by Tim Meyer
“Yes, you should have.”
“But, I think we could use a few more people in our group who can handle a gun. We don't know what we're going to face out there.”
“So you chose my fifteen year old son to be your militant?”
Tina rolled her eyes. “Mrs. Gaines, look—”
“No, you look.” Brenda rose to her feet, glaring at Tina, surveying her mistrustful eyes. “I don't care what you think this group needs, the next time you put a killing machine in my son's hands, you ask me first.”
Several seconds of silence caused everyone to shift uncomfortably. Lilah coughed, not because she had to, but because the awkward moment needed to die.
“You got it,” Tina said through strained lips.
“Matty,” Brenda said, “get that thing off your back and give it to Tina.”
“But, Mom—”
“Now.”
Slowly, he did as his mother commanded. He handed Tina the rifle. She took it, mouthing the words, “I'm sorry.” Matty looked to his mother, then to Lilah, who pretended to count the ceiling tile craters again, for the tenth time. Embarrassed, he ran down the aisle and disappeared around the bend. Brenda called after him, but it was useless; he was gone.
“Now look what you did,” she said, storming past Tina and down the aisle after her son.
Mickey removed his hood and the goalie mask protecting him against the harmful rays of the sun. The winter jacket came off next, along with the snow gloves. He was sweating profusely and wiped his forehead with his knuckles. He kicked free his boots and tore off the snow pants he had stolen from one of the officer's lockers. Slipping into a pair of worn Nikes, Mickey announced, “All right, you law-breaking tugjobs,” and unlocked the door to the courtroom. “It's time to pay for your sins!”
He pushed open the doors and found an empty courtroom, the defendant's box where Sam and Jarvis should have been, but now weren't. He quickly searched the courtroom, hands clamped to the sides of head, squeezing as if it were an over-sized pimple he meant to pop.
How is this possible?
There was no way the men escaped. They were handcuffed, for one. Two, there was only one door in and out of the courtroom and it was locked, he was sure of it. He irrationally thought they dug themselves out like a dog under the neighbor's fence, and searched the floor for evidence. He didn't find any secret tunnels, but he found the opened handcuffs, with the dead woman's brooch resting a few feet away.
He pieced it all together.
Jarvis and his silly act. It had been a distraction. A ruse. First-grade trickery. And...
It had worked.
“Motherfuckers!” Mickey shouted. He was more pissed off at himself than he was at Jarvis. He fell for it. Dumb bastard fell for the whole gag. “You dumb son of a bitch! You couldn't see it coming?” Mickey asked.
Judge Fayden frowned. “I couldn't see it. I only thought...”
“You only thought...” Mickey repeated childishly. “You only thought what?”
“Just thought he was fucking nuts!” Fayden cried.
“You stupid asshole.”
“Fuck you, shit-for-brains! Where were you during the whole trial? Whacking off in the back again! Your pecker must be raw from all the abuse!”
“I don't hear you complaining!”
Fayden closed his eyes, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. “All right. Let's take a deep breath and calm the hell down. They couldn't have gone far. It's not dusk yet and they don't have any protective gear. They could still be in the station somewhere, waiting it out. All we have to do is wait for them to come out and boom. We got 'em.”
“They could head for the woods. The trees would protect them.”
Fayden scrunched his nose. “Risky play. Sometimes the trees aren't enough. Remember last week? Found those kids in the middle of the forest? Toasted.”
Mickey slapped himself in the head. “Duh. Almost forgot.”
Fayden smiled. “We'll search the station. If we don't find them by sundown, we'll take to the road. They wouldn't have gotten far.”
“Plus...” Mickey said, giggling. “We know where they're going.”
“Bet your ass we do. Help that little girl they keep yammering on about.”
“Think we'll find more criminals once we get there?”
Fayden laughed. “You goddamn right we will. And they'll burn like the rest, until the earth is pure and free from the filth that stains it.”
Mickey and Fayden left the courtroom, a sinister smile plastered to their shared surface.
-6-
Under the desk in the Judge's quarters, the small room behind the bench, they hid for an hour. They waited for Mickey to enter, prepared to attack the bastard if he found their secret spot. For some reason, the schizophrenic cop never thought to look there, the most obvious place in the whole municipal building. They listened through the paper-thin walls as the Sargent Mickey destroyed the place searching for them, cursing and yelling about how the entire mess was his fault and how his stupidity was going to ruin everything. If the cop hadn't scared them shitless, they would have shared a good laugh at his expense.
Jarvis peeked through the blinds and into the parking lot. The sun had ducked behind the horizon and he deemed it safe to travel outside again.
They opened the door and poked their heads into the courtroom, making sure it was free from their friend, the psychopath. When they were sure it was clear, they bolted. The doors to the courtroom were wide open and they sprinted down the hall until they reached a fork. Jarvis glanced at the hallway on his left, found it clear, and waved Sam on.
“How do you know where we're going?” Sam asked, still whispering.
“I don't. Keep moving.”
They jogged about halfway down the hall when they heard footsteps ahead and watched a shadow form on the long wall. Jarvis grabbed Sam by the neck and yanked him into an office on their right. They slipped inside undetected. The footsteps grew closer. They could hear Mickey mumbling to himself, something about “killing the fuck out of those motherfuckers.”
Jarvis looked around, his heart smacking against the walls of his chest. The office might have belonged to the chief of police, a secretary, or it may have been Sargent Mickey's. On the desk stood a framed family photo, a close group of a dozen strangers. Next to it sat a wedding photo, and sure enough, a young Sargent Mickey smiled back at him wearing a black tuxedo, his bride garbed in a long white dress, the veil pushed back revealing her smiley face. She wasn't Jarvis's type, but she wasn't bad-looking either. A better catch than what Jarvis thought Mickey deserved. The cop was a lot younger in the photo, more hair and less stress lines in his face, less crazy in his eyes. It was what he looked like before Judge Fayden entered his life.
Jarvis looked away from the photo and found a gun rack mounted on the wall, harboring two rifles and a shotgun. Jarvis stood and reached for one, but before he could make contact, Sam grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him across the room, into a small closet stocked with boxes of stationary goods.
Sam shut the closet door and placed a finger over his lips.
“Motherfuckers,” they heard Mickey grumble. He was outside the door. They could hear him breathing. “No one escapes from me! No one!” They heard the desk flip, crash against the far wall, the picture-frame glass shattering into shards and specks.
Jarvis squinted and peered through the tiny crack between the closet doors. He watched Mickey hunch over to regain his breath. Standing up straight, the officer's face fixed in a ferocious snarl, reminding him of the feral cats in the back alley behind a restaurant he worked at in high school. Mickey turned to the gun rack, rubbing his hands together like a twisty-mustached villain in some black and white cartoon from the 1950s. He stole the rifle off the top rack, and immediately checked the cartridge. Finding it unloaded, he opened the sliding drawer beneath the lowest rack and removed a box of ammo. As if he had no time left in the world, he shoved the bullets into the gun's b
elly, and rushed out of the room.
Sam and Jarvis waited until they couldn't hear “motherfucker” anymore.
Five minutes of interrupted silence seemed like more than enough time, and they opened the closet door.
“Think he's gone?” Jarvis asked. He hurried behind the overturned desk and rummaged through the drawers.
“God, I hope so,” Sam replied, heading over to the gun rack.
“We have to hurry. He knows where we're going.”
“He knows there's a sick girl and she's in a pharmacy somewhere,” Sam said, not seeming too concerned.
“No,” Jarvis said, locating a pair of keys with “Cruiser #3” written on a piece of tape wrapped around the key ring. “No, you told him the name of the town.”
Sam turned to him as if Jarvis was the Ghost of Christmas Past. “What?”
“You told him the name of the town when he arrested us.”
“My son is there,” Sam said. “Tina. Brenda. Bob.”
“Then like I said.” Jarvis jiggled the keys in the air. “We better fucking hurry.”
They made certain Sargent Mickey's cruiser was gone before they rushed out into the parking lot like the building behind them was about to explode. Jarvis spotted Cruiser #3 almost immediately and rushed over to it, slipped the key into the lock, and watched as the button popped on the inside of the door. He ripped open the door, jammed the key into the ignition, recited a prayer he had heard in Narcotics Anonymous six-billion times, and cranked the fucker over. The engine roared, the power of eight-cylinders vibrating the seat beneath him. Thank God, he said, although God had nothing to do with anything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours, Jarvis was sure of it.
Sam sprinted over, opened the passenger's door, and hopped inside. “Gun it!”
Jarvis hammered the gas pedal.
As they peeled out of the parking space, they noticed a fresh cadaver swaying from a light pole in the gentle October wind, his face burnt beyond recognition. If it weren't for the man's flame-frayed attire, they would have never known it was Chuck. Scaly pink and oozing yellow scabs masked his face, looking more like a fresh cheese pizza than a man in his mid-thirties. Wisps of smoke rose off his raw flesh and tattered clothing; dusk had saved him from becoming the blackened brisket the two of them were accustomed to seeing.
Jarvis punched the gas and the cruiser sped out of the parking lot, leaving him and the other twelve hanged bodies behind, forever. They didn't look back and neither Sam nor Jarvis mentioned Chuck, the man who died so they could live, the whole way back to Havencrest and if they had it their way, they'd never speak his name again.
-7-
Sargent Mickey idled in the handicap space in front of Havencrest's one and only pharmacy. He killed the cruiser's brights and stared through the twelve-foot long picture window running across the entire length of the building's facade. Cones of light waved back and forth in a fury. People were inside, he confirmed it. The only thing left to do was bust them for illegal dope-smoking and harboring fugitives.
Mickey knew the sick-girl story was a goddamn lie conjured by a group of drug addicts, habitual offenders, and unlawful citizens trying to get one over on him. He wasn't stupid; he'd seen and heard it all before. Sargent Mickey promised himself he'd never be fooled by criminals again, not after what those savages did to his wife and kids a week after The Burn. He and some co-workers, all of whom survived the terrible tragedy that had claimed the lives of many others, let a pair of seedy characters stay at the police station, letting them live among their families. The two middle-aged men, no older than the three looters he found at that rehab facility, stumbled into the parking lot late one night, hurt and bleeding from a violent altercation taking place several hours earlier. They needed a place to crash for a few days to lay low from the people who were after them. They seemed weird and untrustworthy (he noted their quirks and distrusted the authenticity of their story), but the cops were good cops and good people and so were their family members, so they invited the two men indoors without asking many questions. The first couple of days were cordial, and the cops had barely spoken to their new mates, leaving them to their lonesome down in the holding cells, while the cops' families remained upstairs in the offices they had converted into bedrooms. Two days later, Sargent Mickey left to grab some snacks from a local convenience store—it was a Tuesday and Tuesday meant it was his turn to scavenge—and when he returned, he found his family along with the other cops and their families butchered, their body parts scattered across the station house like a macabre treasure hunt. It took damn near a month to clean up the mess and eradicate the smell, but Judge Fayden helped, putting in long hours while Sargent Mickey mourned the loss of his loved ones and hunted for their killers, which he later found and executed in the same manner they had exacted on his wife and children, only slower and more calculated. James Mickey Jr. was only eight and Ben Mickey was only four, and he thought of their miniature parts scattered like the toys in their playroom when he hacked their killers to pieces. After he satiated his hunger for vengeance, Mickey returned to work with full force and a new zest for law enforcement, scouring the county and beyond for offenders of all types, vowing to never let what happened to him happen to others. He found loads of lawbreakers, all shapes and sizes, sexes and age. Judge Fayden helped him lay down the law of the land, and punish those guilty, (which had been all of them) no exceptions. Everyone was guilty of something and Mickey always found it.
Damn skippy.
He pushed open the cruiser's door and stepped out, one size-twelve at a time. Despite being unable to look the sun in the eye, Mickey continued to rock his Big Texas sunglasses. Once out of the car, he leaned one arm on the open door, using his other hand to work the bullhorn. He watched shadows stir in the window as he brought the megaphone to his mouth.
“CITIZENS OF HAVENCREST,” his voice boomed through the speaker. “IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT YOU ARE HARBORING FUGITIVES IN THAT PHARMACY, AND TO ENSURE NO ONE GETS HURT, I ASK YOU ALL TO COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD, EVERY LAST SINGLE ONE OF YOU.”
Shadows shifted within the pharmacy, but no one approached the window or complied with his demands.
Want to play hardball, huh? Mickey thought, shaking his head, but loving the adrenaline rush associated with busting criminals. He lived for this.
“I SAID COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
A shadow walked toward the picture window, a flashlight wavering in its hand. Light bounced everywhere, pissing Mickey off when the beam caught his eyes.
“PUT DOWN THE GODDAMN FLASHLIGHT AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
The figure skulked toward the front door. Another shadowy outline marched behind it and grabbed the figure, stopping it dead in its tracks.
“Oh, what in the hell!”
The second figure signaled for the first to stay and disobey Mickey's orders. The first figure shook its head, disagreeing.
Ain't this sweet, Fayden whispered in his ear. Mercy for Lawbreaker Number One for complying. Number Two, however, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
“THAT'S IT,” Mickey said, grinning. “COME ON OUT. ALL OF YOU. GIVE UP THE WRONGDOERS AND YOU SHALL GO FREE.”
The front door opened and a man appeared, waving amiably. He neglected to turn off the flashlight and the bright light continued to find its way into Mickey's eyes.
“SON, IF YOU DON'T DROP THAT DAMN FLASHLIGHT YOU'RE GONNA DINE ON A NICE, TASTY BULLET FOR SUPPER.”
The man killed the flashlight at once.
“Sorry about that, officer,” he said, waving his hand in the air as if to mean I come in peace.
Mickey drew on him. “Stay the fuck still!” he yelled, dropping the megaphone. “Or I will drop you like the sack of shit you are!”
The man nearly jumped out of his skin. His hands shot into the air. The flashlight fell from his trembling fingers and hit the sidewalk, small pieces of black plastic shooting in opposite directions. The man's fa
ce changed, the sense of relief associated with being rescued melting, turning to fear and terror. The man tried to speak, but couldn't locate his voice.
“You gotta problem, buddy?” Mickey asked.
“I t-think, t-think, there's a m-misunderstanding,” the man managed to say.
“Only misunderstanding is you don't seem to want to fucking listen to a goddamn thing I say.” Mickey flashed him a sardonic grin. The man was on the verge of shitting himself. “Tell all your drug-abusing buddies to rally up and come on out here. Especially the fugitives. I got business to settle with them, right here and now.”
“What fugitives?”
“What fugitives?” he asked as if the man had called him a pecker head. “Don't you play stupid with me. I know what I know, and I know you got two fugitives that escaped my jail cell, and if you don't give them up right this instant, you're gonna be in a world of hurt.”
The man closed his eyes. Mickey thought he saw tears glistening under them, but couldn't be so sure. His sunglasses made it impossibly dark.
“Sir, please. There's a sick girl inside—”
“Up!” Sargent Mickey cried. “There we go again, yammering on about a sick girl. What is it with you dope fiends? Yous make up the same damn story together? Does that story really fly in these parts? Bout the craziest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard.”
The man seemed at a loss, and Mickey took the man's sullen glance as he was considering a peaceful surrender, but still on the fence. He thought a bullet might settle things, tie up a few loose ends, illustrate a few points his words clearly weren't making. He raised his gun again, gently flexing his finger on the trigger. The man gulped, loud enough for Mickey to hear it.
“S-sir,” the man said. “Y-you've m-misread the situation here. P-please, put down the gun.”
“Misread this, motherfucker.” Mickey pulled the trigger and the man flew backward, landing hard on his back. His head ricocheted off the sidewalk. Air whooshed from his lungs.
