The man behind her was now upon him. He was big, especially when standing next to the five-foot-six Han. His meaty paws grasped for Han, and he stepped to the side, jumped in the air and dealt him a stinging blow to the side of the head with the mop handle. It did no good. The man's ear fell to the ground.
Old Han's heart raced in his chest. He delivered blow after blow to the tall man. His face rained blood on the already stained floor, but still he came. Han cursed loudly throughout the process, and when the lady finally got to her feet, he found himself trapped between the two. Instinct kicked in and he flipped the broken broom handle in his hand so that he could use it as a spear. He leapt at the tall man, driving the broom handle into the fleshy part of his throat and straight into his brain. The man fell to the ground. Han spun around and gave the woman a short but powerful kick in the kneecap. Her leg buckled and she fell to the side. There was no scream of pain, just mindless progression. Han was about to pull the mop handle free and finish her off when the door to the bar opened and two more lazy Americans tottered in.
They moved quicker than the others, and Old Han found himself trapped. He had needlessly boarded up all of the back exits and windows years ago after he had nearly lost his liquor license thanks to the youths that loved to sneak into his bar and drink beer. It kept the minors out, but it was also keeping him in.
As he was pondering the situation, he felt the woman wrap her clammy hand around his ankle. He could feel the chill of her claw through the cloth of his pants. He stomped on her wrist, breaking the bone and freeing himself from her grip. Fear took hold of him, and he dove over the bar, looking for some way to put room between himself and his attackers.
"What do you want?" he yelled. One of the men began walking behind the bar. He grabbed a bottle of liquor and tossed it at the man. It clunked off of him harmlessly, so he grabbed another and continued the process. After three errant tosses, he finally hit the man in the head. He stumbled for a second, blinded by the alcohol and glass stuck in his face. The other man, dressed in a bright puffy vest, climbed awkwardly over the bar. Old Han pulled another bottle off the shelf and brought it crashing down over the man's head. Alcohol and glass sprayed everywhere. Without thinking, Han reached into his pocket and pulled out the only American possession he had ever appreciated, a silver-plated Zippo lighter featuring a half-naked redhead with her back turned in a seductive pose. She looked over her shoulder as if she were simply waiting for someone to come and take her on the spot. He opened the lighter, struck the flint wheel, and touched the flame to the man's face. The alcohol immediately caught on fire, and for the first time, it seemed as if the creature actually reacted.
It flailed on the bar, trying to put itself out in vain and spreading the fire throughout the bar at the same time. Old Han looked at the other man, covered in alcohol with glass sticking out of his face. The glint in his eye was not one of insanity, but cold calculated simplicity. Though he loved the lighter, he tossed it at the man, who immediately went up in flames. As the burning man behind the bar flailed around, lighting even more things on fire, Old Han took his chance and vaulted over the bar. The movement went unnoticed by the two men, as their eyes had turned into dried up raisins within moments of the flames hitting their face. Old Han ran from the bar laughing.
He stood out front watching the flames. Adrenaline surged through his body. The flames grew to the point where he could see them through the windows of the bar. When he felt satisfied that the fire could not be put out, only then did he reach into his pocket and pulled out an ancient cell phone. He dialed 911, secretly hoping that they wouldn't answer. Even better... the line was busy. As the fire roared and crackled, he could hear exploding liquor bottles inside. This was the break he had been waiting for. For years, he had thought of torching his own bar, but he was never quite sure that he could get away with it. Now it was done.
Old Han had dutifully paid his insurance for years. Even when the place had fallen into disrepair and the money had stopped coming in, he had always made sure to keep the insurance policy up to date. He had a million dollars coming his way if he played things right. He cackled in the night as the glass windows on the front door cracked amid the heat of the conflagration.
Now he just had to get a divorce and life would be perfect. For the first time in decades, Old Han was truly happy.
Chapter 25: Ace is Number 1
Ace Fever, real name Shinji Tsukamoto, sat in a cinder-blocked jail cell wondering what was going to happen next. He rubbed at the bruise on his chest where the hillbilly had tried to bite him. His trusty leather jacket had proved to be stronger than the man's bite. The brawl in the club had been brutal, and at the end, the cops had pulled them all out of the club and sat them down on the curb. People were covered in bite wounds, bruises, and blood, and he saw the hillbilly, blood caking his face, being ushered to his own personal ride in the back of a squad car, gnashing his teeth and trying to attack the police officers.
With his bandmates by his side, Ace sat on his rear end on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and trying to plead with the cop standing over him. The police had spent a lot of time asking people their side of the story. In the end, the entire band had all been rounded up, along with some of the more violent rioters, and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon.
They had booked him, taken his fingerprints, and then ushered him down to a cell. Ace was glad that they hadn't bothered going back and searching their music equipment, or else they would have found the pile of cocaine that they had bought when they first hit stateside. Ace's high had long since dissipated, and he wondered where his tour manager was. How long was it going to be before he was bailed out?
The clanging of skull against bars shocked him out of his musings. The man across the way appeared to be trying to shove his way through the metal bars. His teeth were locked in a grimace, and his arms poked through the bars, reaching for him. Ace flipped the man off, but it did no good.
"Go to sleep, you bastard." The man merely snarled at him, reared back and smashed his head into the bars again. Blood dribbled down his sweaty forehead. Ace laid down on the hard metal cot that passed for a bed in his cell. He folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling, trying to ignore the man across the way.
He loved America and hated it at the same time. How could this be the land of the free if you couldn't even brawl in a bar? He wondered how his bandmates were doing. Hey Fever, or Tak as he had known him on the mean streets of Tokyo, was nursing a bloody lip in the back of the paddy wagon. Jungle Fever, whose name seemed to change every week, was examining a bite on his arm when they had come into the station. They had laughed and joked in Japanese as the cops took their fingerprints, but then they had all been ushered to separate cells.
At first, they had yelled and been in good spirits, but if they were feeling anything like him at the moment, they were coming down pretty hard from a night full of booze and coke. They hadn't even had a chance to get to the ladies yet. That was the best thing about America. You could throw a guitar over your shoulder, do a bunch of drugs, and at the end of the night you could head home with some random chick, do your thing, and head off to a different city, and do it all again. There was always a different city in America, and the women were different every time. Different features, different skin colors, different hair colors, even the vaginas were different. Ace closed his eyes, and dreamed of the future.
It wasn't long until the door to his cell clanged open, and the cops shoved another man into the cell. Ace sat up on his bed and looked warily at the man. He was sweating profusely, and he had a bandage over his neck.
The fat guard with the red goatee laughed and mockingly said, "Have fun, you two."
The man with the wound crawled to the other cot in the cell and groaned as he laid down. Ace examined him from the corner of his eye. He was long; he filled his cot to a greater extent than Ace did. He was thick too. This was not the type of man that Ace would want to tangle with. Ace was la
nky and could throw a good punch, but his bony body was not made to take the kind of physical impact that this thick-boned man could most likely deliver. He wore dirty black work boots, a blue flannel sweatshirt and some well-worn jeans. His hair was short and brown, and he could see sweat on the top of the man's head where he was balding. He couldn't tell if the man was in his thirties or late forties.
The man coughed, and rolled over on his side. He spoke with the air of fever, "Hey, where am I?"
Ace didn't answer at first, hoping the man would just give up.
"Where am I?"
Ace tried to make his words as clear as possible; he hated having to repeat himself because of his accent. "You are in prison."
The man groaned and rolled over on his back. He moaned loudly, and said, "Why the hell am I out here? They attacked me! Goddamn, ignorant sumsabitches. They attacked me!" He wiped his hand across his brow and then hung his hand off the side of the cot. Sweat dripped to the ground.
Ace sat up on his cot, curious. It was one of his many flaws. "Who attacked you?"
"They did. A bunch of homeless people come up out of the park and began banging on my trailer. I tried to scare them off with a knife." The man waved his worker's mitts at the air, as if he were holding an imaginary knife. Then he turned to look at Ace. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, "Where am I?"
Ace ignored the repeated question, and instead posed a question of his own, "What did they want?"
The man swallowed, his prominent Adam's apple jigging in his throat. "They wanted to kill me. One of them crawled through the window and came after me. His hands were cold. I stabbed him in the gut with my knife. Right through the middle. He didn't do nothing, the goddamn, ignorant sumbitch."
The man sat up on the cot, his intensity growing. Ace could see the outline of his body on the sheets, formed from sweat. His face dripped with moisture as he continued: "I twisted it, and he still came after me. Took a bite out of my arm, and that's when I stabbed him in the throat."
Ace, his mouth hanging open, had never met a murderer before, at least not that he knew of. "Then what happened?"
The man's eyes rolled into the back of his head, and just when Ace thought he was gone for good, they focused on him. "He kept biting me. The cops showed up. Kicked down the door. Told me to freeze. But the pain... the biting. It was too much."
"And?"
The man focused on him again. "I stabbed him through the eye."
For a second, Ace almost asked if the man had died, but that was stupid. Of course he had died. He was lost in his own thoughts, when the man spoke again.
"You're one of them aren't you?"
Ace was taken aback. His mind, translating English into Japanese, couldn't quite figure out what the man was implying. The man on the cot across from him screwed his face up, and Ace knew what was coming next.
He got his hands up in front of his throat, just as the man launched himself at him. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, "You're one of them!" over and over. He kept trying to choke Ace, and it was all he could do to keep the man from getting a good grip on his throat.
"Help!" he screamed every time he managed to break the man's hold on his neck. They tumbled to the ground, and Ace's world was turned upside down. He was losing the battle. The man's rough hands seized on his throat, and no matter what he did, he couldn't break the man's hold. He could hear one of his bandmates, Hey Fever, screaming for help from a cell down the hall. His vision began to fade, the last sight he would see would be the face of the snarling madman across the hall, covered in blood, his arms outstretched towards Ace, as if he wanted to join in the fun.
Chapter 26: The Shopping Cart of Salvation
Mort's jog from the exploding police car had been as swift as possible. Blood streamed down his face, his elbow ached, and his knee had stiffened up to the point where he was hobbling. His body was covered in sweat, and his face stung where the sweat was seeping into the cuts on his forehead. He leaned up against a wooden fence that had seen better days. He had seen people moving about, heard sporadic shots of gunfire, and through it all he had kept moving, though the years of smoking and minimal physical activity had his lungs on fire.
He leaned against the rough grain of the now gray and somewhat wobbly fence, coughing up phlegm and spitting it on the ground. He had heard sirens, but they had always been heading away.
It began to rain, and Mort lifted his face to the sky to let it wash away the blood on his face. He wasn't bleeding badly, nothing that needed stitches, but the last thing he needed was for cops to see him with his face covered in blood. His bald head began to steam in the early morning rain. He closed his eyes.
Memories of his youth flashed in his mind. Hiding out in the night, away from Pop, his slurring voice yelling out in the night, "I'm gonna get you, boy! You bring your ass in here!" The patter of raindrops on the leaves around him, his heart beating in his ears, threatening to blow out his eardrums. It was a night like this that he had decided to leave, walking through the woods, and never looking back. He wondered how long it had taken Pop to sober up enough to realize that the last of his brood had finally left him alone in that shack in Louisiana, drinking and fighting the memories of his own youth.
He opened his eyes and focused them on a light in the distance, always moving, never stopping, as if Pop were going to find him one day. He put one foot in front of the other and walked towards the light. As he got closer, he saw that it was a 24-hour supermarket, the lights still on inside. There were a handful of cars parked outside, and as he walked up to the front doors, a man came out wielding a cart loaded down with water and tons of canned food.
Mort thought nothing of it, until the man saw him, skidded to a stop, and raised a handgun in his direction. Fear made his eyes bulge, and he could see the hardness in the other man's stare as he shouted, "Don't come any fucking closer, or I'll blow your goddamn brains out!"
Mort's hands came up instinctively, palms out to show he meant no harm. "Easy man."
The man steered the cart with one hand to the back of a pickup truck. He began tossing stuff into the back of it, one hand pointing the gun at Mort, and the other tossing his goods into the back.
Mort stood in silence, fearing the blackness at the end of the barrel of the gun that the man was holding. He was surprised to find that the fear was the same despite the fact that he was forty-years older than the last time someone had pointed a gun in his direction. At least this man was sane, not rambling about the devil and drunk out of his mind. Mort waited patiently. When the man tossed the last jug of water into the back of his truck, he waived his gun at him dismissively, and yelled, "Go on, get out of here. Find someplace safe." Then, without even looking at him twice, he hopped into the cab of the truck and drove away, his bald tires squealing as he accelerated on the rain-slick pavement.
The rain pitter-pattered on his head as he watched the lights disappear into the darkness. He looked inside the grocery store, and decided he could probably use a couple of things. Mort almost changed his mind when he walked into the front door of the grocery store. There, sitting in the entranceway was a dead body, a bullet hole through its forehead. The corpse belonged to a stock boy judging by the apron he had around his waist. He didn't know why he didn't just turn around, but something pulled him into the store.
The florescent lights hurt his eyes, and it took him a while to adjust. The place was virtually empty, just as it usually was at this time of the morning. Only this time, there were no employees to be seen. There were, however, signs of struggle. Boxes knocked over here, a forgotten shoe over there, but nowhere was there a person in sight. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he felt as if he were being watched.
From the back of the store he could hear banging. Mort crept silently, which was no easy task with a bum knee. He was more likely to be heard hissing through his teeth than taking a heavy footfall, but he did a pretty damn good job of moving quietly. He crept down the cereal aisle, pu
tting random thoughts of the last time he had eaten cereal into the back corner of his mind. Why the hell were there so many cereals? Who could possibly need that much variety?
The banging got louder as he crept heel to toe, followed by a quick hop, down the aisle. It sounded as if someone were banging on a shutter. As he reached the end of the aisle, he slowly leaned out and peeked around the end cap.
The grocery store had a pharmacy. In the pharmacy, a woman cried as six of those things pounded on the iron shutters that secured the pharmacy after closing time. For a moment, his mind raced, wondering how to get the woman out of there. He could cause a distraction, giving her time to escape, but what then? He sure as hell wouldn't be running from any of those things, and if they were like the recently deceased cops that he had encountered earlier in the night, he would be done for. He was about to disappear down the aisle when the woman in the pharmacy spotted him peeking around the corner.
He could see her eyes widen in sudden hope, and even as he was shaking his head and putting his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, she began screaming at him for help. Mort backed away in haste, knocking a box of cereal to the ground. A red-headed leprechaun looked up at him from the ground, mocking him. The gang of creatures at the shutters turned around to investigate the noise. It only took a second for them to give chase, and then Mort was shuffling down the aisle trying to get away from them.
He had a head start, but he knew that he was running a race that he had virtually no shot of winning. As he reached the halfway point of the aisle, he looked over his shoulder to see the first of them rounding the corner, arms out, knocking more mocking leprechauns to the ground.
This Rotten World (Book 1) Page 9
