Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance

by Michael Paul Gonzalez

  She scrambles over the headrest and latches onto my chest, then pries at my mouth, claws at my eyes, and the burning in my head is out of control now. I bite down hard and feel the syringe still in my mouth, the plastic slowly weakening, giving way, the taste of what’s left inside adding to the blaze.

  She hits my stomach, pries at my legs, and I hear echoes of a voice saying something about cardiac arrest. Someone else says seizure. Someone else says I’m faking.

  I open my eyes and I’m in my van, which is now wrapped around a light pole in a neighborhood I don’t recognize, and there are men surrounding me.

  And she’s crawling down my body, punching and prying, pushing a hand up my pantleg, digging into my thighs, forcing herself up and through, first just a finger, and then her hand. The whole time I’m crying, begging, I brought you into this world, I brought you in, and why are you doing this? Then she’s climbing up and up, a reverse breech birth, and my body spasms again and again, and I want to check for blood, but there’s no sense in it.

  She’s gone. She’s gone.

  And then there’s a chorus of voices around me, a religious experience, all of them shouting, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ! The world spins, my head snaps around and I vomit blood.

  One of the men has me down, loosening my shirt. Tapping my cheek. Trying to keep me conscious. And the sky in my world is turning dark, and it looks like rain again. I hear the thunder clap five times, feel the first few warm drops on my cheek. And then it stops. The thunder rings off of the walls, like the fading echo of several handguns going off at the same time. Rough hands haul me up and toss me across the back seat of someone else’s car.

  Faces swim across my vision like melting candles. They’re kids. All of them up there, high-school delinquent joyriders. The one staring at me looks a little panicked. He slaps me.

  “You’re making this difficult,” he says.

  “You better not die,” another voice calls. “Do not let her fucking die in my car!”

  “You got a fucking set of heart paddles in the trunk?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, asshole!”

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

  “We coulda called 911, you know!”

  Through slitted eyelids, I see the boy next to me, his cheeks splashed red, genuine concern in his eyes. I start to rock in and out of waking consciousness, as the boys try to stay cool, even going so far as to talk about chicks and cars and useless, trivial shit…Every few minutes someone nudges me, says to keep an eye on me, don’t let me die, whatever.

  Then I’m floating up and up, something bony jabbing into my stomach, and the world is passing beneath me. I’m being carried. We jog for a few minutes until I’m thrown down on a bench. No, a gurney.

  A sea of faces above me, I’m propped up, pushed away from the boys who watch me fade down the hall. We stop in a small room. Everything is too bright in here. I hear a man dialing a phone. There’s a pause.

  “Sharon. You know the Doc always told us to keep an eye out for anything weird here, anything we could bring to him? I got a lady here. No legs. Ugly as fuck. I think she’s the one. I’ll bring her in.”

  Back down the hall, back out the door, past the boys again, their faces puzzled. One of them asks where we’re going. The man tells them I have to be transferred to a different facility. But I know what’s happening.

  We’re heading back to the Doctor, and there’s nothing I can do. I have no legs. I have no weapons. I feel my heart slowing down. I can see the blood flow behind my eyelids, little rivers ebbing and flowing. Then I’m in the hollow dark of the tent again, drifting past Delia Sugar, past Joe, and my water breaks.

  There are burning cramps, horrible prolonged strains, and something moves inside of me. My lower body is exploding. Something’s coming out, and there’s no way I can do this, no way to deliver whatever it is.

  My stomach distends, stretches, my pelvis cracks, my thighs spasm out sideways, and still the pain won’t stop. Even here, in my unconscious, I have to close my eyes against the pain. A balloon full of rusty nails, a salt-covered gunny sack of razor blades. Doesn’t quite do the pain justice, but it begins to give an idea. There’s one last swelling, one huge jolt, and it feels like everything inside of me is broken and burned.

  I open my eyes, still inside of the dark tent, and I see her silhouette walking away from me. She spins, staggers and falls. Slumped against a wall I can’t see. Covered in blood. Mine or hers, I can’t tell. And she’s saying she’s my daughter, she’s my daughter.

  Somewhere outside of the tent, someone is grabbing my face, performing mouth to mouth. Shouting that we need to put on some speed and get to the Doctor.

  Behind my daughter, I see another slumped form, one I can’t quite make out. She’s telling me I don’t understand anything about the Doctor. She hates me. I understand.

  They’re out there fighting for my life.

  My daughter takes a step towards me, trying to move to me, and I find a way to get to her, hold her, tell her everything’s going to be okay. Nobody’s going to hurt her again. She’s in Heaven now. It’s better this way, because she can’t feel any more pain. I’ll make it better. I’ll make it all better. She doesn’t have to haunt me. Just go away. Just go.

  And she does, dissolving through my fingers and leaving me alone in the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I come to in a clean white room. I think it’s a men’s room. I’m on a job. I don’t have any legs. I’m here to kill someone. I’m pretty sure. I’m sitting on a toilet dressed in full field gear, a heavy flak jacket making it difficult to balance. I lower myself to the floor.

  Everything here is spotless and pristine and clean. Three stalls down, I see a pair of feet, pants rumpled around the ankles. I’m not alone, and I think that’s my target. I reach up to my shoulder, fingers finding a carbon blade, light and lethal. I slither slowly across the floor, towards the shoes. My other hand moves to my shoulder strap, pulls out a Glock-9, and I keep belly crawling, never breaking stride.

  Simple plan. I don’t know if this guy’s expecting me. So I’ll slide in hard on my back, a quick stab through the foot as a distraction, then a shot straight through the bottom of the jaw. Job done.

  He can’t be expecting me, because nobody takes a dump this way. He’s not moving at all. Not a single shift, no breath, no grunt, nothing. I’m right outside the door now. And I replay everything in my mind that I want to do. I inhale, hold, visualize, and then keep my breath held. No noise to give me away. I move.

  My wrist snaps up and back, driving the blade clean through the right shoe. If he’s screaming, I don’t hear it over the rustle and clank of my equipment as I flip over and slide in to deliver the death blow. The gun is up, clean and straight, and my finger squeezes and the shot is loud enough to take out my hearing momentarily. I close my eyes, waiting for a body to slump down onto me, or blood. I get a light dusting of plaster instead. Did I miss?

  There’s nobody up there. Nothing in this stall but an empty set of prosthetic legs, one decorated with my knife. I pull myself into the stall hard. Someone had to have heard that. I’m compromised. They’re all onto me now. Someone will be here soon. I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.

  I need to hide. Might as well go up. Problem. How to climb up onto a toilet that has no lid? The little horseshoe seat isn’t sturdy enough to use for leverage. I could just pull myself up, but I don’t think I could balance on the lip of the toilet very well.

  I’ve got to get a little wet, I guess. I hook my fingers around the cold porcelain, pull myself up, and the little electronic eye on the wall triggers. The toilet flushes. I watch the vortex of water swell and disappear.

  Mrs. Robinson, this is your life.

  Just a little higher…my hand slips and plunges into the cold, murky water, but at least the bowl looks pretty clean. I jam a finger, but it’s not my shooting hand. It takes everything I have to spin around and keep my balance on the seat, and there,
just inside the stall door, is my daughter.

  “Mom, you’re a mess,” she says.

  My synapses take a five-second vacation, except for my left hand, which scrabbles towards my pockets, looking for a vial of Clearwater. She fades away before me, but I’m still looking for a hit. I see her smile a few times when I blink.

  I finally find something in one of the flak jacket’s many pockets. A bent-up, faded syringe, toothmarks in the middle. No good. I look between my legs, into the toilet. It’s clean and clear. The faint smell of chemical. Maybe it’s Clearwater. Maybe. I’m not about to drink toilet water to find out. But with my daughter standing there staring at me from the inside of my eyelids, it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.

  All I can do is wait. And wait.

  Finally, she fades, her features swimming up and over my eyes, recessing back into my brain. A reminder. Sometimes you just need a reminder to keep you moving. The bathroom light pulses in a kaleidoscope of colors in rhythm with my heart. Fluorescent to red-purple to blue-green. The room is quiet until I hear someone stop outside the door.

  Cramps, shocking me, making me flop down from the toilet. I land hard on the cold tile floor, twitching. I feel a twisting pain in my lower half and look down to see two freshly sprouted legs, pink and rough and shiny, like something a starfish would grow after losing a fight. I reach up to feel my face. It’s all putty and cold cream.

  When I try to stand up, my legs are filled with jelly. They melt through the floor and I slide down until what’s left of me makes contact. The door opens, and a set of legs walks in, dressed in medical scrubs. There’s a haze across the room at about chest height. I can’t see any faces. I pull myself out of the stall and into the corner, pressed in hard. The man moves another step closer to me. The mirrors here run floor to ceiling, playing our little dance in stereo. Seeing our frozen reflection, we look like something you could pick up from any hack artist, some anguished coffeehouse soul by the beach. Half a woman cowering in the corner, a faceless man menacing her.

  I frisk myself looking for anything, some way to keep fighting. I spot it two feet away, lodged in the shoe. I yank the knife out of the boot, turn and hold it before me. My last line of defense.

  My head is still buzzing. The colors in the bathroom follow the sound of the dying fluorescent light by the door. A faint buzz, whining up and down, and the light hurts my eyes, making everything excruciating.

  “We’ll have you back soon,” he says, his voice high and lilting in the black fog. Then his face resolves, and I’ve seen him somewhere before, but I can’t remember.

  He makes a move towards me, and he says, “Relax,” even though his lips don’t move. “We just need to get you back. Stay with us. Veronica and the Doctor. So much to do still, so much to discuss,” looking right at him, his mouth is still.

  When he takes a step towards me, I flinch, except it wasn’t the man in front of me. It was the one next to me. In the mirror. I blink.

  The mirror is lying to me. I don’t see me. I see a girl holding something, a shard of broken glass, her hand wrapped in a towel. She’s crouched in the corner, pale and green, one knee bent up in front of her. In front of this girl, there’s an orderly. The whole room is tiny lime-colored tile, floor to ceiling, three toilet stalls, this girl, and the orderly.

  I look in front of me. It’s Doctor Robert Fortescu. When he moves, the orderly in the mirror moves too. When I draw back from him, raising the knife higher, the girl in the mirror slams back against the wall and copies me.

  This is why they tell kids not to do drugs.

  “How did you get out of your room?”

  And then the Doctor, under his breath, says, “Fucking junkies. Look what they’ve done to you.”

  The orderly says, “Nobody needs to get hurt. Put it down. We can’t have you running around.”

  And Doctor F says, “People always try to convince themselves that higher price doesn’t mean higher quality. And they’re wrong. You will tell me who gave this to you. Later?”

  My head is swimming with insects, hundreds of tiny pinprick legs moving across my forehead like an expressway. In the mirror, the pale girl tugs hard at her hair, her eyes bugged out, the veins in her neck and head pulsing so hard you can see them. She lowers her knife a fraction, and the orderly takes a step forward.

  Which to me means the Doctor is coming at me, so I raise my knife again. And the girl in the corner holds out her jagged glass knife.

  And I’ve had enough. So I drive the heel of my hand into the mirror hard, spiderwebbing the bottom corner of the little hospital scene. The orderly is still there in the reflection, and Dr. Robert is still here on my side, but at least I don’t have to look at the girl anymore. I only see her legs and hands at the fringes of the cracks. So of course she starts screaming.

  Doctor Robert reaches a hand into his pocket slowly. “Quiet now,” he whispers.

  I close my mouth and the girl in the mirror stops screaming too. The orderly says, “Did you take your meds?”

  In the cracked glass, I see three or four reflections of myself, my face beet red, my shoulders heaving from breathing hard.

  “Murk,” the Doctor says, “is what piss poor white trash make in their trailer house bathtubs. Knockoff Clearwater. There’s no real way to tell the difference between my products and the counterfeiters’, not taste, smell, texture, buzz. But my merchandise has no withdrawal symptoms. I have long-term customers. Nobody else does, because nobody else cares.”

  Even though the Doctor is three feet away from me, I feel his hands on my arms, my neck.

  “Was it Delia Sugar who gave this to you? You may never recover…But fret not, for it will not go unpunished.”

  My heart pounds so hard that it feels like someone’s kicking the side of my head. The room swings with every heartbeat. There’s a pain in rhythm with my pulse. I realize I’m hitting my head on the wall. In the mirror, the girl is on her hands and knees, using her head as a battering ram, trying to break through into my skull. Trying to make a connection.

  “Horrible withdrawal syndromes. Paralysis. Hallucinations. Extreme mood swings. Unchecked aggression. Delusions of grandeur. False memories. Stroke. Irritable bowels, the list goes on.”

  In the background, in the mirror, the orderly calls for help on his radio.

  “This,” the Doctor continues, “is going to sting a little bit.”

  He withdraws his hand from his coat pocket holding a syringe wrapped in sterile paper, and a long needle. A loooooooong, cavity-piercing needle. Between his pinky and ring fingers is a small ampoule with clear liquid inside.

  I see the shape of the girl behind the crack in the mirror, her feet flailing, her voice racked by sobs like a whale trying to sing out of water.

  My head lolls forward. My knife is on the floor in front of me. I don’t remember dropping it. The Doctor takes the opportunity to jab the needle into the side of my neck and push the plunger in. It’s so long it feels like it’s traveled up my carotid artery into my head. I feel the tip scraping the edge of my spinal column.

  “I never forgot you,” he breathes into me. “First do no harm.”

  My eyelids flutter as the color in the room races through the visible spectrum. Before my vision goes, I see the orderly joined in the mirror by two burly men in brown uniforms, security. They rush the girl.

  Everything goes white. The light at the end of my tunnel.

  And I hear the security guards saying, “Calm down. Stop fighting us. Relax…”

  The girl screams, “Charles Baldacci was guilty! Justice! Charles Baldacci was guilty! Justice! Justice!”

  And then I’m gone.

  * * *

  I remember happier times, when my family was…

  I really don’t remember anything from the good days. Nothing anymore. The days with my daughter, bonding over a…a what? I’ve been telling myself the whole time that all of this was for her. She’s been all that’s kept me going. But I haven’t really tho
ught about her.

  Charles Baldacci was guilty. What the fuck is my daughter’s name? This bothers me only slightly less than what the girl in the mirror screamed. Why wasn’t he on the list if he was guilty?

  Damn. Damn. Damn.

  I can’t move. I can only turn my head slightly to the side, and even then, my vision isn’t clear enough to see anything beyond the spiderwebbed crack I made in the mirror. Still here in the bathroom. But maybe it’s not a bathroom. Maybe those are other hospital beds and not stalls. Maybe those are IV stands, not antique water tanks.

  Then I see two feet move in the mirror. Above the paper slippers is a pair of knobby ankles and some basic hospital pajamas. It’s me. My name is fill-in-the-blank, and I am an addict. She, me, crouches down and puts her hand up to the cracked glass. Her eyes are filmy, faraway and lost.

  “Remember this?” she asks.

  Her face isn’t very clear to me, but even so, I see that her jaw is scarred, her hairline is jagged. I’m afraid to answer or ask any questions. Whatever’s holding this vision together could shatter and blow away.

  She runs her hand across her face, feels her hairline, mutters, “Ashes to ashes…”

  She holds a little card in her hand, a picture of a man on it with a hazy border. Done in simple black and white, two dates at the bottom, beginning and end. It’s Gavin. It must be Gavin. So this is after he died. So he did die. There was a funeral. But she…I…still have legs.

  “Charles did it,” she sings. “Charles Baldacci took everything away. Not my fault. Not my fault.”

  “Doctor Robert said he could save her,” she mumbles.

  A muffled voice calls from her side, in the hall, “Calm down.”

  “I never touched her!” she screams in reply. “Don’t read your newspapers for the facts! I know the truth. I was there, you weren’t there, you sanctimonious…”

  “Stop it!” the voice screams.

  She slumps to the floor, next to me in the mirror, her voice barely audible. “Baldacci did it! Not me. Not me?”

  That is me in withdrawal, coming out of something, sweating toxins with every pore, my skin sallow and rubbery. And this is me in some strange room, my skin pasty, the last remnants of whatever the Doctor gave me binding to my system.