The Fall of Polite

by Sam Kench

  ‘I said that’s far enough. Don’t come any closer.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just-’

  ‘Turn around and go back the way you came.’ Probey had a one-handed grip on his rifle now, pointing it to the sky.

  ‘No, it’s okay. My name’s Maisey. This is Tommy. We’re looking for help. I’m not one of those bastards running around robbing people.’ She looked down at the kid and reminded herself to watch her language around him.

  ‘Listen, take your kid-’

  ‘He’s not my kid. I found him sleeping in a dumpster behind that factory.’ She pointed a thumb back over her frayed jacket shoulder to a shoe factory with scorch marks around the brick inlaid windows.

  Maisey had felt her heart break when she found Tommy curled up in that dumpster, taking him for dead at first. He had been in there a half day already before she found him and he hadn’t eaten anything solid for another day past that. He had begun to eat what he could stomach from inside the dumpster.

  ‘He said his mom left him there-’

  Lance paced back and forth in front of Eamon. The side of his gun tapped shakily against his bandana, his finger firmly on the trigger.

  'Look darling, you're pretty as a picture but we ain't got time for all that business. So just turn back around.'

  'What? We need help-'

  ‘That’s not my concern.’ Probey barked.

  Maisey was shocked. She slid a couple of feet down the hill through the snow. ‘I- I thought you could help us.’

  ‘You aren’t of any use to me.’

  Eamon felt an urge to fire his shotgun into the back of Probey’s head. He figured he had about a 50-50 chance of Michael, caught by surprise, firing his newly acquired pistol at him, but a 100% chance of jumpy Lance shooting him before he could even rack in a new shell. He had to prioritize his trip to the retirement home, so instead of stepping up, he stood silently and watched as Probey dismissed the poor woman like her and the child were worthless.

  ‘I thought you could help,’ she repeated in shock.

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  ‘You’re a cop!’ Her words were slathered in hatred.

  ‘That’s right.’ A tension hung in the air, Probey’s sunglass covered glare not quite turning the shocked woman away. His gun drifted out of the air and into a two handed grip.

  ‘Will you just help me get to the high school? There’s supposed to be some kind of safe setup in the gym or the auditorium or something.’

  ‘We’re not going that way. I’m not going to tell you again. Walk away.’ Probey followed strict trigger discipline at all times. In his head he was conducting a mental countdown from ten. On three he would move his finger to the trigger, and on zero he would open fire on the woman and child.

  He got down to six before Maisey turned away with the child, calling Probey a bastard over one shoulder and a goddamn son-of-a-bitch over the other. She went in through the propped open door of the shoe factory she had come through, then shut and barred the door behind her.

  ***

  MAISEY CROSSED the factory floor and exited out the back. She passed by the dumpster she had found the kid in. A yell flew at her from her side and made her jump. Turning around, she was met with the sight of a bone thin woman with wild and dirty hair rushing towards her.

  ‘Get away from my kid!’ Her black/yellow, misshapen teeth betrayed her crack and meth addiction.

  ‘He’s your son?’ Maisey asked, though her real question was still to follow, ‘How can you leave your son alone in this hell-hole? What kind of mother are you?!’

  ‘Oh shut the fuck up, bitch!’ The crackhead closed the distance between them, dirt and dust fell from her tattered white garments as she moved. Her skin was covered in a gel of grime. ‘Let go of my kid’s hand! Get over here, Tommy!’

  ‘No, you stay away from that crazy lady.’ Maisey spoke down at the tiny terrified child. Tommy was silent, his collar pulled up over his mouth and his eyes unblinking. The crackhead was one addict who wasn’t going to let an apocalypse stop her from getting her fix. She had left the kid alone for two days to track down a drug source, of which there were still a couple in business and whose prices had raised ten-fold; truly an industry unfettered by the fall of polite. She didn’t feel an ounce badly about leaving Tommy behind. It was what was best for him, she had told both him and herself.

  ‘Get away from him, you fucking bitch!’ The crackhead snarled. Yellowed spit flew through the air as she slashed Maisey’s face with a razor blade held between her thumb and three bony fingers.

  A curled diagonal line carved through Maisey’s face, splitting her right eyeball vertically in two. The slash continued all the way down through her top lip and gum and halfway through her bottom lip before slipping out of her flesh and back out into the open sunlight. The scream echoed around the factory as Maisey fell to the gravelly snow, clutching at her eye as if pressure could alleviate the unimaginable pain. She blinked involuntarily; the split eyelid peeled apart each time it opened and closed. Her tear ducts pumped and her eyelashes thrashed like a seizure patient.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ The crackhead yelled down at Maisey, rolling and screaming on the ground. ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’ The crackhead picked up an icy orange brick from a pile beside the factory wall and clobbered Maisey over the head. The screaming terminated, followed shortly by the end of its distorted echo.

  A chipped and bloodied brick hit the ground and the crackhead took off, dragging Tommy along behind her. He was yanked straight off his feet, his shoes almost coming off as they dragged along the slush covered gravel. He hung from his wrist clenched tightly in his mother’s hand like a stuffed animal hung from a claw machine. Her discolored fingernails dug into his skin. He stared at Maisey as he was pulled backwards, her motionless body getting smaller and smaller.

  6. A PILE OF DEAD PENSIONERS

  THE SECOND VEHICLE pulled up to the gazebo and the gang was reunited. As he approached, Georgie gave Probey a nod that let him know what he asked had been done.

  ‘Any trouble?’ Probey inquired, expecting none.

  Georgie re-affirmed Probey's expectation with a slow shake of the head. One way, pause, then the other.

  AT THE FARM Georgie took out the brother without leaving the car. He leaned against the window frame and took aim through his scope at Paul, who was in transit from the chicken coop to the house with eggs in his hands.

  Paul recognized the crack of a rifle, but before he could turn around, his brain was scattered across the snow behind him. The eggs shattered on the ground and his body fell atop the yolk.

  Georgie yanked back on the rifle’s bolt and ejected the empty shell casing onto the floor of the car.

  His walk to the house was slow. Not out of caution, but because it was the most comfortable speed for him to move with his left foot having an infection that he had been ignoring for several months. He could deal with the pain, he just hoped it wouldn’t need to be amputated. He often felt like his body was falling apart, and in those times he would say to hell with it.

  Making his way inside, Georgie hung his long gun off its shoulder strap and withdrew his handgun, a top-break Webley revolver. He confidently made his way through each room on the first floor before ascending the stairs and eventually reaching the closet that housed Lucille, and the twins. He opened the door with a gentle push.

  The start of a ferocious yell left Lucille’s lips with every intention of bringing the hatchet in her hands down on Georgie’s head, but she had moved nary an inch before a bullet struck her breast and sent her to the closet floor between her two children.

  At a calm, deliberate rhythm, Georgie shot each child in their identical face, then fired another shot into their mother’s head. The door drifted shut and Georgie turned away unfazed, not an ounce of emotion creeping across his façade.

  EAMON, FULLY DISILLUSIONED as to the number of living family members he had left, gave the group directions to the retirement home.

 
‘Why the fuck are we going to a retirement home?’ Michael asked as the posse split back into two groups and hit the road in their vehicles.

  ‘I need to find my wife. She might be there. Her mother’s there.’

  The posse vehicles cruised easily through the town, the only vehicles on the road. The jeep housed Lance, Probey, Eamon, and Michael and led the way.

  ‘I was kind of getting a no women allowed sort of vibe from how that just went down with that woman at the gazebo.’ Said Michael.

  Probey interjected, looking out of the passenger side window, ‘That’s right. They get in the way and have all kinds of needs and predilections that just complicate matters. They ain’t any good in a fight, ain’t any good for safety, and that’s what takes priority above all else.’

  ‘But we’re going to find my wife.’ Eamon said it as a statement but was also hoping to hear confirmation from Probey.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll look for her. If we find her, you can make sure she’s safe, tell her how much you love her, and then tell her goodbye.’

  Eamon didn’t argue. He knew it wouldn’t matter and he knew that if and when he found Beth he would figure everything out; run off with her and hide from the gang or kill Probey and the others if he felt himself capable in whatever context the decision needed to be made.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, the two vehicles neared the retirement home. Eamon’s directions as they got closer had become less surefooted. They turned off the town’s main street onto a winding, one-lane dirt road lined with evergreen trees.

  ‘You hear that?’ Lance asked as he rolled down the window. Music was playing loudly over some sort of sound system from farther down the road. Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Right Down the Line’ drifted through the trees as the two vehicles continued slowly down the winding road.

  The jeep reached the end of the road which opened into a wide parking lot with a sign at the front confirming they were in the right place. The parking lot was littered with cars. At the end of the parking lot was a one story brick building that ran in the shape of a square with a big open courtyard in the center.

  ‘Lance, you stay with Buella.’

  ‘With pleasure, Probey.’

  The rest of the posse approached the front entrance of the retirement home. They held a two-line formation with Eamon, Probey, and Peter in the front, and Georgie and Michael in the back. Right Down the Line reached its conclusion and, after a moment of soft crackling, started over again from the beginning over the retirement home’s PA.

  ‘Do retirement homes usually smell like death?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stopped at the double-doored entrance. ‘After you.’ Probey said to Eamon with a gentle flutter of his gloved hand.

  Eamon racked his shotgun and pushed his way through the door, unlocked and unblocked. He looked left and right down two wide hallways, empty save for a wheelchair and two tipped over walkers. He stood apprehensively in place long enough for the song to conclude and restart again.

  Walking down long empty hallways, peering into dark, empty rooms, Eamon was distantly followed by the others. He came to a set of double doors opening into a courtyard. Stepping through the doors, he froze and dropped his gun.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Michael exclaimed quietly.

  A pile of the dead elderly had been erected in the center of the snowy courtyard; built against the flagpole for support. The American flag flapped proudly up above. Every resident of the large retirement home, every employee, every unfortunate visitor… all dead and frozen together in a macabre amalgamation that reached far above the top of Eamon’s head. Wrinkled limbs stuck out of the satanic stack as if to wave all of the good in the world farewell.

  Eamon’s heart dropped, feeling deep within its arteries that his wife was entombed within the pile.

  A moment flashed in Eamon’s mind. A few months after their wedding; the moment he told Beth his darkest secret.

  He was a disaffected youth, scratching at the open sores of society in search of a purpose. The path that ultimately led him to the gang that became his second family started out as one far more isolated and alcohol fueled. He did all he could to live up to the ideal of masculinity that had been implanted within him. He drank hard, he womanized, he started fights; all the while hating himself more and more but deluding himself into thinking the opposite. This is what I’m supposed to do. This is how I’m supposed to feel, he told himself over and over again.

  One cold night in Kansas City, a bar fight went too far. Eamon drunkenly threw a right hook into a undeserving lush’s jaw as he had a dozen previous times, only this time, the lush fell in the exact wrong way. The poor sap caught the side of his skull on the edge of a wooden barstool on his way to the floor, and his world went permanently black.

  Eamon thought the guy was playing possum at first… until the blood starting creeping across the dirty floor and the other drunks started panicking. Eamon got out of town immediately afterward.

  He couldn’t look Beth in the eye when he finished telling her this terrible secret. He was sure she would divorce him and leave as soon as she heard, but he couldn’t keep it from her any longer. He had never told anyone what happened that night, not even his Hand-Breaker buddies who openly spoke of killings carried out by their hands.

  But Beth stayed by his side. She knew the man she married wasn’t the same man from that story. She saw the pain on Eamon’s face as he told his secret. She knew it had been eating up at him for years, and to her, he had paid enough for this sin.

  Instead of gasping and running off like he expected, she gave him a warm hug and told him he was better now. Eamon had loved Beth with all his heart for years by that point, but that was the moment that convinced him soulmates were real, and that he had found his.

  And now his soulmate was butchered and left to rot.

  Another door into the courtyard opened and a teenage boy dressed in camouflage limped toward the pile with a metal gasoline canister in his hands. He hadn’t noticed the group. His eyes were locked, seemingly in wonder, or perhaps pride, on the gruesome display of death.

  Georgie found the boy in his scope, but lowered his aim when Eamon charged in, leaving his fallen gun behind.

  The boy hit the ground with Eamon atop him, two ribs broken instantly, blood already entering his lungs. Eamon dragged a punch across the teen’s face, then grabbed the gas canister and drove the rusted metal edge into his nose, splitting the bridge.

  There was a fire burning inside Eamon. A fire that had been suppressed by a now dead love. A fire that, uninhibited, raged with the fervor of an active volcano.

  Eamon put the heels of his hands on each side of the teen’s head and pressed them together. His arms trembled as the young camo-clad man screamed. Eamon stared down into the boy’s pained eyes as he called upon the dormant strength sleeping inside of his weary tree trunk limbs. Suddenly the screaming stopped and Eamon’s hands were a good deal closer together. No longer a head between them, now separated only by a crushed mess of hair, skin, brain and broken skull.

  The anger swirling around Eamon’s soul was all consuming. The agony and death of this stranger had done the slightest to quell the anger, like he was feeding a beast that lived in his gut. This act of violence chipped away at his fury like a man attempting to tunnel through mount Rushmore with a plastic fork.

  A rifle cracked and a frozen body amidst the pile behind Eamon was struck by a bullet fired by another similarly dressed teen standing on the other side of a glassless window surrounded by a few others. They all looked the same age, like they might have graduated high school together, and like that probably wasn’t so long ago. Or maybe it hadn't even happened.

  The group had grown up together, their sociopathic traits shared in equal measure and drawing them tighter together than they would have been otherwise. They had bonded over hunting trips, and while they didn't put up much of a fight, the elderly had proven to be far more exciting game than deer. The sociopathy had graduated to psychopathy wit
h the fall of polite. The found this new world liberating.

  Georgie returned fire and decimated the shooter’s head with a single shot from his rifle. The other teens skittered away from the window and ran off into the retirement home like cockroaches fleeing the kitchen light.

  Eamon lifted up the shirt of the corpse he was kneeling over and grabbed onto the handle of a silver revolver tucked into his waistband. The gun had a long barrel and was large enough that it might have broken the teen’s wrist if he ever tried to fire it one handed. For Eamon, the kickback was of no concern.

  Eamon was already in forward motion as he stood, tearing across the courtyard and blasting through the double doors on the far side with his shoulder. The rest of the posse started behind him until Probey put his arm out.

  ‘Wait. Let him do this.’ He looked specifically to Georgie, ‘Let him get this out of his system. If he needs help, he’ll call us.’

  Eamon fired twice through a closed door that he saw two of the disturbed teens disappear through. Two .357 sized holes punched through the door and Eamon heard scrambling on the other side of the particleboard. He kicked the weak door, aiming just to knock it in but ending up taking it clear off its hinges. The door flew into the room, and before it hit the floor, Eamon had shot one of the teens in the head.

  The particleboard door hit the floor and slid across a living room area, landing at the feet of the now dead teenage murderer who collapsed upon it. The second young hunter lifted a semi-automatic handgun and fired as Eamon ducked into a kitchen nook. The thin wood of the kitchen separator did nothing to stop the bullets, but did obscure Eamon’s location as lead flew over and beside him.

  Outside the room, two more psychopathic teens approached from the hallway and a third stood anxiously at the far end.

  Eamon put his palm flat against the floor and leaned out from the kitchen with his gun arm outstretched. He fired twice into the teen’s chest, sending him smashing backwards into a box TV.