There was a moment where you could see him wondering whether females with just a knife should really be coming out the side of they neck at niggas holding guns. She laughed and flicked beckoning fingers. “Play yourself, then. Come on. I wish to fuck you would.”
They fought a lot and they were both tired, both sick of it. Anhell’s litebrite eyes took on a glint far more sharp and steel-like than diamond-pretty.
“Oh yeah, daddy,” she moaned, as if muvver were wet from all the foreplay and good to go now. “You only gotta act like you wanna raise that gun at me, and I will pay you back every motherfucking thing. Let’s do this.” The gun trembled in his hand, his eyes hard, and the odds that his arm would come up went up—thirty, forty, fifty percent. Satan had her hype as fuck. “Do it, you bitch ass faggot ass PUNK!”
Mumbling under his breath, making faces with his eyes down, Anhell propped it with the umbrellas beside the door and leff out. She went and got the gun, laid it on the table in front of her.
Madison, Tiphanie, Arelys and nem sent a group text right then, tryna get the crew together to go to this new Harlem club, and at first... but then she thought of the narcotic bass, the tight-packed bodies writhing together to the music, and her just swinging the machète through all the niggas and her girls like some reaper in the corn... Nah, she texted back. I’m in for the night. Sorry. One of em called. “Yo, put ya nigga on, girl. I’m bout to tell Anhell we just going out dancing. Ladies’ night. Fuckit, he can come too. Ain’t nobody seen you in a minute—’Nisha! What is it...?”
She was sobbing and she never cried. “He said, he said...” Anhell had muttered I hate you when going out the door, and it had hurt her feelings bad. You just don’t say shit like that!
“Oh my God, Anhell said that? Well, what led up to it?” Madison said. “Tell me everything that happen, exactly.”
She sketched a version of events that, mmm, skimmed the details of the Brooklyn adventure and double homicide, swearing fealty to infernal powers and the carnivorous griping of demonic weapons. Perhaps not every fact concerning her own foul-mouthed instigation made it into the story, either.
They talked a long time, until the girls were all in the taxi together on their way to the club. And because Madison was that ride-or-die friend, always one hundred percent team ’Nisha, she felt a lot better when they hung up.
It was very late, but Mama would still be winding down from the hospital, nodding on the couch in front of some documentary. She called.
“Oh, hey, baby.” Soft voice, sleepy. TV muttering in the background. “I guess you went back over there, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You know you ain’t gotta stay with him, right? You could definitely get into nursing school. Girl, you smart, and that boy—”
“Let’s not do this tonight, Mommy, please. Okay?” Mama talked a tough game when Anhell wasn’t up in her face, but them gray eyes worked on her, too, getting her all oh-you-want-a-plate-baby? and tee-hee-hee in person. “I don’t feel like talking bout him. And is that gunshots I hear on your TV? I thought you hated them cop shows. What you watching?”
“Turn on channel thirteen,” Mama murmured. “Just for today, PBS is showing that new film DuVernay won Sundance with, BLM.”
“Oh, word?” She reached for the remote, but kept the TV muted, her eyes on her Sudoku book. “What’s it about?” She penciled in numbers while Mama sleepily ran on and on and on.
... of us gunned down six days out of every week by the police. Hoping that cell phone camera and video technology... to disrupt the historical impunity of police brutality and extrajudicial murder...
“Yeah?” she said, paying attention only to the cadences. Mama’s voice soothing, lovely, there since the beginning. 6. “Huh.”
... reinstituting Jim Crow and slavery through the carceral state and prison labor... felons, afterwards, barred from the franchise, employment, or even basic welfare benefits.
“That’s awful, dang.” 6.
... electing Trump... a direct consequence of Pence, for example, sending state police troopers to close down African American voter registration in Indiana.
“Wow, I ain’t even know that.” 6.
Mama fell asleep, so she hung up.
Anhell came in, eyes all droopy and red from smoking in the street. Mostly she just felt, as usual, glad to see his fine yellow ass home again, though she fronted like whatever, who cares? Smelling very clean, of coconut lime bodywash that wasn’t in the bathroom here, Anhell leaned in to kiss her. Ew!
Nice of him to take a shower, but his breath was giving funky receipts for all his recent activities.
She caught his face in the palm of a hand and pushed him off. “The way yo bref kicking, you just been down on some bad pussy for real, for real.”
He ran for the Listerine and then crept back, looking at her with dog’s eyes—a very bad dog. So handsome, though, so hot, he blessed the room just by being in it. And girl you know this dopey bloodshot gaze is full of the purest love you’ll ever get. She sighed, reached out a hand, ran fingers down his scalp between frizzy cornrows. “Ya head’s looking pretty rough. Hand me that comb and sit here. I’ma take these out.” Anhell sat on the floor between her knees. She turned up the volume a little, just to a friendly mutter. He pulled the table closer to pinch open a phillie and roll up his late-night .5 grams.
Ready for Iraq in combat armor, whitepolice in Missouri and Louisiana held machine guns, rode tanks. Natural hair sisters holding poster board signs. Baltimore niggas wilding like the cops won’t shoot. Close-up of a brother, his face fades out. Baby mama crying. Close-up of another brother, that face fades out. His muvver crying. Another face, another wife. Face, mother. Wife, mother. Faces. Crying.
“Know what I wanna see?” Anhell, with each word, scrawled cursives of smoke on the air. “Some crying whitebitches on this TV.”
Normally she had better things to do than ponder the reefer ramblings of a nigga fly as hell, yes, but oh so simple. Now, for whatever reason, her hands paused in the springtime flood of his hair. Fascinated, she said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah!” Anhell said, throwing out a preacherly hand at the TV. “Why’s it always us gotta have the sad story? Let me see some bad ass niggas who get away with nothing but stone cold murder. Then let me see whitemamas, whitewives, cameras all up in they face, weeping and wailing outside the church. Now that would be some funny shit!” His laughter caught on hooks of smoke, broke into helpless phlegmy barking.
The hair stood up on her neck, goosebumps chilling her arms. She slapped on his back, inspired to her soul. It came to her with a bright ten-story-high clarity, like the LED billboards at Times Square. True vocation. God’s work and the devil’s!
4
#killers4lyfe
4.1 police massacre, October
4.2 state funeral, November
THE SKY AT one a.m. hung low above the city, orange clouds damn near bright as day. Gypsies bumped the horn when slowing and sped back up. Draped in colored Christmas lights, almost, the curbside mountains of garbage bags, all beaded by spitting rain, winked under headlights, brake lights, sodium and neon. The piped corridors of all the scaffolding over the sidewalks, all the doorways, and all the stairwells going down breathed back at them parfum de piss. It was unseasonably warm in the Bronx, and a lovely night for an atrocity.There was the precinct house just ahead. Time to make the bacon, Mr Pig.
A sextet of cops were smoking on the precinct stairs. Three cigarette cherries flaring with the draw, three redder and dim hanging hipside. Who knows but that qualms might not have stirred the hearts of dark gods, who then might have brought down the storm elsewhere, on some other night, if all those cops out front hadn’t been white? But police have their own little clicks, too. Spanish tight with Spanish, black with black, whitecops keeping to their own kind.
Anhell laid down an enfilade that had him doing numbers before half a minute was out. The devil, if it ain’t been said, saw to questions of ammo and
aim, chambering embers di l’Inferno just faster than Anhell could squeeze the trigger. Hellfire tracers went streaking through the dark and one, two, three, four, five whitecops turned explosively to redmeat. Number six, before losing the lungs to do so, gave a shout. She and Anhell ran—not away, toward the trouble. Just vibing on the slaughter at first, thrilled how babyboy had put ’em down like that, now she felt eager for a taste of her own. A bitch gotta post up, right—get her hands dirty, too?
Some cavalry came pouring out the precinct front doors to see about that shout, and chop, chop, chop were three who had been whole made all in twain. The machète went in and through without effort, but still she felt, somehow, a slow buttery drag across the blade, as if demonic steel were stiff meat belonging to her own body and sinking deep into a lover all wet, hot and open for her. No need, as it turned out, to drink down whole gallons from any one body when this much blood was flowing. The first cupful’s sweetest, anyway. Naw, a spoonful will do, given this abundance.
Stepping over the bestrewment, they went in.
4.1 police massacre, October
4.2 state funeral, November
4.3 police massacre, October
LASTLY, TWELVE WIDOWS filed on camera. Whitewidows, all white, though their eyes sought reflexively for any who weren’t. Only one widow would be allowed to speak, and not an ugly one. They knew which one it would be the very instant she, blonde, stepped into view. The black lace she wore overlay a silk sheath that, iridescing under the lights between deep purple, reddish black, and... indigo? lent her gown the dark complexities of a raven’s wing seen in direct sun. Not the dress your granny would wear to the funeral, this number, and “gorgeous” only got you about halfway there. The camera lingered a bit over the distinctive red soles of her glossy black pumps.
“Eight outta them sixty-three we kilt weren’t even white,” Anhell complained. “How come they ain’t let nunna them widows on TV?”
“Optics, baby,” she said and swallowed deeply, in wisdom and resignation, from her tumbler. “They gotta keep shit looking a certain way for the message.”
45 hadn’t won the presidency for no damn reason: He quit reading off the ’prompter all wooden and halting and started ad-libbing for his base.
“Studies show, there’s a yuge amount of science, so many studies showing that our African Americans, the blacks, actually kill each other 99.9% of the time. Facts!”
Anhell sucked his teeth. “Ain’t nobody wanna hear this cheeto ass looking fool! When they putting the widows on?”
“President first,” she said, “then the mayor. Widows go last.” One more watery sip drained the ice in her glass, and she looked around with increasing consternation for the bottle. “Yo, my nigga—how you drank up all the Henny that quick?”
“Ain’t even that serious, ma.” Anhell leaned over the couch’s far side. “Got the bottle right here...” After pulling it up from where it sat (still one-third full) on the floor, he poured over her ice until, clinking, the cubes floated up.
“Oh,” she exclaimed. “Cause I was getting ready to say...!” She took a good, long swallow.
4.2 state funeral, November
4.3 police massacre, October
4.4 state funeral, November
WITH A STEP backward into the brimstone sirocco, they couldn’t be seen well from here, earth. And so from there, hell, the screams of the damned and heat blasting at their backs, they juked around wildly shooting cops and took the whiteones bang! to the head, swap! through the neck. It was less a trick of witchcraft than basic physics, time in hell running at a faster clip than our earthly clock, and so much so that, when they stood on the smoldering threshold, all these police, by contrast, were moving in slo-mo and clumsy as fuck.
Anhell dropped them as if this were some damn videogame. Kevlar, steel desks, security doors, ducking around the corner of cinder-block walls. All this could’ve just as well been cardboard, a wish and a prayer, because none of it was saving cover. Satan whispered a name to each bullet, and if that one which the boy shot had heard yours, well, baby game up. You was done. Every shot traveled on a rigorous and unbroken line to its target no matter what intervened.
Anhell had a do-not-kill option, the gun making in that case a strange bark and blowing no two-pound red mass off that brown or woman’s body. Indeed no wound at all appeared, though these lucky ones allowed to live, these few shown this presumptive mercy, all fell down writhing to the ground, their screams matching the damned for raw-throated abandon. Here in the police station, there was a little noise like that in hell.
Semiautomatic muzzle-flash all about her, a ricocheting glitter she batted away, the incoming slow as water balloons lobbed by a three-year-old. She hacked would-be heroes in half. Funny, how you think the first shift at the slaughterhouse will be so hard, really seeing how the sausage gets made, where pork chops come from. But it turns out, you’re about that life. You were made for this, babygirl! Don’t shit faze you. Flinging swatches of crimson over every surface surrounding her, she felt almost bad. It was too easy. (“At places, the blood in there so deep, your shoes stepped in, your socks got wet...”) Best of all she liked it when they tried to hide. Chopping in after them through the barricades, the doors, the little under-desk shelters. Then one pretty moment, when most cowered and begged, some rallied to squeeze off a last shot, and she finished that piggy and went for the next. You ever just start laughing, can’t stop? The party’s so good, you’re having such a nice time?
4.3 police massacre, October
4.4 state funeral, November
4.5 police massacre, October
MRS LIAM CONOR O’Donnell, dec., stood and approached the pulpit. You could see she ate salads, worked out, no bread. A face for TV, makeup on point, and that gown fitting very well—but everything tasteful.
Addressing St. Patrick’s navy-clad pews: “I know that all of you join with me and the rest of America in grieving the loss of so many of—and truly they were—New York’s Finest.”
“Bitch won’t cry.”
“That hoe will definitely cry. Now, shh.”
“But look at her makeup,” Anhell said. “How she tryna mess that up? Nope. Watch, not one tear.”
“Bet you some bomb ass head we getting tears from her.” And you know she had to be sure, because she hated giving head! “Now, shush, so I can hear.”
“... our respects to the slain and honoring their sacrifice. Ladies, when our men fall, we must take up arms and the battle cry. To contribute to the cause and the future I’ve borne two beautiful daughters. I’ve been a good wife.” She smiled sadly and the camera flashed on two blonde cherubs in white blouses, black jumpers. “I still remember those last moments when Liam—Lieutenant O’Donnell—when he was going out to work... I wanted to tell him.” She lay a palm over the flatness of her immaculate belly. A murmur and stir convulsed the pews. “Yes. A new baby. This one, I know, will be the son Liamalways wanted, a boy who will now never—”
“Lemme get a puff of that, yo.”
“Thought you wasn’t fucking with the weed like that? Damn, girl! Keep smoking like this, you bout to turn into a ’head like me.”
“Nigga, just pass the blunt.”
“All of us gathered here today know that a darkness is falling over this nation and over the earth itself. As demographics shift, the struggle for the continuance of Western Civilization has become existential. Diverse elements would see the blood and soil of this nation washed away in a dismal tide. But it is incumbent upon the Herrenvolk to secure the future for our children and for theirs. No, there can be no parley with evil; strength must be our answer. Before the Almighty, I swear to you that we will prevail over our enemies, and the perpetrators of this tragedy shall soon know our vengeance...”
4.4 state funeral, November
4.5 police massacre, October
4.6 state funeral, November
KNOCKING MOTHERFUCKERS OUT really don’t work the way it do in movies. Sad to say, but not
all the black cops she smashed upside the head with the flat or blunt of her demonic machète lived to tell the tale. And, to be honest, Satan was from jump like You can miss me with all this conscious killing, organic murder crap. Whenever she tried to spare the lives of too many women, black, Asian, Spanish in a row, buddy got fed up and made the machète spin in her grip from play side to business end. Oop! A couple of the wrong heads went flying too. Oh, shit, sorry! Bees that way sometime, though. The third or fourth time Satan decided enough with this woke ass bullshit, and caused the machète to spin from ‘knockout’ position to ‘decap,’ the unbreakable barrel of Anhell’s shotgun intervened, clangingly, before her always-fatal edge could claim this victim.
“I thought we was only killing the whitepeople, the men?” Anhell said, and jerked his chin at the policewoman kneeling between them. “She ain’t neither one.”
Brownskin. Not short, not tall. All right looking, although the uniform’s shapeless navy slacks and boxy polyester shirt were doing her thickness no favors. The policewoman was definitely a stranger, but seemed incredibly familiar at first glance... and then she realized why. “Get yo ass outta here,” she snarled, gesturing up with the machète. Go!
Commuted from slaughter, a fawn clambering to her feet between the lioness and leopard, the policewoman stood up warily.
“Go on,” Anhell said, smiling warmly. “We gotta finish up here.”
About to run, the policewoman did a double take. “Oh, you got some pretty eyes, though!”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 48
