by Bob Williams
Shen continues to talk as if I haven’t said a word. Which pisses me off because the laughing gas line was really good.
“For instance, if I know you, and of course I do, you’re a cardboard cutout. A highway billboard. No, a neon light. You’re a one-dimensional anger-bot. Since Curtis over there hit you with his pistol, in your own incredibly stupid way you’ve either been plotting to kill him or at least hurt him seriously.”
“And? What’s your point?”
“My point, you half-cocked imbecile, is that nothing Curtis Woolever has done to you has been of his own free will. That has to have occurred to you, hasn’t it? As it turns out, Curtis Woolever is one of the kindest souls I’ve ever come across. I felt his goodness when I touched him. I had to give a little extra to lean him in his new direction. You see, your anger is misplaced.
“But regardless of your inane motivations, I will do you what the low lyers call “a solid.” The three of us walk up and stand alongside Woolever and join his gallows-gawking. Shen pats him on the back.
“It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it, Curtis?”
“It most certainly is. It’s phenomenal.”
“Would you do something for me, Curtis?”
I feel a five-ton semi drive right into my gut. Ohgodno.
“Yes, of course, Admiral Shen. Anything.”
“Would you mind walking up there for me ... and hanging yourself?”
***
The instant Prescott gave the “stay” command, Lexi sat as instructed and stayed exactly where she was. She watched keenly as Curtis Woolever led Prescott at gunpoint down the street. The second she deemed it acceptable, she turned and ran back to Lobo’s Printing and in through the open back door.
Once in the house, she stopped momentarily in the kitchen and let loose a high-pitched howl. And then another. Then she started to sniff for Cole. That’s who she wanted. She went through the living room without stopping, as that’s where she had been with Prescott.
She continued through to the foot of the stairs. She stopped and used her powerful sense of smell to determine whether she needed to go up the stairs to find Cole, because Shields was down the hall. She barked loudly, aggressively, and incessantly as she charged up the stairs. Once at the top, she turned left and raced down the hall to the first door on the right. She jumped up and pushed the door, which wasn’t completely shut, all the way open and rushed in.
Cole was a light sleeper and had heard the dog’s racket in the kitchen. He was sitting up, on the floor with his back now against the wall, when Lexi burst in. Lexi ran right up to him and started barking. She also patted at his leg aggressively.
While he was not fully awake, he could tell instantly there was a problem. And it most likely meant something had happened to Prescott.
“Okay, okay, Lexi, ol’ girl,” he said, failing miserably at trying to calm her down. She barked, louder and more repetitively. Cole was fully in tune now, and jumped to his feet. He grabbed his jeans and pulled them on while not bothering to tuck in the faded Chicago Cubs T-shirt he’d been sleeping in.
“Come on, Lex,” he said. “It’s about time this party got started.” he grabbed his socks and boots and ran out of the room. When he and Lexi reached the top of the stairs, they both saw Shields standing fully dressed at the bottom with her guns holstered and her sword hilt showing off her shoulder.
“Prescott and Woolever are gone! The back door is wide open,” she said, her voice fraught with worry. “How did we not hear anything?”
“Not sure, Laura, but I think Lexi knows,” said Cole as he pounded down the stairs. He almost went ass over tea kettle, tripping over Lexi on the way down. “Let me grab my guns, and we gotta go.”
“Wait! Wait! Hold on!”
Cole stopped in his tracks. “What is it?”
“Our plan still holds.”
“Are you serious? Prescott is gone! We have to get him back!”
“Michael, we were always going to separate. It’s a shitty plan, yeah? But we knew at some point it was going to be just Shen and Prescott. Only difference is, we’re not set up. We should’ve started together.”
“We have no idea how long he’s been gone.”
“Hold on. Lexi just woke us up. There’s no way Prescott walks outta here and Lex doesn’t know it. Grab your shit and let’s go!”
She means business! Cole grabbed the Mossberg shotgun, his 1911s, and the MK46A and ran out the door after Shields and Lexi. He never bothered to put on his footwear.
Cole, now in front, led Shields and Lexi up North Fourth toward the Seventh Son. They saw the Freak brigade working on something big but couldn’t tell what it was. As they got closer, they were finally able to see what it was that Shen was constructing.
“Holy shit,” said Cole. “He wants to fucking hang our asses.”
Shields said nothing. She sat down in the driveway of a nearby home that had long since been deserted. Prescott was somewhere within the walls of the Seventh Son. She didn’t know if he was dead or alive. She didn’t know what to say to Cole. And she had no idea how to proceed. All she could think of was to retreat. Pull back. For her, dying seemed easier if Prescott was by her side. At least that way he’d be dying with her. But if he was already dead, what the hell were they going to accomplish?
“Michael. We have to go back.”
Silence.
“Michael.”
Silence.
“No,” he said. “I won’t leave him. He wouldn’t leave me. And he wouldn’t leave you. If we die tonight, Laura, we die. That’s it. No parade. No nothin’. We just need to stick to the plan. Those are your words. Not mine.”
“So ... what, then? What do we do?”
Silence.
“Michael!”
“We wait,” he said. “And when the time is right, we fight.”
ENDGAME: PART TWO
“Sure! Actually, nothing would make me happier,” replies an ecstatic Curt Woolever, one of the kindest souls Shen has ever come across. I watch in horror as he happily strides around to the side where the stairs are located, climbs them, and walks to the center of the contraption where a noose currently hangs. The noose sways from left to right due to a slight, yet very disturbing breeze.
“Curt! Don’t listen to him!” I scream. I’m only about ten feet from him, but I’m hollering as if it were miles. “Curt! You do not have to do this!” I am having no effect whatsoever.
“I’ve been thinking,” says Woolever, “you’re actually not my friend. So you may not call me Curt any longer.”
“That’s right, Curt,” says Shen. “You tell him. You are in control of your own destiny. Now it’s totally up to you, but it would sure make me happy if you’d put that noose around your neck and pull it tight. Then just give that lever there next to you a good kick.”
“Come on! Do it!” Rebecca bellows. She is loving this.
“It would be my pleasure, Admiral Shen.” Woolever takes the noose, steps up to it, and places it around his neck. He then holds the knot and pulls the excess rope to make the noose tight around his neck.
“Curt! Curtis!” I wail. “Stop! This is not you! Shen is making you do this!”
“Why, that is totally absurd. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He kicks the lever as instructed and the trapdoor drops. And so does Dr. Curtis Woolever.
The first thing he does is the obvious. He grabs with both hands at the rope around his neck. He draws blood straightaway as he scratches and claws at the noose. His tongue is sticking out and his face is a ghastly mixture of fear, oxygen deprivation, and the realization of certain death. He kicks furiously. His eyes bug out of his skull as he fights with everything he has for that elusive next breath. He even wets his pants as the final degradation of his utterly senseless death.
“Yes!” booms Shen. “Yes! That was beautiful. Damn beautiful!”
“I’m going to kill you, you son of a bitch. You hear me?” I say through clenched teeth and spittle.
“Y
es, well. I’m sorry; I just don’t see that happening, seeing as how you’re about to die. I was gonna rally everyone around and make a big fucking deal about this—you understand, make a big speech. But I believe that’s all a bit played out, don’t you think? Like you said, Mr. Prescott. I’m going to stick to directing.”
“Fuck you. You can kill me, but my friends will avenge me. I hope Lexi tears your fucking nuts right off and eats ‘em in front of you.”
“Ohmifuckin’god, man, you are so melodramatic,” cries Rebecca. “I can’t wait to see you shit yourself while you’re flailing around up there.” She laughs. I fucking punch her square in the face and she drops like a sack of potatoes.
Shen watches what happens and shrugs. “I guess she won’t get to see you shit yourself, after all. She really hasn’t worked out as well as I expected.”
The Freaks who’d been working on the gallows until its completion are still milling around, and had seen Woolever’s death. While he’d scratched and drawn blood, it didn’t amount to much, but now that I am looking at them, I am shocked there hasn’t been a break.
What kind of control does he have over these Freaks?
“Boys! Oh, boys! My friend Mr. Prescott here is going to make a run for it any minute. Could you please stop him, beat the shit out of him, and put him in the noose?”
He’s right. I break, heading back toward the print shop in a dead sprint.
“GO, GO, GO!” screams Shen. “Get him and bring him back here now!”
I look back over my shoulder as I’m running and see Shen waving his arms and jumping around like a damn lunatic. I also see four to six large dudes running behind me. Way closer than they should be, considering the start I had.
When I turn back to facing forward I can’t believe what I see. Three houses down, just standing in the front yard of a house I can’t really describe because I’m sprinting, I see Cole, Shields, and Lexi in the company of three of Shen’s soldiers.
Ah, shit.
I pull up from my dead sprint in time to stop dejectedly in front of the house, which I can now tell is a piece-of-shit A-frame with peeling paint and busted out windows. The rat pack finally catches up with me from behind, and we all come to a meeting in the yard. I’m not resisting. Neither are my friends. Not anymore, since Cole has a split lip and Shields seems to be massaging her stomach or ribs. Lexi looks ... okay.
I’m sucking wind like it’s going out of style, so can’t do much when I feel my leg get kicked out from under me at the knee. I fall to the ground right next to my beautiful dog.
“Hey there, Lex. Good girl.” She licks my face, but I swear she seems just as defeated as I do.
“Come out to the coast. We’ll get together, have a few laughs,” says Cole. I can’t help but smile. A Die Hard reference dropped into the perfect situation by a man I once thought had lost his sense of humor forever.
“You do realize we’re probably going to die, right?”
“I got a feeling this might go differently than you think.”
I glance at Shields. “The fuck’s he smokin’?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a flashback or a battlefield brain-fry thing. But he really believes it.”
“I’m right fucking here.”
“Shut the fuck up! All of you,” growls the biggest Freak. “We’re taking you back to Admiral Shen. I think I can speak for the rest of the guys here when I say we’re really going to enjoy watching you all suffer horrible and excruciating deaths!” They all break out into a chorus of laughter.
“Well, aren’t you a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.” I receive another lovely kick in the back for my trouble.
Cole, Shields, Lexi and I are quickly rounded up, and we head back toward the Seventh Son and that damn noose. I am terrified of the thing. Even post-Descent, I can honestly say I never even considered the thought I might die by hanging. I always had my money on punching my own ticket after a Freak finally got one on me.
As we walk back, I get to thinking about Malcolm. I can’t rightly say I’ve had much time to think about him or where he’s gone. I can only assume he left to go find help. I think he only went through the motions out of pity for our little band, which he knows is marching to Shen like pigs to a slaughter.
No, that’s not right. Earlier tonight he was different. He was honest. He was open about his mistakes and genuinely wanted to first, stop Shen, and second, atone for his transgressions.
So where did he go? Maybe ... up there?
If Malcolm has gone back to the Higher Grounds, he could very well be rotting like a bird in a cage right now, and we’re pretty much done here. But. And it’s a very big but. If he went up there and somehow inspired the graybeards ala Al Pacino at the end of Any Given Sunday, we may just have a chance. That is … if we survive long enough.
Malcolm? If you can hear me, your crazy Japanese angel padawan is about to hang me. And probably Cole and Shields. And my dog. I hope you can make it. Oh, and bring the cavalry.
“Hey!” says Cole pointedly.
“What?”
“You’re doing that thing you do when ... you know?”
“Know what?” I ask, staring intently and making my ‘shut the fuck up’ face.
“Oh ... yeah.” Then he stares intently back at me and mouths the word, “Well?” Complete with a minor shrug of the shoulders.
I shake my head.
He nods.
We complete the short journey back up North Fourth to the Seventh Son. I haven’t really been paying that much attention, because I was kinda thinking about dying. Now it appears that all the Freaks have been summoned and are slowly filtering out of their hidey-holes to gather around the gallows, in the parking lot and into the street.
If he had to do it all over again, I imagine Shen would’ve picked a different place. The place is awesome. I mean, it must have been before Chaos took a giant shit on the world. I’d have totally hit this place up. But as the stage for a post-Descent showdown between a fallen angel, his Protectorate enemy, plus Freaks and us, it’s a bit small.
The goon squad secures each of us to the instrument of death that looms over us, and the leader of the bunch—the we-all-can’t-wait-to-watch-you-die asshole—retreats into the Seventh Son. Presumably to alert Shen that we are back, so he can get on with his Clint Eastwood themed party.
“Cole ... Shield ... Lexi,” I say as a lump materializes in my throat. “I’m not sure how this is going to play out, but I just wanted you guys to know I love you.”
“Fuck off, Prescott. If you of all people throw in the towel I will hang you myself.”
“Think, Prescott. Think! Work Shen. Work him!” says Shields.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means just be your usual asshole self. Do whatever it is you do to throw people off. You need to buy us some time. Maybe Malcolm couldn’t answer because he was in a palaver with the Protectorate brass. Maybe they’re formulating a plan as we speak and they need a little more time.”
“Wait. Did you just say ‘palaver?’”
She smiles.
“That’s what I’m talking about. Cole, you get in there, too. You guys are good at arguing. Just make it last as long as you can.”
“Okay. If I can do anything, I can talk.” I’m humble bragging, I know, but I might be dying soon.
As if on cue, Admiral Shen emerges from his bunker, and we all turn at the sound of the overhead doorbell. Shen still strides with confidence as he marches toward us. Rebecca is in tow, sporting quite the shiner, along with an entourage of rather normal-looking Freaks.
When the group approaches looking all happy and shit, I do the best I can to start raining on their parade.
“That bell really doesn’t work well for you, amigo. Bit of a pussy entrance if you ask me. Cole?”
“Total homo. What’s next? Chaps? I hear they may need an admiral in the Village People.”
Shen merely looks at two members of the entourage, and they converge on
Cole, giving him a quick but effective beatdown. I am up again.
“Wait. Wait. Wait! Cole’s already slow. I can’t have him any more damaged than he already is.” I notice Rebecca glaring at me with a look that might’ve scared me if I wasn’t in the middle of trying to stall my own lynching.
“Well, hey there, Rebecca! That’s one hell of boo-boo ya got there. I’m surprised to see you up. Did your daddy over there feel you up? Help you feel better?”
She rushes up and tries to kick me in the balls but I easily parry her kick with my boot.
“Face it, Rebecca. You don’t bring anything to the table, do you? With Shen, you’re just a psycho scrounging for scraps.” She screams in fury and charges me again. Shen rolls his eyes and has a couple of goons grab her before she can touch me.
“You will not damage my property, Rebecca. Not now, when the time has arrived for us to begin our endgame.”
“He can’t talk to me like that!” she shrieks.
“Yes, he can. And you best calm down, girl. Or you just might join him.”
That shuts her up.
“Excuse me, Admiral,” I say. “Since I’m gonna die, there’s just one thing I gotta know.”
Shen looks exasperated. “What? What is it that you must absolutely know, Mr. Prescott?”
Shields chimes in. “I’m sorry. Have you two not had the talk?”
“What talk?” barks Shen.
“He doesn’t really like to be called Mr. Prescott. Daddy issues or something.”
“I don’t give a fuck what he likes to be called. It won’t matter in ten goddamn minutes.”
“Ahem. Back to me.”
“What?”
“I asked you a question. Remember? The thing I gotta know before I die.”
“What? What? WHAT!”
“Well, it’s actually very important to me dying in peace.”
“Okay!”
“Who’s your Doctor?”
Shen stops cold. If this was a child’s cartoon, his face would’ve turned red and steam would’ve shot out of both ears before his head exploded.
