The Fall of Polite

by Sam Kench

  Her food supply was holding out, but wouldn’t for too much longer. She would have to venture into town for supplies before long. She wasn’t sure if she was ready. She was stronger, but still not strong enough. Or maybe it was confidence she lacked, or experience. Minimal knowledge of the nearby town was another deterrent to her travel. There were only a handful of fuzzy trips to the local shop with her dad and aunt in her memory bank. Those memories, fuzzy as they were, had Mark erased from them. Maria would need to fumble around the unknown for her supplies in town and wasn’t yet confident in her abilities.

  She laid on her back looking up at the cobweb covered ceiling beams, breathing deeply.

  THE NIGHTMARES HADN’T STOPPED, and Maria’s hatred for Mark only continued to grow. Her vision of revenge grew from a beating at first, until nothing short of Mark’s death would mean justice had been served. After nearly a month and a half of revisiting the basement, Buddy barely even played into her nightmares any longer. Her focus shifted solely to Mark, even as Buddy choked her with the axe and forced himself between her legs. In her dreams Maria saw Mark sitting on the other side of the boiler room door. She saw Mark’s passive, un-helping, uncaring face night after night, and each day she worked to transform her body into a state that would be able to make that face unrecognizable.

  SHE SAT UP and then quickly moved closer to the window at the sight of movement beyond the tree-line across the road. She knelt under the low, triangular attic roof and laid her hands against the hexagonal wood of the open window. A woman stopped just before the road and hid behind the closest tree, watching the house.

  Maria observed as the woman set a gym bag down on the ground and removed her coat and shirt. The woman took a different shirt from the bag and put it on, this one was familiar to Maria, full of rips and the name of a particular New Hampshire beach. The woman took something from the bag and applied it to herself with her fingers, then dropped to her knees and dug a shallow hole in the snow with her hands. She stuffed her gym bag into the hole, then covered it back up.

  The woman stepped into the road and walked slowly towards the house. ‘Help!’ She called out. ‘Someone help me!’ Maria recognized her fake-blood covered face. She was struck by the coincidence of it all. This trickster hadn't been on foot her entire journey, that much was obvious. Her car had probably broken down on some nearby road and she was entering into the same con that had worked for her God knows how many times so far. Maybe she hadn't broken down at all, but just parked and gone out looking for suckers in secluded places with sympathy and things of value that she could take for her own. What are the odds of us both ending up here? Maria pondered. It was an alignment of the stars; fate, telling her that she was destined to have her payback. The universe was presenting her with a small scale opportunity for revenge; a warmup dish before her main course of vengeance against her abandoning brother. The forces of cosmic balancing sought to wet her appetite.

  HEADING TO THE FRONT DOOR as a knocking fist struck against it, Maria picked up her Aunt’s double barrel shotgun.

  ‘Help!’ the woman cried from outside.

  Maria held the shotgun out of view and opened the door. She stood face-to-face with the woman who had robbed her in her own home. Maria cracked a wry smile. There was only recognition on one side of the gun.

  ‘Help me, please.’ The woman said, pretending to be injured. ‘I- I’m hurt. Will you please help me?’

  ‘You’ve pulled this trick before, bitch.’

  A flash of recognition danced in the woman’s eyes. She reached for her concealed knife.

  Maria jabbed the shotgun into the woman’s gut and pulled the trigger.

  The liar was nearly blown clean in half as she was blasted off the steps of the house. Her body flipped end over end through the air and struck the path, chest first, several feet away before sliding further still into the road, leaving a dark red smear behind her. She wouldn’t need to feign injury any longer. She was the model image of it.

  The woman strained to lift her head. She scraped her external guts along the road back toward her stomach. Her blurry vision settled on Maria, approaching confidently.

  Maria wondered how many others this woman had ripped off before making her way all the way up here. Maria strode up to her and pulled her own shoes off the dying woman’s feet. The liar reached a bloody hand up towards her, but Maria continued forward without so much as a downward glance. She reached the tree-line across the road and dug up what the woman had buried. The liar was dead by the time Maria returned across the road.

  13. A CHEMICAL ESCAPE FROM A MAN-MADE HELL

  A LONG LINE of the mostly sick, mostly tired, mostly malnourished inhabitants of the parking garage followed behind Lucas on the slow foot journey back to the high school. Maisey and Charli continued forward alone.

  The string of men and women behind Lucas was a largely defenseless mass and would make an easy target for any ill-willed group of scavengers.

  Lucas kept his handgun drawn and clearly visible to provide the slightest deterrent against any would be threats who spotted him from the distance. He hoped their sheer numbers would prove intimidating.

  There were a couple parking-garage-citizens who were already struggling badly before they had progressed even three blocks along their journey. They were the oldest and the sickest of the bunch. Lucas wanted to stop right away and let them rest, but he knew he couldn’t for the sake of the others. He had to accept whatever losses couldn’t be helped, and that was challenging for him.

  WHEN THE POWER SURGED and the lights flickered for the first time, Lucas left his dorm and caught a bus headed toward his grandma’s retirement home. The thought of her sitting in the dark, alone and afraid, made Lucas feel like crying.

  The bus driver was sweating profusely and didn’t look Lucas’s way as he entered. The driver had a friend standing right beside him at the front entrance, carefully eyeing each person they picked up. His hand rested atop a holster at his hip.

  The driver blew right past certain crowded bus stops if he thought that particular cluster of pedestrians looked aggressive. Lucas began to doubt the bus was following any particular route.

  The bus was mostly full when Lucas boarded and, within 10 minutes, was well over maximum capacity.

  Suddenly, the driver took a sharp turn and got onto the highway, following a whisper sent into his ear by the armed friend. The vehicle approached top speed and the crowded occupants fought over bars and hand-loops for balance.

  The friend drew his handgun and pointed it at the crowd, demanding they turn over any and all valuables they had on them; money first, then phones, then jewelry, then anything else worth a damn.

  Lucas was near the front, and found himself compelled to attempt to diffused the situation as the front row of the bus’s occupants began to toss their belongings toward the man, and others shouted their own threats of violence back at him.

  It quickly became clear he wasn’t the only one with a gun, as four other bus occupants drew their own firearms and pointed them toward the front of the bus over the heads and between the limbs of terrified, unarmed travelers.

  ‘Stop the bus!’

  ‘Put the gun down, fucker!’

  ‘How the fuck do you think you’re gonna stop all of us?!’

  ‘You’ve got 10 seconds!’

  The competing voices shouted over each other, over the rattle of the bus’s metal frame, and over the roar of the maxed-out engine.

  Lucas put his hands over his head and stepped between the armed man at the front and the incensed cluster. He found himself tossed side to side by the rocking bus, but he kept his hands in the air. ‘Put your gun down,’ he said, looking the man square in the eye. He saw regret over the miscalculation on the man’s face. Lucas shook his head gently and gave the man an understanding look. ‘Put it down. It’s your only chance at a happy ending.’

  The man’s eyes flitted nervously between Lucas and the gun barrels over his shoulders.


  ‘No one has to die. If you need money, for something important…’ Lucas lowered his hands. He pulled out his wallet and took off his watch. ‘You’re not usually a bad person, am I right?’

  The man didn’t say anything. He trembled and his eyes grew wet, but no speech escaped his quivering lips.

  ‘Why start now?’ Lucas held his offerings aloft.

  The man softened and lowered his gaze to the proffered possessions.

  Lucas thrust his wallet and watch into the man’s hands and gently took the gun from him in exchange.

  ‘Now get him!’ one of the other occupants shouted.

  ‘Kick his ass!’ yelled another.

  ‘No!’ Lucas said, turning to face them. He held the gun above his head by the barrel and grabbed onto a pole with his other hand to steady himself.

  ‘Throw him off the bus!’

  ‘Just fucking kill him!’

  Lucas talked them down.

  The disarmed man sat down on the floor, pulled his knees up to his chest, and balled hysterically for the next half hour.

  Lucas made sure the driver eventually took him to his grandma’s retirement home, after stopping at more urgent destinations for other occupants.

  By the time he arrived, every resident of the retirement home had been slaughtered. His grandma was the cherry on top of the macabre sundae.

  Lucas convulsed and vomited as Gerry Rafferty’s voice taunted him through P.A. system. He quickly staggered back out of the retirement home before the celebrating young psychopaths noticed him.

  A USED BOOK STORE become Maisey and Charli’s shelter for the night. Charli consumed small rations and Maisey drank another of the meal replacement shakes from the doc with two painkillers. Each woman made an attempt at conversation with the other but the attempts were fruitless and amounted to little more than empty exchanges. It was clear there was no friction between them, and they decided that would have to be good enough. This new world wasn't an environment conducive to friend-making. Charli thought about asking Maisey why she cared so much about a stranger's kid, but didn't. Maisey thought about asking Charli how she had secured so much control back at the gym, but didn't. They slept the night through and continued forward in the morning.

  THE WOMEN WALKED at a brisk pace further into the city. After a brief exchange of information in the morning, their journey was conducted in silence... until Charli said, ‘Hold up.’ She raised her hand and moved into a brick alleyway.

  Maisey followed and got behind Charli in the alley. ‘What is it?’ She asked in a whisper.

  ‘Think I hear an engine.’ Charli lowered herself to the ground and crawled toward the edge of the alley. She laid behind a cement stoop leading up to an apartment building and peered with one eye over the bottom step toward the corner of the street.

  ‘Do you see anything?’ Maisey asked, clutching her gun tightly in front of her. She kept the safety on, like they had practiced.

  ‘Shh.’ Charli listened as the faint rumble she heard grew louder. She identified the engine as one she had personally worked on back at Dirty Jay’s. Her vision confirmed what her ears already knew, as a black muscle car with an exposed engine slowly rounded the corner two blocks away. Snow landed on the hot engine and turned to steam. The car had blood on the bumper and bullet holes in its windshield. It wasn’t being driven by the vintage car collector who Charli had tuned it up for several months earlier. The car moved deliberately slowly, its dead-eyed driver scanning the streets, his passenger dangling a Tec-9 out the window and humming a distant tune.

  Maisey could hear the engine now, it rumbled like a growling animal and rolled slowly like a prowling one. She watched Charli wave a hand back at her from the ground and said ‘What?’

  ‘Back up.’ Charli said as she crawled away from the stoop and got to her feet inside the alley.

  Maisey led as the two of them jogged quietly down to the other end of the alleyway. She laid her back against the brickwork and peeked with her good eye around the corner. The street looked clear.

  Charli looked over her shoulder and saw the nose of the muscle car passing into view down the alley. ‘Move,’ Charli ordered as she gave Maisey a hard shove.

  The women exited the alley and moved quickly up the sidewalk to the east as the purring engine continued slowly west.

  ‘Sorry for pushing you.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  They resumed their silent journey toward the bartering drug dealer.

  TWO HOURS OF CAREFUL MOVEMENT later, they arrived at the red building designated as the drug dealer's place of business. The building was three stories tall and had a downward staircase cut right into the sidewalk that led down to the basement. A small sign in black paint on cardboard was affixed to the peeling red paint of the building. It read: “DRUGS FOR SALE”. An amendment had been added below in dark green paint, reading: “TRADES ONLY”.

  Maisey and Charli stood motionless on the sidewalk in front of the steep grey steps. Snow had collected at the bottom but the comings and goings of the city’s addicts had both flattened it and colored it brown. An orange light danced on the other side of the wooden door at the bottom of the icy steps.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Charli asked.

  ‘I fuckin’ better be.’ Maisey replied.

  They made their descent and pulled open the splintery door. An orange hallway illuminated by flickering candle light was home to a 24-year-old black man lying face first on the cold, stone floor. He wore a navy blue boiler suit with the word ‘BUG’ stenciled across a patch on the back. Maisey and Charli shared a glance, then Charli checked his pulse. ‘He’s alive.’

  Bug had acquired his desired drug. He made it all of five feet before shooting up and taking a forceful “nap” into the floor.

  The women stepped over him and made their way to a door at the end of the hall from which more light spilled. This door was metallic and didn’t open as easily as the first had. Charli knocked. A hollow metal pounding filled the hallway and roused Bug from his slumber for a moment before he slumped back into his chemical escape from this man-made hell. Charli had her gun holstered, but had the snap open and her firing hand at the ready.

  There was a rusty scraping sound on the other side of the door. It swung out into the hallway with a creak. The women stepped inside.

  The room was small and decorated like a home-office. It was a finished basement with smooth walls, a desk in the center, and a thin carpet pasted to the floor. The drug dealer, Marquis, an eastern European fellow, sat behind the desk in a swivel chair in the light of an oil lantern. A guard stood by the door behind the women with a sawed off shotgun in his hands. He had a buff upper body but a scrawny lower one and was dressed in solid gray.

  Marquis crossed his ankles on top of the desk, nearly knocking the lantern over. He gave a smile and revealed he had less teeth than he had fingers, and he was missing one of those too. His hair was thinning but what was left of it was slicked back with stagnant water. ‘Welcome to my place of business, ladies.’ The words tumbled out of his mouth like water from a holey bucket. His gold chains and rings shined brightly in the lantern light.

  The bodyguard spoke up and raised a paper shopping bag with one hand. ‘Weapons stay in here until you’re done.’

  Charli turned to face him and motioned for Maisey to avoid doing as instructed. ‘Not as long as you’re carrying out in the open.’

  ‘You don’t like it, you can leave. Those are the rules. Everyone follows.’ The guard said.

  Maisey joined in, ‘What do you think, we’re fucking stupid?’

  Charli stepped closer to the guard. ‘We’re not about to disarm ourselves just because you say so.’

  ‘Am I going to have to use this?’ The guard dropped the shopping bag and motioned with the shotgun, stopping short of aiming it directly at her.

  Charli didn't stop short; she went all the way. Her handgun cleared its holster in a flash. She wrapped both hands around the grip and pointed it directly at the
guard’s face, safety off, bullet chambered.

  The guard leveled his shotgun at her stomach.

  Maisey pointed her gun at the side of the buff bodyguard’s head and looked to Charli for confirmation.

  ‘Everyone calm down!’ The dealer shouted, his feet now firmly planted on the floor. ‘Let 'em hang onto their guns, Benjamin. They’re just a couple of women. What’s the big deal?’ He asked, attempting to diffuse the standoff.

  The guard lowered his gun, then Maisey and Charli followed suit.

  Charli turned to Marquis and approached his desk. ‘Then I guess you won’t mind if I keep my hand full?’ She motioned with her pistol.

  He shrugged exaggeratedly, ‘Don’t matter none to me.’

  Charli kept a grip on her gun but lowered it to her side. Maisey did the same. The guard leaned against the wall beside the open door and balanced on one foot.

  ‘So, what are you ladies in the market for? Smack? Crack? Paddywhack? We only do trades in here. No cash. Not anymore.’

  ‘We’re after information.’

  Marquis scoffed, then rubbed his chin and gave it a second thought. ‘Okay. Maybe we can trade for information.’

  Maisey spoke from behind Charli, ‘We’re trying to track down a kid. Has a mother you might’ve dealt to. She’s about 5’8. White, dirty, wild hair, brownish blond, frayed greyish clothing, long yellow fingernails-’

  The dealer interrupted. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I might know who you’re talking about. Let’s talk about what you’re going to give me.’ He leaned over the desk and threaded his fingers together.

  Charli pulled a cereal bar from her pocket. ‘How’s five of these sound?’

  ‘I don’t know if I can give out patron information for so little. I had something a tad more specific in mind anyway.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Charli inquired.