Doomino's_Apocalyptic Pizza Delivery_A Bizarro Grindhouse Tale

by Lucas Pederson

  Destruction of Doomino’s property is a felony!

  Wells stiffened and looked ready to launch himself at her, and Spike’s grin widened, stiffening to defend herself, but the prick only shook his head, meeting her grin with one of his own. “I’ve still got you for two more deliveries, and nobody says how often I need to send you out.” He chuckled, cigarette rasp making his voice rumble like thunder. “A little time off from the road will do you some good, I’m thinking. It’s double kitchen duty tonight, bitch.” He turned and started off, pausing at the doorway to raise a finger like he’d just remembered something. “Oh, and after you scrub that prep line so clean I can see my goddamn reflection from Mars in it, wash my clothes.” He chuckled. “I left you a few presents in the hamper.”

  Then he was gone, goose-stepping down the hall until he disappeared into his office. She let out the breath she’d been holding and twisted her neck sideways, spine cracking. Another few seconds and she’d have killed him, condemning herself to who knew how many more deliveries before she went out in a blaze of glory.

  She thought about that for a second. Would it be so bad?

  Then she shook it off. No point thinking about shit until it came rolling around so she sighed and shuffled into the kitchen to be a good little Cinderella before her wicked stepdrivers tried to stuff her pumpkin.

  The floor of the kitchen was so damn greasy she about fell on her ass twice before making her way to the sink. How the fuck could anyone work without breaking their neck? But it was as it always had been and it wouldn’t change as long as Wells was the manager. Filthy pans stood like fucked up leaning Towers of Pizza. Three stacks, nearly as high as the water-stained ceiling. What Wells called Slop Row, a stainless-steel counter with all the pizza ingredients in the center, was caked in dry pizza sauce, shredded cheeses, and all that shit. And that’s exactly what it looked like. Shit. Like someone hopped up there, took a ginormous dump, and smeared it around.

  The smell was the worst, though. A mixture of everything on the sour side of rot. Garlic, tomatoes, rancid cheese, onions, pepperoni, yeast. It all hung in the air, congealing into a singular stench that forced hot bile up her throat. She hated this part of the job.

  Spike poured degreaser into a dented tin bucket, filled it with hot water, and grabbed her filthy sponge. She wasn’t allowed a mop, let alone a new sponge. Fuck you very much Wells. Gritting her teeth, she began scrubbing. She was just grateful she didn’t have to use her tongue like that one time.

  Spike shuddered and repressed the memory. She could still taste the Spamaroni pizza they had on special that week.

  Wipe, wipe, wipe, back to front, not front to back!

  Hours later, she didn’t know exactly how long, the kitchen was done. Or as done as it was ever going to be. Because, whatever. Hands aching, swollen and red, Spike dumped Wells’s dirty laundry from his hamper into a trash bag. She saw more than she wanted and smelled even more.

  At the bottom of the hamper, she found Wells’s presents. A couple of big turds rolled around, like two brown hamsters who’d escaped their cage. She almost left them. Almost. But she only had two deliveries left. She had to be good. So, she dumped the turds into the toilet and flushed, waving goodbye to the shit she’d affectionately named Brownie and Squirms, certain she’d seen some kind of parasite gliding through one of them like it was a reenactment of the movie Dune. That last one left behind a dirty trail of wormsign on the stained bowl. After her tearful farewell, she took Wells’s clothes and stuffed them in the wash, making sure to add the special ingredient that would make them sparkle. Piss.

  Tired and wrinkly, her bladder pleasantly empty, Spike pushed through the door to the yard, which was laid out behind the restaurant. The yard was all dirt, surrounded by a thirty-foot, steel-reinforced concrete walls topped with snarls of razor wire. Guards patrolled the walls, carrying rifles with scopes mounted on top, barrels sweeping the yard in hopes of getting to pop someone.

  Other inmates milled about the yard, even if it was almost midnight. One good thing about Doomino’s was that they allowed inmates to come and go from the yard as they pleased. Kept people from getting cabin fever, or so she assumed.

  Spike went over to the corner where all the weights were paid out. She’d been lifting and working out ever since Mr. Doom had recruited her. Even then she knew, if she wanted to be the best, she’d have to work her ass off and beat the men at everything. Competition-wise, not their dicks.

  “Aw, look,” Sam Wilton cooed. “If it isn’t Doom’s lil’ cunt.”

  Speaking of dick.

  “Stick Doom’s billion-dollar dick up your ass, Wilton,” Spike said. “Not in the mood.”

  “Sounds like you’re takin’ enough for both of us, Whore.”

  He walked beside her now, matching her clipped pace. Even in the open air, she smelled the rot of his teeth. Doomino’s provided toothpaste and brushes for their convicts, and regular visits by a dentist. At least she thought he was a dentist. The guy could have been a vet for all she knew. Regardless, they needed those chompers nice and white for the cameras if they wanted to be more than just a clip on the highlight reel of APD. But Wilton clearly didn’t give a shit.

  “Fuck off,” Spike said, nearing the workout area.

  “How long ya got now? Three deliveries?”

  “Two.”

  Wilton chuckled. “Well, was nice knowing ya. They’re gonna throw all the shit at ya at once, ya fuckin’ dumb cunt. And Wells will—”

  She stuck a leg out in front of him, tripping his dumb ass. Wilton made a high-pitched squeal before falling in the dirt.

  “Ya shitty lil’ whore,” Wilton wailed, peeling himself from the dirt, looking ready to cry.

  If she hadn’t been so pissed off at Wells, it would’ve been almost comical, but she wasn’t up for playing Whac-A-Mole with Wilton’s thick skull. So, she ignored him instead, and he eventually scampered back to his tiny group of fellow Nazis, several of them milling about, eyeballing the dark folks and probably wishing they were in their bunks whacking it to Mein Kampf. Once she took over, if he wasn’t dead already, they would be. She’d make sure Wilton and his buddies got the worst of the runs that came up.

  Treat your fellow employees with respect!

  She spotted Javier sitting alone, back against the far wall, scribbling away in his glittery pink notebook. It looked fabulous.

  He told her once, if he ever got pardoned, he was going to go clean and be an author. She never had the heart to tell him there weren’t any more authors. They’d gone extinct. It was all robots these days, powered by an AI algorithm, pumping out book after book, all the real authors having been lined up and gunned down by Amazon in what had been dubbed the Great Literature Sweep years ago.

  Not in the mood to chat, Spike went over and hefted a fifty-pound dumbbell in each hand and started with curls. Her biceps bulged, veins popping. In her mind’s eye, Wells’s scarred, crispy face was between the weights every time they clanked together. Her jaw clenched, nostrils flaring with every heated breath.

  Mr. Doom announces new store in Des Moines! New study reveals fresh fish will rot your lungs! Eat more pizza! Love your justice system! El Paso is not Texas!

  On and on with the propaganda and announcements and fascist bullshit. It scrolled across her vision every few seconds. So much so she once almost clawed it out of her eye, but then she wouldn’t have been able to drive so she came to her senses. Might as well have killed herself like Billy did if that were the case, tying a rope around his neck and attaching it to the rollers of the oven and turning it on. He came out the other side well done, and the store smelled like burnt hair for the next month.

  After twenty-five reps with the dumbbells, she moved on to the leg press. No one else really used the thing so it was still set at her desired two hundred pounds. She sat on the bench and pushed. It was either weights or go on a killing spree. More specifically, cutting off Wells’s dick and making him eat it, but that’d be just an appeti
zer before the main course.

  Better get some sleep, bitch! Wouldn’t want our resident rock star having bags under her eyes.

  Spike shook her head, wondering what Wells hoped to accomplish with his bullshit. He didn’t seem to understand that any change in the monotonous barrage of Doomino’s system messages was a welcome one, no matter what it said. Fucker could be reading Twilight in Gilbert Godfrey’s voice and Spike would finger her asshole to it. Anything was better than wash your hands, obey your masters, sell more pizza, be a good citizen, obey!

  “Think you’re some big shot, girly, treatin’ Wilton like that?”

  She sighed at the interruption but didn’t stop running through her reps. Didn’t even bother to respond. She knew the voice. George Bannon. Not one of the Nazis, but a huge white dude who hung out with them, pretty much guilty by association.

  “You got Doom wrapped around your wobbly clit, don’t you? How else would you get all this special treatment, huh?”

  She raised an eyebrow and glancing at him without breaking her stride, counting her reps out without replying.

  Twenty-five. Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two…

  “Suckin’ his billionaire cock on the weekends, right?” A deeper voice. Not Bannon. She knew it, too. Mike Ramsey. The one black dude there you didn’t fuck with. Even the Nazis steered clear of him. He wasn’t as big as Bannon, but the guy could literally rip your arms off and beat you with them if he so desired. She was sure she’d seen him bench press one of the cars when they needed to change the tire and couldn’t find the jack.

  Despite all that, he hadn’t once come at her. Not since his buddy Grady grabbed her ass and she slammed his arm in the hearse’s back door, dragging him along behind her until his elbow was ripped out of its socket. She’d delivered the arm with the pizza, telling the guy it was a new promotion going on at Doomino’s. If he ordered more often, he just might collect all the rest of the pieces of the gang banger puzzle.

  Grady, or Flipper as he was affectionately called from then on, was scooped up and brought back to the store, where he eventually got shanked for trying to stick his stump up some dude’s ass in the showers.

  Spike shrugged in answer.

  Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen…

  “You one cold bitch. One of these days they gonna pin something on you, and ol’ Sparky’s gonna be waitin’ to give your ass a final ride.”

  “Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt,” she said, mimicking a seizure. “Ride the lightning, baby.”

  Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five…

  “C’mon,” Bannon said, shaking his head. “This bitch ain’t worth our time.”

  “Sure,” Mike said. “Wanna go play with Jammin?”

  “Always a pleasure, gentlemen.” She forced a fake smile and waved them away.

  It was always the same thing with those two. Like ADHD squirrels, they bounced from asshole to shiny asshole, looking to stick a nut in.

  And just like that, they scampered off.

  Their new target, Jammin was Benjamin Groth. He was a short, skinny thing Bannon and Mike used to get off on. In more ways than one. Ben always hobbled around the yard, wincing, a prime candidate for a starring role in a hemorrhoid commercial. His asshole was probably the size of a goddamn softball by now. If he hadn’t been a serial cat rapist before he got arrested, Spike might’ve stood up for him now and again. Maybe.

  But probably not.

  Finished with the leg press, she moved on to the bench press, ignoring Groth’s high-pitched caterwauling. Like everything else, the weights were still how she left them the night before, none of the knuckleheads having bothered to adjust them.

  Eventually, the rage subsided until the only thing she felt was sore.

  Sore and tired.

  Five

  Jackson Mudwater Wells—a name bestowed upon him by his pappy, thanks to Jackson being conceived after a particularly explosive and acrobatic anal encounter that caused his daddy’s shitty penis poison to run into the wrong hole and impregnate Jackson’s mama—paced his office after lights out. His dusty shoes traipsed a line in the corn meal that always covered every inch of the floor in the restaurant no matter how often he had the inmates sweep. The shit was a virus, latching onto every surface and spreading everywhere like some virulent strain of herpes. One day he’d take a flamethrower to it. Hopefully that bitch Spike would be on the receiving end of the torch.

  He held his cell phone to his ear so hard it burned, reminding him of the day she first arrived. Jackson had a hankering to hit that plump piece of ass as soon as it saw it sashay through the front doors. Apparently, she’d wanted to hit him, too, recalling the moment she’d wrapped her fist around his left nut, his favorite one, tugging it damn near to his knees, and forced his face onto the conveyor belt that fed the pizzas through the oven, scarring him for life.

  “Bitch,” he muttered, the ring of the phone echoing in his skull. “Hurry the fuck up,” he shouted, hearing the phone click right after.

  “What you want, Wells?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

  “World fucking peace and a transvestite in the white house. What the fuck do you think I want?”

  “Thought you might be ordering a pizza, seeing how that slop you serve over there ain’t even fit for those cockweasels you call staff.”

  “Keep talking, but it sure ain’t you sitting on top of the ratings, now is it?” Wells huffed, accidentally snorting a gooey green ball of snot onto the receiver. He scraped it off and admired the sheen, holding it up in the light. It was nearly perfect, not a nose hair to be seen polluting its purity. He stuck it to the desktop and rolled it back and forth until it was a perfect ball, then rolled it over to his collection set by the base the lamp, the booger balls baking in the heat. He licked his lips thinking about his bumper snot crop. I’ll be back for you later, he thought, pointing at the latest addition, only then remembering he was on the phone. “But yeah, it’s not like any of your drivers would ever make it here on time to bring that shit. That’s why the show is called Doomino’s, not LateFuckingDumbassino’s. I’d have to kill the slow fuckers, but I have a better idea for them.”

  “And what’s that, Wells?” the voice asked. “You know I don’t rent them convicts out as whores. Not since that one time at Chico’s Chicken Wing Festival and Dildo Revival. Who the fuck knew ranch dressing would go bad so quickly?”

  “Everyone, ya dumb shit. There’s a whole bunch of things you can smuggle in an inmate’s ass, I should know, but dairy sure ain’t one of them. Them chocolate Easter bunnies ain’t no good neither, just so you know. Once them things melt, there ain’t no telling the difference between the rabbit and what comes out them convicts naturally, know what I’m saying?”

  The voice did its best impression of a nod. “Anyway, much as I like talking about asses with someone so informed about them as you, maybe you should tell me what you rang me up about since we both know this ain’t no social call?”

  Wells pulled the phone away from his ear and glanced around his office a moment, cocking an ear toward the door to make sure no one was listening. When he was certain he was alone, he shifted the phone back and cleared his throat.

  “Nah, you’re right it ain’t social, but that don’t mean it ain’t worth your while.”

  “Not so far.”

  “No?” Wells asked, chuckling, sounding like a rabid parakeet had gotten stuck in his throat and was trying to ride a Moped out. “Well, how about this?” Wells went on to tell the voice what he had in mind, the two coming to giddy agreement a few minutes later.

  He didn’t figure it’d be so easy.

  Wells tossed his phone on the desk and plopped into his leather chair, giggling like a Japanese school girl at the brrrrrrrrrrrrrp his ass elicited against the leather, tooting like a train with all his laughter. He’d done it. He’d really fucking done it.

  When he’d finally settled, he realized his cock was the hardest it’d been since 9/11. H
e unbuckled his belt and yanked his pants down around his ankles, kicking his legs out under the desk so he didn’t have to see the racing stripe crusted along the seat of his drawers. He’d have Spike scrub that one out by hand.

  Once it was out of sight, he slid the box of Kleenex closer to him and squirted a bunch of hand sanitizer into his palm. He hissed as the alcohol set fire to the rash of herpes blisters running up his dick like bubble wrap. Howling, he rubbed one out until he came across his big hairy gut in a gush of red and runny white. If only he’d thought to inject some blue food coloring into his cock he could have had his own 4th of July celebration. Or maybe add some extra red for a shopping mall killing spree.

  Why not? Shit, the flag was already at half-mast.

  Six

  Body a mass of quivering, aching muscle, Spike slammed the door shut behind her, hearing the guard lock it, and started toward the narrow cot in the far corner. Moldy straw poked out of the tattered sack that served as the mattress, its sheet crusty and piss-stained, both done prior to her arrival all those years ago, though she’d added her own scent to it along the way.

  Her room was the only place in the entire building she could truly be alone. Well, as alone as she could be with a corporate computer installed in her, whispering sweet nothings directly into her eyeball. At least the cameras in her room still had a nice sheen of shit on them, keeping Wells from peeking in on her.

  She was just about to slip out of her jumpsuit and crawl into bed when the door rattled on its hinges from a sudden burst of frantic knocks.

  “Bitch! Get your pink little ass out here! Hey! Hurry the fuck up.”

  Wells, making all kinds of ruckus so late at night.

  Spike drew in a breath, let it out slowly as he opened the door. “Dude, you better have a good fucking reason for—”

  “Urgent delivery,” Wells spouted, jowls trembling. But Jesus hopping on a lily-pad was he all sorts of frantic. Wide-eyed and everything.

  “Fuck a bunch of that. It’s closing time.”