Rat-A-Tat: Short Blasts of Pulp

by Russ Anderson, Jr

  Eventually, Cerberus managed to track me down amongst the floating debris. They'd hung back to check Mithra's orbit had not been shifted significantly. The remaining crewmen hauled me in on the end of a weighted rope.

  I kept on asking about Yuri, but there was no answer.

  I never saw him again, except in those nightmares which we all find sometimes at the bottom of a glass, or in the dark night hours when it's too hot to sleep. He was with our old comrades. Now there was only me left behind, and revenge was all burnt out of me. The pain never came back.

  After an investigation, SolFed offered me the Cerberus again; I could be reactivated, and there'd be another medal in it, it would be good public relations for the service, they said, it was always good to have a hero. An example to us all.

  I told them to shove their ship, and the medal, where the sun doesn't shine.

  KILLING TIME

  By Ken Janssens

  There had been quite a commotion, that was evident. Slivers of dust were still dancing on the air as if they were not familiar with the concept of gravity. Their frenzied activity was spotlighted by a single shaft of sunlight that pierced through the bullet hole in the thick seventies-era curtain.

  The gun weighed heavy in Draper’s hand; and his hand did the same on his lap. The slide wasn’t hot anymore. He was sorry for that, the heat having been quite soothing on his stained jeans. It had distracted him, though only minutely, from the other pains he was feeling.

  Draper was already a two-time loser. The first time he had gone to jail, he spent three months there. He had been nineteen-years old and the car had been thirty. A classic. A Rambler. A beauty.

  His second stint had taken up a good part of his early twenties though he’d never tell anyone the reason for it. Not out of anything as human as shame or guilt, or even pride, but because he had no recollection of the event. Draper had to take the word of the cops and the two eyewitnesses that had described the scene they’d happened upon during a nightly stroll. Through the open blinds of Mary Anne McGovern’s one-story shithole, the two self-proclaimed Chicago hippies had watched as Draper, with a potted aloe plant grasped firmly by its lip, smashed the terra cotta clay against his former girlfriend’s face. To this day, she was still blind in her right eye, a scar running straight up to it from her chin, pointing out the past crime to those who were not aware. The drugs that had been in Draper’s system were a mix of cocaine and heroine. Those, on top of the fifth of Johnny Walker Blue, had made the entire night vanish from the part of his brain that should remember such things.

  Now, he was slumped against a cold wall in a poorly-kept apartment on South Austin; the only drug running through his veins was adrenaline. Usually that would stimulate the flight part of the famous “fight or flight” response, but the lead slug in his pelvis and his dying wife on the ground kept him from spreading his wings.

  The third body in the room gave Draper little concern. Not only because the man-child was a complete stranger, but because he was dead; a combo that made it difficult for someone like Draper to care about. He cared about himself and, surprisingly, Suzie, a woman he married because he thought he had to. Twins had been predicted when he said “I Do” but only one child, an itsy-bitsy girl with giant, stunning blue eyes, survived the journey out of the pool.

  But there it was, anyway. He cared about Suzie; the phone, still transmitting a signal as it lay in the puddle of Draper’s blood, bared evidence to that fact. Hell, he probably loved her. Though, he had never been absolutely sure… positively certain.

  It had been thirteen minutes since he had dialed 911 and the sirens were just now starting to overpower the broken but still whirring air conditioner resting precariously and unseen behind the perforated curtain. The hole was made by the first of the three shots Draper had fired. The dead man-child had ducked rather quickly, squished his hand under the bed’s mattress, and rebounded back up into the gunfight, all in an eye blink. Draper’s second bullet had caught the greasy-haired fool in the shoulder just as the bone four inches north of his own pecker was shattered from the twenty-two fired back his way.

  The exchange, however, had not been over. Each of the modern-day cowboys had one more remark to add to the bloody conversation. Due to his newly-acquired injury, the man-child’s last pull of the trigger had resulted in a miss of his intended target, while Draper’s aim, as he was slipping down the wall behind him, a red streak of fresh paint marking his decline, had been perfect. The (now officially) dead man-child had crumpled to the floor instantly upon receiving his third eyeball. His six-chambered pistol hadn’t gone off again.

  But it hadn’t needed to. All the damage that the universe required had been completed. Draper had found that out when he turned for his wife’s help off the floor--a floor that was getting more slippery with his AB positive.

  Draper, a bad man, had been punished. And his wife, possibly a worse person because she wouldn’t say the word “no” even though she cared about “right from wrong”, was unconscious three-arm lengths closer to the apartment door.

  Draper looked back towards his wife. It was currently fourteen-and-a-half minutes since three people had dropped several feet in altitude to the surface of the dirty linoleum, fifteen minutes since Draper and Suzie decided to bust into Michael Hector Ramirez’s sixth-floor one-bedroom. The word on the street was he had product here that he was trying to move. Familiar with Michael from their near decade of drug use before getting clean (a feat that rarely occurs cold turkey when a couple tries to do so together), Draper and Suzie had staked-out the Blakewood Estates until the drug dealer left on a Sunday afternoon to do nefarious things by simply passing small baggies to weak-willed people. The husband and wife had waited longer for yet another resident of the seven-story complex to exit the mostly-glass front entrance so they could enter and sneak up the stairs to suite six-o-nine. They had known that whatever they found they could sell, an act that would keep the landlord off their backs for at least one more month. Suzie wasn’t working on account of her intermittent stutter in times of stress. Draper had recently been downsized. Finding another job while sporting the title of “Double Ex-Con” had inevitably proved fruitless.

  “Sir,” came the voice over the redder-than-usual Kyocera, “if you can still hear me, police and ambulance have just arrived at the premises.” Draper realized she was right. There weren’t any more sirens. That gave him what? A minute? Possibly two for them to stride up the half dozen flights? It didn’t leave much time to finally make his decision.

  Draper swung his arm over so his hand could rest on his lap next to its mirror image. He checked the clip. There was plenty of ammo left in the Glock lying between them but, of course, quantity was not an issue as long as that quantity wasn’t zero. The gutshot he had sustained would not end his life. Draper knew that. It was supposed to be one of the most painful spots to get hit, but also took the longest for a person’s life to completely spill out onto their surroundings, be it the backseat of a getaway car, the already wet grass of a careless but WWII-obsessed neighbor’s backyard, or a floor of solidified linseed oil topped with a layer of dried mud, ten feet away from a drug dealer’s cousin—a man who was supposed to be at his mother’s to watch the Packers play the Bears, not sleeping off a high started minutes from when the sun wanted to rise over the building-spattered horizon.

  For Draper to no longer have to worry about the trials of this world--money, crappy genes, breathing—he would have to take matters into his own hands. When it came down to it, it really didn’t make a difference that he had now committed felony murder, he could have simply snatched a socialite’s purse. “Two-time loser” meant third strike and out. Draper wasn’t going to feel anything besides concrete, bedsprings digging into his back, and the brutal or “caring” touch of another man for the rest of his life, something he didn’t think he could bear. So if “the rest of his life” was only thirty more seconds…

  Draper raised the gun to his temple. He couldn’t brin
g himself to put it in his mouth, he didn’t want to be reminded of his father. As his finger rested on the trigger, he tried to think of all the reasons why he shouldn’t squeeze it hard. Even though he came up blank, Draper decided that he could hold off a little longer until the loud footfalls echoed down the hallway.

  “They are ascending the stairs to your location as we speak.” The 911 lady that Draper had called for his wife had quite the soothing tone. Hopefully, the officers and the doctors and the lawyers would be half as sensitive when, and if, Suzie made it through the next 24 hours. The six months max she would spend in prison for attempted theft under five grand--once the judge learned that she wasn’t aware that Draper had brought a gun to their little break-and-enter—would ruin her speech forever but probably nothing more. This would be her strike number one.

  Loud thumps, accompanied by booming men’s voices and the electric buzz of chatter on press-to-speak walkie-talkies, commenced after the distant squeal of a push-in-levered door flew open. Draper steeled himself. He still didn’t have anything in the “cons to suicide” column in his head (he thought of his daughter and how she had become better off living with Suzie’s parents over the last three years) so he knew this was it. He murmured something that was supposed to be “Live well, my love,” then started to count down from five. He quickly determined there was no use counting past four.

  As the cops gathered outside six-o-nine, the lead, an older Korean woman who had surprisingly kept her gentle nature despite years of exposure to murderous degenerates and racist partners, held up her hand to signal for everyone that it was time to enter the apartment. All they knew was that a man had called to report that a woman was suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest. With their department-issueds raised to shoulder level, the four officers burst into the apartment, all sound and fury.

  After securing the crime scene, Officer Kim Van Tran screamed to the paramedics who were still waiting in the corridor that the coast was clear. They scurried in like rats and once they had positioned themselves around the three piles of scarlet, human rags, Van Tran squatted down to talk with the only conscious resident of the OK Corral, his six plus six shooter strewn onto the bed across from him. Before she could part her lips to speak, Draper cut her off with a statement; a statement he knew couldn’t have been uttered by a man who had a pound of brain sticking loosely to the nearby dresser; a statement that needed to exist, to hang in the air like the particles of curtain dust, so that his wife wouldn’t have to serve fifteen-to-life for awareness of the firearm.

  He was absolutely sure… positively certain.

  CALIBER

  By Ralph L. Angelo Jr.

  Giana Miranda Calibre pulled the zipper up to her neck on the jet black leather jumpsuit, her ample breasts withdrawing within the confines of the suit. She always smiled at this. She knew what she looked like and how men looked at her hungrily. But that too was a weapon, as much as the twin .45’s she slid into matching holsters at her hips, and the dagger she slid into her boot after unfastening a small zipper at the bottom of her right jumpsuit leg. She fastened the zipper once again and then looked at herself in the full length mirror.

  She was stunning, five feet nine inches tall with auburn hair that set men’s hearts on fire. Her body was a perfect thirty on a scale of one to ten, and her face, well that was the wickedest cut of all, her face made starlets and supermodels jealous. She was drop dead gorgeous.

  Now she was gorgeous and on the hunt for vengeance.

  She fought back tears for the hundredth time tonight dabbing at her eyes before her mascara ran. She walked toward a door near the front of the house and grabbed a set of keys off a counter near the door, which was the garage entrance. She exited into the two car garage and pushed a button on the wall, the garage door instantly began to open as she walked past the barely used Mercedes SLS AMG GT that sat on her side of the garage.

  Instead, as was the norm for her, she threw her leg over a jet black Kawasaki ZX-14 and thumbed the starter to life as she pulled her helmet on.

  She turned towards the garage opening, already knowing what she would see there, who she would see standing framed in the headlights of his car from behind him. His long leather coat blowing in the slight breeze behind, the fedora atop his head unmoving, his face hidden in darkness.

  “Where ya goin’ Gee?” he asked with a voice like gravel through a grinder.

  “Where do you think Johnny? They killed him Johnny. They killed Charlie. They have to pay.” She replied softly, barely audible above the purr of her bike’s motor.

  “Gee, yer gonna get yerself killed, dammit. Ya can’t run off half-cocked like this. Think things over. Let me handle this, I have my best detectives on the case, hell, I’m on the case. We’ll get him an’ all his cronies, I promise ya Gee.”

  “No, Johnny. Torretti has to pay, and he has to pay tonight, with his life.”

  She wheeled the big motorcycle past Johnny and gunned the powerful motor, instantly lofting the front wheel up towards the full moon overhead, then sped away as the wheelie descended to finally lightly touch the pavement.

  She cared nothing for herself right now, nothing for her own life as she sped between cars on the highway at breakneck speed, zigzagging in and out with half a dozen close calls in as many seconds.

  Charlie was dead, her Charlie, the only man she ever truly loved, and no matter what her brother Johnny, the chief of police in Riverburgh said or did, she was the one who was going to deal with Torretti, her and no one else. She was going to end him once and for all, no matter what it cost her.

  She practically flew over the Riverburgh Bridge, her front tire once again seeking the sky as the speedometer registered well over triple digits, as it had for most of her ride. Behind her flashing lights tried to keep up with her as she easily left them behind, darting between moving cars like they were standing still, leaving them all in her wake. The wind tore at her leather suit as she dropped two gears and slowed the powerful machine before turning left, than right then left again in a short series of blocks near the wharf, leaving behind any pursuit that had managed to stay with her thus far. It didn’t matter, she knew this was going to be a one way trip for her, no matter what, Torretti had to die, and she had to be the one to kill him.

  Charlie had been a sweet, gentle man who knew how to make her chase him, which no man before had ever been able to do. He knew which buttons to push to get her going. He alone broke down a lifetime of defenses she had built up. They had been married barely a year, and now this. It was unfair and too soon. They barely had any time together.

  Charlie had been an undercover cop investigating Torretti’s life of organized crime. Torretti ran the docks and the warehouses near it. For months he had worked his way into Torretti’s organization. Sometimes she didn’t see him for weeks, but she had her own brother Johnny to thank for all of that. But he was also the one who introduced Charlie to Giana. She choked back sobs within her helmet as she rounded the last corner and saw the warehouse in front of her, the one with the two thugs standing at opposite sides of the driveway, trying to seem inconspicuous, but looking anything but.

  Anger colored her vision blood red as she snapped the bike into first gear and yanked the throttle, once again lifting the front wheel skyward as she rocketed down the long, dark street directly at the two thugs who stood there in stunned surprise!

  But almost instantly they drew guns from beneath loose fitting jackets and began to fire at the speeding motorcycle!

  But they were too late! Giana fired first, nailing each thug in the chest and throat. Their bodies dropped to the ground as she sped past.

  ***

  Inside the warehouse, Torretti spun in his seat. He was a bald man with shocks of grey at his temples reaching back around the base of his skull. He was heavy-set with dark piercing eyes that bespoke of a lifetime of cunning, with much evil done at his behest. “What was that?” He barked to the three thugs who sat in his office playing cards while he ca
lculated his most recent ledger.

  The three hired guns snapped up out of their seats as the motorcycle’s roaring engine grew louder.

  One of the men, Johnny Zico by name, turned and replied, “Sounds like a motorcycle, boss.”

  Torretti shook his head in anger before replying, “I know that, you idiot. Go check it out an’ take Bruno wit’ you, jus’ in case.”

  Zico nodded in agreement and nudged Bruno to follow him as they walked towards the door to the street, Zico opened it just as the volume of the motorcycle’s motor crescendoed and before he could say a word, almost six hundred pounds of roaring street bike rammed into him in a blur of power and death!

  The big black motorcycle sailed through the door, flattening Zico and killing him instantly as Bruno stood dumbfounded and in shock!

  Bruno ran to where the bike crashed within the warehouse with Zico’s bloodied and dead corpse still pinned to its fairing. “I’ll kill ya!” He roared to no one in particular, he just felt he had to say it; “Someone had to die for this!” he thought, but where was the rider? He looked around and only saw Zico’s body with the rapidly growing puddle of blood around it.

  “Lose something sport?” a voice as sexy as anything he ever heard before inquired.

  He spun instantly as twin ‘45’s fired, catching Bruno in the chest twice, the muzzle flash of each gun and the shadowed form of female death the last thing that Bruno ever saw.

  ***

  “Boss,” Benny began as he pointed his gun at the door of the room he and Torretti were in, “It’s that crazy Caliber chick, that friggin’ Charlie’s wife. I saw her gun down Bruno just now.”