Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories

by Dennis Etchison

  Jaime tried to say something.

  "Don't mean a thing, kid. He's garbage now."

  Jaime heard the sound of a car passing far away, a bird on the wires outside, the racing of his own heart. He didn't know anything to say.

  His partner pulled a body envelope out of the 'clave, wrapped the body, sealed it with the sealing iron. Seconds, minutes passed but Jaime could think of nothing to say.

  He saw Jesse wheel the litter to the tailgate, press the button to lower it, climb out and push it to the old car. The woman screamed. She seemed to lose her mind when she saw it. Jesse struggled with her until he could inject her with a tranquilizer. She slumped into the car. He tossed the credit plate in after her. Then he put the bag by the lamppost on the cracked sidewalk. The bulb was burned out but Jaime saw clearly the formless encapsulated remains like a giant slug caught on the cement. He saw the two little black faces staring and crying. The children were jumping up and down on the car seat now. They kept their fingers in their mouths; spittle ran down their dark wrists, leaving their cold fingers glistening. Tears streamed alongside their flat noses, shining them, and their brown eyes wavered and glittered like jewels. When Jesse started toward them with needles Jaime called out. Tried to call out. His throat was a single dry, painful muscle. He bit down until his jaws hurt. Their eyes were looking at him.

  Jesse headed back to the van.

  "Get out! Up front! We're not clear yet."

  Jaime moved but not fast enough. Jesse grabbed him by the smock and flung him toward the cab. "Start it up. Start it!"

  Jesse took over. He stuffed Jaime into the front seat and gunned the engine. His ferret eyes darted about the empty street. "We got to make this look right." He slammed into reverse, drew back, shifted into first and pulled up to the tail of the car. Then he locked against the car and rammed it forward into the lamppost. There was a grinding and buckling of metal and a splintering of glass. A piece of the lamp hit the top of the car, rolled off and shattered on the street into a million unrepairable fragments.

  On the way back, Jesse would not stop talking.

  "That coon'll never find out who we were," he was saying. "Just like we used to do it in 'Nam. The first 'tract and 'trans units came in while I was over there. We used to keep the ARVN forces up with transes from the body count. 'Got to keep the war machine running!' they told us. Then there wasn't enough. We finally had to get into our own casualties. The NCOs told us to get what we needed off our own. They wouldn't let us take nothing off the whites. We got some of the brown brothers together and made sure ours got left alone. We had to look somewhere. Most of the civilians, the gooks, were too small. Women, kids. So we came down on the nigger bodies. We made sure there were always enough of 'em. Then they started transing stateside. Right away there were too many patients, not enough donors. I coulda told 'em that was gonna happen. So when we got on the outs we went into business, me and Raoul. We wasn't the only ones. There are plenty of units like us. Sure, plenty now."

  Jesse settled back, moving his belly behind the wheel.

  "Whatsamatter, kid? We made a good hit." He patted the thermostat. "We'll sell 'em tomorrow. Or the next day. Don't worry."

  They squealed around a corner and headed up the long gray ramp to the freeway. They passed a collision but two independent units were wheeled into place next to it already, the two drivers haggling over the rights. Jaime saw a fist pounding the air.

  "Me, now I got something to worry about." Jesse yanked the drainage belt loose under his smock. "Damn pisser. Gotta get me some new kidneys. You ever have a tube runnin' up your dick? I'll get 'em, though. That's for sure. Long as it's not off no damn spade."

  They sped past accident after accident, metal and chrome and flesh spattered over and over again across lanes for miles, as if part of the same accident. And always the vans moving in from all directions, cutting across dividers, heading against the traffic, closing in.

  "I need a lotta stuff, just for myself." Jesse bit fiercely at his torn thumbnail. "Old ticker won't hold up forever. Not to mention the rest of me. Get pains in the middle of the night, you know?"

  He turned his head on the thick stalk of his neck.

  He glanced across at Jaime. His eyes roamed over Jaime's thin body, the strong young muscles, the firm abdomen. He smiled, a crack splitting his cruel brown face.

  Jaime was hypnotized by the passing lights. His eyes focused on the sideview mirror outside the door. He saw that his jaw hung slack, his mouth half open as if to speak, as it had been for mile after endless mile. He saw the white, sharp, strong teeth, good teeth, the kind anyone would be proud to own. He sat gripping the religious medal around his neck, so tightly it burned his hand.

  "Don't let it get to you, kid. It's that damn smog. It's worse'n a sacka onions." He slid his fleshy hands down to the bottom of the steering wheel. "But it's all in a day's work, I guess. Be home with my wife an' kid in a few more minutes. Welcome to the Company, Jaime. We need somebody like you. Believe me." When he heard no answer he said, "That is your name, right? Jaime?"

  But Jaime did not hear him. He was back on the dark street, waiting, but she would not stop. She would not stop screaming.

  On the Pike

  His name was Geoff and he had been seeing her for seven weeks, ever since; almost exactly, in fact. Her name was Sherron. She was nineteen-and-a-half and a Fine Arts major, and he had met her at the semiannual Students Arts & Crafts Sale in the sculpture patio among the kilns and unfinished steel and bronze weldings, the finished ones as well all jagged, angular jumbles resembling knives, halberds and rusty sheets in the sun and concrete shadows.

  A crowd of women in floral print dresses cooed over her bowls and ceramic teapots; her dishes were going like hotcakes. He had short-cut through the Arts wing on his way back to the House, and now circled in the unexpected activity, arriving at her table by natural course.

  Tracing with his finger a caricatured Uncle Sam glazed blue-and-russet on a centerpiece plate she had tagged not for sale, he thickened his lower lip and nodded in a knowing wrap-up and turned to leave.

  "Wait!" She waved through her customers, edging to the end of the table.

  "You talking to me?"

  "Um. Do you have a match?"

  She was pretty, cute, close enough to it, at least. He nodded and fished in his windbreaker.

  "Thanks." She ignored the pottery hounds — they were picking over the last few pieces, anyway—and watched his eyes. "Do you have a cigarette?"

  He watched back, came up with two.

  She cradled her elbow in her other hand and flexed the cigarette in her fingers. He lit hers and then his, waiting ceremoniously for the sulfur to burn off first. She cupped her hands, small and gray with dried clay, around his and inhaled.

  "Do you have a car?" she asked, without blinking.

  He had to laugh. "What's your — " Only then did he recognize her as the girl his roommate had pointed out in the cafeteria. That one'll help you forget, man, Greg had smirked. She'll go out with an-y-one. For one night. "Your name's Sherron, isn't it?"

  "Mm-hm. I have to get to the USC Dental Clinic by three o'clock. I have an appointment."

  She stared him down.

  He glanced at his watch. "Three o'clock, huh?"

  "I thought afterwards we could go to my place. I could make you some Ovaltine, or something."

  When he looked up she was smiling. Really smiling. "You're not putting me on, are you." He said it like he already knew the answer.

  "No," she said. And she wasn't, either.

  So it had gone: from icepacking a wisdom tooth socket all the first night, to breakfast and lunch and dinner, to the friendly, slippery morning showers, till it was too damn much trouble driving back to the House for periodic supplies of books, money, underwear and socks. He had moved out, and moved in. One night they passed in and out of each other's eyes for hours, each leaning forward as if to enter a mirror held by the other, and out again, and then again. So the
y would get married—no shit. She acted as if she didn't care about that part at first, though she warmed to it after introducing him to her sisters in West Covina. Some nights he dreamed he had stuck his neck out an open skyscraper window, but made himself leave it there on the sill, daring the window to come crashing down and behead him. He had broken through to the other side, and he was going to stay there, no matter what.

  So that now, after a basketball game at the Long Beach Sports Arena, they found themselves mousing their way back in a determinedly unhurried stumble-pace to the car. A few colored lights remained on along the Nu-Pike, an old boardwalk fronting the parking lot, and the bulbs reflected in the easy tide lapping the sandy bar, breaking up like winking Christmas lights in the gently strafed waters.

  "Hey," she said, "I wanna ride the roller coaster!"

  "Naw," he said, tightening his arm on her neck, steering, "come on, they tore it down, remember?"

  "No, then, well, so what?" insisted Sherron. "We can still have fun!"

  "You want to get mugged? There's nothing over there but winos and sailors."

  "Come on. You can buy me a cotton candy, or something."

  A country-and-western bar was letting out in the amusement park. The couples sashayed away, all sequin shirts and wide dresses, their dishwater children, he imagined, left under blue TV screens in paper-thin rooms somewhere; he couldn't hold back a bitter thought of Jeannie and the hick veteran she had run to the altar with — was it only seven weeks ago? Some kind of square. He had seen him once. Probably has tattoos, thought Geoff.

  Sherron led him past boarded-up concession stands, a fortune-telling parlor with frayed tassel drapes and a palmistry chart the size of a hyperthyroid octopus. The pavement glistened with stains of indeterminate origin, shiny smears like the ones found on garden leaves and walkways the morning after a rain. A huge plastic model of a hot-dog-on-a-stick thrust out from a stand in an obscene beckoning. In the dim glass, beyond her reflection, he saw dark and cooling game machines and wilted stuffed animals. He stood staring, trying hard to think of something, when she began pulling excitedly at his sleeve.

  She pointed to a spot a hundred feet down the pike, where stragglers had drifted to form a crowd in front of a small wooden platform.

  "It looks like a show! Oh, can we go?"

  A man with a neck microphone was gesturing at the canvas behind him, and now Geoff heard a tired voice reverberating between the rows of empty rides and abandoned booths.

  He caught up with her just as the pitchman introduced a girl in a turquoise harem costume. The pitchman promised a mystifying, stupefying and mesmerizing demonstration, "one which you will remember the longest day you live.

  "But first," he pressed on, his moustache brushing the microphone like the sound of a riffled stack of bills, "allow me to call your attention to what I hold here in my left hand…."

  He held up a blue roll of tickets. All day long, he said, he had been selling admissions at one dollar per. He made a rhetorical bet that some "within the sound of my voice now" had paid that full price time and again to see the very same show that was about to go on again inside the tent.

  "But this is our last performance of the night and, tell you what, I'm going to put these away." He held up a pink roll. "That's right, fifty cents, the regular child's price — this time and this time only!" To a faceless man in the booth: "Herb, don't sell any more of these adult tickets tonight…."

  "I bet he says that every time," whispered Geoff.

  "Shh!"

  Then the barker called everyone — there were only twelve or fifteen — in close to the platform, so they would not miss the mind-boggling demonstration he had promised.

  He tied her wrists to a splintered, cross-like T-square (to force truth from her before the trick was over?). Geoff watched her writhe in the soft ropes, her bejeweled navel rising and falling above a low gilt belt. Now the latecomers, almost all men, pressed intently to the platform, their eyes rolling over her like ball bearings on a washboard.

  "She's wearing a wig," Sherron interjected. "And there's a rip in her armpit. Poor thing."

  The barker pitched and persuaded and promised and enticed and the audience, grown restless, flicked eyes from the word pictures flying like spittle-moths from his mouth to the painted poster renderings strung up against the tarp:

  Pin Head, an androgynous mystery.

  Mister Frozo.

  Petrified Man.

  The Human Pin Cushion.

  A sword swallower with the neck of a giraffe.

  A fire eater.

  And a geek, curiously unexplained.

  He started a portable phonograph, promising admittance for those in line before the music stopped — "Limited standing room!" — and then, don't blink, the girl whipped her freezing hands out of the ties, hiding them in her veil as she ducked inside.

  They got in.

  Geoff smelled sawdust and something he didn't want to name as they inched away from the closed flap. His eyes strained to open to the dim light. Sherron hung on his sleeve, her breast pushing into his arm, and he liked that, and then remembered why: Jeannie, walking home from school in their sophomore year, before he had gotten his car. He hadn't known what it had meant, that memory, until now, and he fought it, everything about Jeannie, Geoff and Jeannie, Jeannie and Geoff. Well, the hell with her. He had something different now, and better, he told himself, and he wasn't going to give it up. It didn't matter, it didn't, what his friends said, that he was only on the rebound…

  He put his arm around his fiancée.

  The sword swallower slid an assortment of smooth chromed blades into his gullet, starting each one carefully and then allowing the weighted handle to glide it down all the way. He wiped them before with a rag reeking of antiseptic, drawing them swiftly up and out and wrapping them neatly away at the end.

  "That's easy," confided Sherron, "see, he just tips his head so far back his whole throat opens."

  "Yeah, sure, but how does he keep from throwing up?"

  "Aw," said Sherron, "I wanna see something good!"

  The magic show was slow and tacky; it was the sword swallower again, doing double duty. He struggled through a levitation with the girl in the harem costume. He got her up on the board, then kicked out the chairs, then put the sheet over her—he had forgotten; and every time she started to tip one way or the other he had to yell back at the shabby curtain for someone to tighten the wires.

  It was the last show of the night, all right. Geoff felt embarrassed for the man, he couldn't help it. But Sherron laughed. She was getting restless, he could tell.

  Pin Head was asleep, they were told.

  Mister Frozo was down for the last time, too, laid out on a bed of nails surrounded by twenty-five-pound blocks of ice like the ones that come down the chutes of vending sheds in small towns. You didn't want to stand too close to the table, with the dirt and straw melting to mush underneath. Mister Frozo, a beefy pink man without expression, appeared at first, too, to be asleep, and perhaps he had been for hours; the outline of his body had sunk deep into the icy supports; when he got up, if he did when the show was over, he would leave behind a mantle of Gaudí architecture, clear shivering crystals like the pointed slopes of translucent icebergs.

  But just then Mister Frozo, prodded, did sit up, lifting slowly at the waist like a rigor mortised cadaver, so that all could see the deep hole-like indentations quilted into his back.

  "Sit on him!" someone suggested, and a girl laughed.

  Shuddering, Geoff stepped ahead to the next stall. The cold was beginning to get to him. He rubbed his hands, breathed into them.

  Next in line was the Petrified Man.

  Geoff stood reading the signboard while Jeannie, no, it was Sherron, moved over with him, and then the others led by the sword swallower. The sign was crudely lettered and spelled, as if by a child. This is what it said:

  THE MAN 14,000 YRS. YOUNG!

  This perfect Specimen of a MUMMY unearthed in
North Amer. Continent

  by Archeologists in the Place: Puebla, Mex. in the year: 1939 A.D. The

  Prehistoric Man was a member of the Clovis Culture (12,000–10,000 B.C.)

  and made his own Lanceolated Spear Points using the Flint or Chip Method

  of design. He is therefore assumed to be a Hunter, several of his Tribesmen

  were found nearby & were also known to be Hunter's also. He made his

  home a rude Wickiup made of sticks or branches and the skins of Animals

  he Tracked & Killed. He is preserved so timelessly by the High Altitude &

  Dry Climate, so that he was preserved whereas his Tribesmen were not.

  Look carefully and you will see authenticated Hair, Fingernails. You have

  just witnessed the Most Perfect Speciman of Man of his Era on Earth!!

  Truly An Unforgettable Sight

  The sword swallower recited the same words out loud. And that was that, except that those who wanted a closer look were given time to file past Petrified Man in his plastic-capped pine box, a very realistic mock-up, brown and taut and convoluted as a chestnut. Uneasily Geoff noticed the teeth.

  Sherron no longer clung to his arm. He turned and snared her wrist out of the stragglers shuffling to the far end of the tent.

  "You don't want to see any more, do you?"

  "Well, what do you think?"

  "I think it's a stone drag," he answered soberly.

  "Oh, come on," she said, "we never have any fun," and that brought him up short.

  A drunk, a pair of sailors similar as bookends, a girl from the country-and-western bar, an overweight, rumpled, lonely man with perpetual five o'clock shadow, a young crewcut with his sleeves rolled, picking his nose slowly after a hard day and night at the pinballs, Geoff and his girl and three or four—who could be sure? — other furtive presences on the fringe. They found themselves clumped together before the last platform.

  The sword swallower went into a low-key spiel about fire-eating.