I paused. Listened. Nothing.
Shit.
Maybe they’d heard us breaking in.
I pointed my gun in one direction and looked at Big Stupid. I then pointed at myself and then another direction. Big Stupid nodded and we headed off toward different parts of the house.
Some tidbit from high school American History class rattled around in the back of my brain – Custer dividing his forces.
This made me think how Shaggy and Scooby always got suckered into wandering off alone while Fred did whatever he did with the two chicks.
I looked back hoping to see Big Stupid but didn’t.
Double Shit.
I crept down a back hallway, floorboards creaking.
A bedroom full of luggage, trunks, bags, backpacks, suitcases. In front of me, like a ghost, Cobb rose up, clutching a huge military duffle bag to his chest.
Our eyes met.
I leveled the .38 at him.
He blinked and understood.
Cobb tossed the heavy duffle at me and knocked the revolver aside. I stumbled back, and by the time I recovered, he was on me, one hand on the wrist of my gun hand and the other going for my throat.
We wrestled on the floor, and I felt his knee come up and smash my balls. I yelled. He slammed my gun hand against the floor, and I lost the revolver.
I turned my head and sank my teeth into Cobb’s hand. Blood flooded my mouth, and I heard Cobb scream. He wrenched his hand away, and I spit his own blood at him. I punched him in the face, and then he punched me in mine.
We rolled around and I got on top of him and got both hands around his throat.
I thought I heard something blunt smash into something else and a yelp elsewhere in the house, but I was too busy to worry about it.
My hands found Cobb’s face, thumbs pushing into his eye sockets. The eyeballs didn’t squish as easily as you might think. I really had to dig my thumbs in there, but I finally felt a pop and a give and Cobb went stiff, hot blood washing over my hands.
Cobb quivered, legs and arms flailing a moment before he went limp. I pushed his dead body away from me and gasped for breath.
I looked up.
It was the bearded one coming after me, the one I’d seen in Sandy’s house when I’d pulled the stocking off his head.
He held an axe handle over his head and was set to bring it down with two hands on my skull. I threw up my hands in a feeble attempt to ward him off, but it was no use. He was going to bash my brains out.
Big Stupid appeared behind him and stove in his skull with the crowbar. The man’s head dented in like it was made of tin foil. He twitched and stutter stepped to the side and fell over.
Big Stupid loomed over me. “I killed two others upstairs.”
“G-Good.” I staggered to my feet. “Christ.”
I looked down at the man Big Stupid just crushed. He looked like he was made of paper mache. All smashed in.
“What’s in the duffle bag?” Big Stupid asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”
I grabbed the duffle and slung it over my shoulder. There was the overwhelming urge to open it and gander at the cash, but I didn’t want Big Stupid to see and complicate things.
“Go start the car,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He hesitated.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re done. We’re leaving.”
“Okay.” He left.
I suddenly felt sore and fatigued. The duffle weighed me down. All I wanted to do was get to Big Stupid’s Humvee and sink into the passenger seat and have him drive me back to Baton Rouge.
She sprung out in front of me in the hallway and stabbed the knife into my stomach.
“Take it, you faggot,” Sandy said. “Fucking take it and die.”
She pulled the blade from my gut and thrust it in again higher.
I sucked breath, eyes wide.
She pulled it out and thrust it in one more time.
I grunted and felt nauseous.
Sandy pulled the knife out again, hate gleaming in her eyes. “Die, you son of a—”
Big Stupid was there again, behind her. He grabbed the back of her neck and squeezed like it was nothing at all. There was a raw, wet snap and she went limp and slipped dead out of his grasp and flopped to the floor.
My hands came away from my guts sticky and red.
I was dying.
I tried to hold my guts in, heard a soft whimpering and realized it was me. My head went dizzy, and the room spun as I felt Big Stupid lift me up and carry me out of the house and into the hurricane.
Twelve
My eyes popped open. I was slouched in the passenger side of the Humvee, and we were on the move again, driving through the hurricane.
“Where … what …”
“I’m going to try to get us back to the Interstate,” Big Stupid said. “It’s elevated.”
I think I went in and out of consciousness a few times. Paine flared then ebbed in my gut. I felt could.
We were back on Canal Street.
I opened my mouth to tell Big Stupid we needed to find a hospital or a paramedic or something. But the Humvee suddenly lifted and bobbed and turned the street lights a blur in the wet window.
“What the fuck! What the fuck!”
“Levy broke,” Big Stupid said. “Surge of water. Hang on we’re going to—”
The Humvee shuddered with a loud metal clang, and I was thrown against my seatbelt. Fire exploded in my gut, and my vision went fuzzy.
Then I felt rain on my face.
I looked down. Big Stupid was waist deep in water, carrying me down Canal Street.
He had the duffle slung over one shoulder. I looked back and saw the Humvee smashed up against a lamppost, tilted up like one of the tires was on top of something.
My stomach hurt so bad.
“S-set me down someplace,” I said. “Just f-for a minute.”
He carried me to the median where the water was not so deep and spread me out on a park bench that was barely an inch above the waterline. The wind pulled at our clothes, rattles street signs.
“Hey, man,” I said. “Look at my wound, okay? Tell me what it looks like.”
He lifted my shirt and splashed some water on the wound, wiped away the blood. “Bad.”
“Am I going to make it?”
A long pause. Too long. “No.”
“Okay, now wait a minute,” I said. “Look again. Look real good okay, and tell me if I’m going to make it.”
And whatever Big Stupid said, I’d believe him. Like he was a world famous Johns Hopkins surgeon. Because Big Stupid would lie.
He looked at my belly, back up to my face. “You’re not going to make it.”
“Okay. Fuck. Just fuck. Okay. Open that duffle and bring it over here so I can see.”
He brought the duffle around where I could see what having to move too much and unzipped it. Inside were bundles of tightly wrapped hundred dollar bills. It was full of money. Enough to do anything.
“It’s getting wet. Zip it up.”
He zipped it.
I felt cold, colder then I’d ever been.
“Take it. Get out of here and take it.”
He stared at me, blank.
“Take it for your mom and Sissy,” I said. “H-hey. Hey. You know what you should do? Hey, you listening?” The world faded, colors bleaching out around the edges.
“I’m listening.” His voice was calm but somehow loud, like it could cut right through the hurricane.
“You’re going to need to launder that much cash,” I said. You should open a comic book shop.”
Big Stupid didn’t say anything.
“Walter.”
He still didn’t say anything.
“Take it for Sissy, Walter. Take her someplace where people can live.”
I faded out just a bit. I rallied myself just a bit and lifted my head. Big Stupid waded slowly, moving away like some prehistoric beast, the duffle bag ac
ross his back.
Ray was going to be pissed and thinking that started me laughing pretty good.
I let my head fall back with a splash. The water was rising.
I thought it would cover me over, but it lifted me up and I started floating.
The electricity finally went and plunged the world into darkness.
I wasn’t cold now.
There was only darkness and the roar of the storm like the sound of a giant machine cranking the world around and the sensation of floating away off into some endless unknown dream.
THE END
SIN-CRAZED PSYCHO KILLER! DIVE, DIVE, DIVE!
A Seaman Jimmy Sticks Adventure
by Anthony Neil Smith
I
I’ll tell you if you really want to know, but I can’t promise you’ll like it. I can’t even promise your safety. They told me in no uncertain terms to keep my goddamned mouth shut tighter than a nun’s cunt, but that was twenty-odd years ago. Who’s ever going to know, right?
So I somehow got myself volunteered for a top-secret mission. This was 1944, and things weren’t looking so good in the Pacific.
We were still island-hopping, trying like hell to clear out hardheaded Nips who just didn’t give a holy shit if they died or not.
Never seen the likes of it before, how they took slug and slug and kept on coming. Amped to the gills on something, goofballs or what have you. Smart little bastards, too.
They knew a million ways to hide in plain sight, and all our boys were just Johhny Go-Getters flying a wide smile and the red, white, and blue, thinking we could skip the fighting and just scare them away. The kids had been reading too many Captain America comics.
They didn’t have no goddamned shield when the machine guns ripped into them like a machete through soft butter. They fell face-first, barely got “Mommy!” out of their mouths before their souls were falling hellbound.
No, no, don’t look at me like that. No matter what they told you about our glorious, God-blessed venture, I’ll tell you right now that none of us had any illusions. We were killers.
We saw what happened to the dead. They weren’t angel faces in coffins. They were bags full of bile and gas that rotted just as bad as fruit.
What we were to do was sneak in, rescue a covert “clean-up team”—four men sent to a small island, barely a mile across, six weeks earlier.
Supposedly were about a hundred Nips there in a bunker, holding tight until the Nips needed them to help come in from the rear and surround the US fleet. And let’s multiply that by hundreds of little islands like that.
Other clean-up teams had gone in, taken the small batches out, then replaced them with Japanese speakers who could jibber-jabber on the radio, intercept orders, feed them to our commanders. So it was our turn to take out this rust bucket and pick up the cleaners. These guys, I tell you, were some fucked-headed killers, I tell you, I do. Yes.
Think of the worst soldier, the absolute worst, and multiple that by twenty, and train him to be one of the best killers in the world. That’s what we were going to retrieve, times four.
This crew, I tell you. Who were we? We were the ones who served with indistinction.
We never ran away from a fight, but we sure as hell didn’t run toward any. We weren’t heroes. We weren’t cowards. We just… were.
To be honest, we were the types who joined the Navy because we thought dying on a sunny tropical beach was better than dying in cold European mud on cold European farms with cold European farmgirls staring down at our cold mangled corpses.
That’s who they wanted for the trip. Something about the cleaners brought that out. Knowing what I know now, I can see why they did it.
I should’ve feigned crazy. Hell, I should’ve volunteered for the infantry after all. Most of the guys would’ve said the same thing. The Navy didn’t want to waste heroes or fools on this.
They wanted the dull, the beige, the mundane. And there we were.
The rust bucket? Oh, lord, we called it the Prayer Boat, because that was the joke—the only thing keeping it together—but the truth was it was liquor. We smuggled so much fucking liquor onto that death-trap, the Captain had to know. He had to.
The goddamned boat, I swear, its real name? Victor. Like Victor von Frankenstein. I’m sure they meant “winner” instead. It was built with the exploded parts of boats that got hit at Pearl Harbor. Three subs like ours, scrabbled together for secret missions.
You could still see and smell the blood and guts on the steel, burned on hard as rock. When it was at full power, the whole ship smelled like burning flesh, and they never found out why. But the damned thing was abnormal, I tell you.
It had dead-end passageways, different-sized doors, pipes going places that didn’t make sense. You might twist a wheel that opens a valve that aims superheated water right in a guy’s bunk.
It made noises like a cat losing a fight.
You can blame that on the bastard kraut they got to design it. They were much better at U-boats than we were right around then, so when we needed to take scrap metal and turn it into a top-secret super-quiet sub, they dug this guy, Patzer or Pincher or whatever, out of the prison they’d left him to rot in. Told him if he would build the boat, he’d get one less beating a day and also be allowed to eat once in a while. So I don’t know what more we could have expected.
But the weird-ass boat had nothing on the ghosts. Guys would wake up in the middle of the night to some poor schmuck calling for his mommy, all wispy and shit, holding onto a pipe or a bulkhead, crying—I saw one, too, I’m telling you, just freaky—and then all the sudden, the fucking guy would explode.
Exploding ghosts, two or three a night. Imagine that (?)
No one ever told me why I was chosen for this gig, but I had to have pissed some brass off royally, don’t you think?
So off we go to retrieve the G.I. Psychos. Goddamnedest mistake I’d ever seen.
II
Took almost a week to get there, so we had to endure surprises like sudden temperature changes—the steel of one’s guy’s bunk would burn your skin, while the next guy’s had ice on it—plus all that hot water spurting, the burning flesh smell, and exploding fucking ghosts, and you bet your ass we ran out of the bootleg liquor in just two days.
Couple of guys even drank their own piss, thinking it might have a touch of whiskey left in it.
Then the time came when the Captain, bless his goddamned heart, told us we were gonna surface and send a team to pick up the cleaners. Now, this Captain had a good heart.
He liked his men, and he had risen in the ranks the slow, normal way, right up until Pearl Harbor killed enough superior officers to put our Captain on the fast-track. I say this kindly, and I won’t use his name because of how much respect I have for his poor, overburdened soul, but that man was in way over his head.
One of the best officers I ever knew, and probably the worst Captain the Navy could have put on that boat.
A Nip prisoner with a gun would probably have made better decisions. But anyway, it came time to choose a team to get the cleaners, and I ended up as part of them.
I don’t know why. I had tried to do my job at the barest minimal acceptable level as to escape any praise, any reprimands, anything. I wanted to blend into the blood-scorched iron walls around me and live to shit another day.
But it didn’t happen like I had hoped, and here I was in the pre-dawn hours with four other unlucky bastards on an inflatable raft, drifting towards shore. If I had thought the smell of death on the sub, well, how can I describe how much worse it was up top? The humidity made it thicker, somehow, and the ocean was more like a stew, so many guts and pieces of Nips floating around.
We saw something we first thought was another inflatable raft like our, only overturned. We were almost right on it when we realized it was a dead Nip bloated from the gases, one the sharks hadn’t eaten yet.
And almost on cue, just after we passed him, there came the shark, chomping into the
poor bastard with a sound like a juicy, hot fart.
Good thing the sun wasn’t up. The noise enough made most of us puke overboard.
The light eased over us as we hit the beach, and we were able to see the full impact our boys had had on the island—rotten Nips as far as the eye could see strewn across the sand, the whitecaps on the surf turned red.
The Cleaners were supposed to meet us on the beach. We waited, crouched down low among the bodies, just in case. But there were no more Japanese left. No snipers in the trees, no kamikazes in the air, no last-gaspers lunging with bayonets. Nothing. Just the quiet churn of the water and the god-awful stink.
We stayed still, our bodies tensed to the point of sprain, until it dawned on us that no one wanted to kill us. We stood tall. We looked out at the horizon. We watched the sun rise through the trees.
We actually felt…pretty good.
The LT leading the group told us that if those bastards didn’t show up in five more minutes, we’d have to go looking for them. That’s when the anxiety ramped up again.
Maybe there weren’t any Nip bullets with our names on them, but there were snakes and spiders and mosquitoes carrying all sorts of jungle bugs that would make you flat out suffer a good long time before you finally died.
And that wasn’t why any of us joined the goddamned Navy, to end up dead from an insect bite the size of a dime.
Lieutenant Foxwinner was a once-in-a-lifetime leader. He was as calm as a cold stick of butter in the middle of a firefight, so I’d heard. I’d never been in one with him.
But the boys swore by him. The bastard cared, but would still shout in your ear to get your pussy-ass off the ground and charge along with your brothers, you piece of turd.
And that’s would you would do, because, goddamn it, the Loot was right there in the thick of it with you and he always came back without a scratch, didn’t he? That’s who you want leading you into Hell.
But all I knew about him was the time I heard him in the shower, begging the Ensign who was banging him to not leave him now that the Ensign had decided he wasn’t a fairy after all. Crying, the Loot was. Poor guy.
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