes were probably four feet in diameter and the edges were warm and melted as if some kind of hot liquid had created them.

  The next trailer I came upon belonged to the producer’s three nephews. The first nephew was both under and in front of the trailer. Everything but his head and left hand had been crushed under the overturned trailer. His skin was pasty and death must have been slow because he looked as if he’d tried to pull himself out but had only succeeded in clawing his fingernails off. His tongue had flopped out of his mouth and was drying on the pavement. I quickly set to busting out the back window to keep from vomiting. Once the window was taken care of, I climbed in and was assaulted by an incredibly foul odor. I thumbed on the flashlight and stepped past the bed. I didn’t know any of the nephews’ names but I called out anyway.

  I didn’t get any replies but about seven steps in I found the source of the awful smell. Apparently the second nephew had been in the middle of a fairly healthy shit when the earthquake (uh, disaster or whatever) struck. The bizarre part was that the kid’s head was missing. It didn’t look like a decapitation. It was too messy for that. It looked as if his head had simply bursts. A large piece of scalp had been plastered to the ceiling and blood was dripping off of it in large drops. The almond colored FRP paneling was splattered with specks of red and drying in streaks. The nephew’s spinal column protruded bluntly out of his shoulders like a rotten tree stump. The edges of his skin were frayed and hanging loosely off his neck muscles. I checked the rest of the trailer but there was no sign of the third nephew.

  The nightmare that was the boys’ trailer was six steps behind me when I suddenly bent over and lost the leftover Chinese I’d eaten three decades ago. I placed my hands on my knees and hurled into a crack in the asphalt. The crack was deep and through watery eyes I saw my vomit descend deep into the darkness. Not that it mattered (since they were dead) but I was glad that I hadn’t been a bad houseguest and spewed in their trailer.

  I recovered and it was almost three minutes and two cigarettes later before I came to the next trailer. I knew when I saw, Ollie, a tabby cat on the prowl, that this dumped over Airstream belonged to Vic. I knew Vic owned an Airstream like me but I had never taken the time to visit. It was a nice trailer or at least it had been. The cat had been with us since AH2 and he issued a soft meow and then nestled against my bare leg. His fur was warm and soft. I scratched the top of his head and he titled his chin back. He purred me “a thanks” and I could feel it vibrating against my leg. When I stepped through the busted back window, Ollie didn’t follow and I knew that meant one of two things. Either I was going to find the trailer empty or Vic was as dead as those two boys.

  I found the prop master lying on the front wall of his trailer. He was on his stomach with his face turned away from me. His legs were pinched under a section of cabinets that had broken off from the wall. As I got closer I realized that all of his silverware, plates, and glasses were scattered across the floor like some kind of Martha Stewart minefield. I knelt at his feet, which was as close as I could get without moving the cabinet. The heels of his feet were callused and yellow. It reminded me of how Gina’s feet looked in the summer time. She hated shoes. She’d go bare foot year-round if I’d let her. The wind howled and whistled as it was sucked in through the busted window. Chips of glass were blown loose and I heard them ricochet off the wall.

  It was while I was kneeling there next to Vic’s dead body that I realized that I had never seen him without his straw hat. Staring at his unruly hair filled me with an overwhelming desire to organize a nationwide manhunt. The hat needed to be found. Someone needed to find it. It was Vic’s damn signature hat and he deserved to die in it. Tears were streaking down my face and I had no idea how long I’d been crying. I pawned it off on shock because I didn’t even like Vic; he annoyed the shit out of me. Still, he didn’t deserve this.

  I wiped the tears away from my cheeks and discovered something very weird. I was weeping blood. I must’ve gotten a nasty cut when I got knocked out because not only was the blood running down my face, it was also screwing up my sight. I couldn’t see a damn thing with my left eye. I needed a mirror. I settled for the glass in the cabinet doors on top of Vic. I thumbed the flashlight on, stuck it under my chin (like I did when I told Gina scary stories) and leaned forward to look at my reflection.

  It took my brain a minute to process what I was seeing. I wasn’t weeping blood, in fact I wasn’t weeping at all. Where my left eyeball should have been was a grotesque empty socket. The walls of the socket were caked with blood and my eyelids were shriveled and dry. No wonder I had the biggest migraine of my life. My damn eyeball had been ripped out. Having one eye wasn’t the end of the world, I mean I’d definitely have to get an eye patch because last time I checked empty eye sockets didn’t rate real high with the ladies. But, what really bothered me was that I hadn’t even noticed that my eyesight had been reduced by fifty percent. So what if it’s the same eye Stone lost during his first tour of duty. My name wasn’t fucking Stone!

  “Stone … is that you?” croaked a familiar voice.

  I looked away from my miserable reflection towards Vic’s body. The voice had sounded just like him. But it couldn’t have been Vic because he was-

  “Stone?”

  Oh my God it is Vic. He’s alive!

  “Yeah, it’s me Vic. I’m gonna get you outta here, okay.”

  I was completely disgusted with myself. Vic was alive the whole damn time. I should’ve been doing everything I could to get that cabinet off of him. Instead I was crying about my eyeball. It’s not like I didn’t have another one.

  “Just hang on,” I told him as I tried to move the cabinet. It didn’t budge.

  “Forget about me. It’s too late,” he cried.

  With my feet flat on the floor, I bent my knees and grabbed the edge of the cabinet. I lifted. This time it did move and I kept lifting until it was practically standing upright.

  “Alright! Can you move at all?” I asked.

  There was plenty of room for Vic to crawl out from underneath the cabinet. But he didn’t. He just grunted and then rolled over onto his back as if he was sun bathing. My thighs were on fire and my shoulders and arms were shaking badly.

  “Vic, I can’t hold this all day!”

  “It’s too late for me Stone. I’m already infected.” His voice was eerily calm.

  Infected? “What?”

  I looked down at him. His hands were resting on his chest. Just add his favorite outfit and he’d be read
y for his pine box. My strength gave out and I had no choice but to lower the cabinet back down on top of him. He didn’t complain.

  “What do you mean it’s too late?” I asked.

  “I’m infected. I got one of em’ in my head.”

  I looked at him horrified. “I don’t understand.”

  “Extraterrestrial. In my noggin.” he spit, pressing a finger against his forehead.

  I sat down before my quivering legs sat down for me. Infected? Extraterrestrial? Are you fucking kidding me? Vic was practically on his death bed and he was talking about aliens.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Vic?”

  “Didn’t ya see the hole in the earth?”

  “Yeah, I saw it. But I thought it was an-

  “Meteor? Don’t kid yourself, Stone. That’s where the aliens have been hidin’.”

  “Okay, so the aliens came up out of the ground and then got into your head?” I couldn’t hide the sarcasm in my voice. I was mad…and scared.

  “No, the ones in the earth are soldiers. This one,” he tapped his forehead, “is an infiltrator.”

  “How’d it get there?”

  “Water,” his breathing became very labored, “the bastards poisoned the earth’s water supply.”

  “But … so everyone’s infected?”

  “You ain’t.”

  I couldn’t believe it. He was smiling. “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Cuz, you’re a lefty. They got no use for lefties.”

  “How do you kn-

  “It tells me,” tapping his forehead again, “told me everything.”

  “They’ve infected everybody that’s right handed?”

  “Yes,” more wheezing, “but only the right brained survive!”

  “What? Why?”

  Again that smile. “Because the creative spirit can’t and won’t be controlled.”

  “So what happens to the left brained people?”

  “I don’t know about you but if I was in a car that started drivin’ itself around I’d get out as fast as I could.”