Dub always collected his five points.
He always won the game.
Dub stepped off his bike, smiling at a group of men coming down the stairs toward him. Three men, led by Rock Steady Teddy, who had missed his date with the cot-and-needle courtesy of the awe-inspiring phenomenon which had busted down prison doors all across the nation. All around the world, Dub figured.
Teddy’s sleeveless denim jacket hung loose on his wiry frame. Taller than Dub, his light blue eyes matched the faded material of his wildly embroidered threads, his thick beard a shade darker than the straight blonde hair hanging across his shoulders. An attacking scorpion rose up on one side of his jacket, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, both creatures rounded out by The Devil’s Own grinning skull and crossbones emblazoned on his back. One baleful eye winked from within the skull’s leering face, while beneath the crossbones, blood-red letters spelled out The Devil’s Own. Three tattooed teardrops spaced evenly down from the corner of his left eye denoted the three lives he’d snuffed out in the can. Two he’d gotten away with. The third of which had earned him his place on death row.
“Steady Teddy!” Dub called out, high-fiving his partner in crime as Bert and Ernie and Teddy’s two pals headed up the jailhouse steps. “’Sup, brother-man?”
“It’s all about you, baby.”
Dub didn’t acknowledge Teddy’s words. He let his grin do it for him, because it was all about him, and everybody around there knew it.
Teddy, nodding toward the spiked head, said, “Who’s your date?”
“Aw, just a little something I picked up.”
“Where’s the rest of her?” Teddy asked, drawing a snickering laugh from Dub, and a disgusted look from two of the truck-guarding-drones. “And where’s the rest of your crew? Eight rode out, four came back?”
“Had a little trouble there, Teddy. A little fucking trouble.”
“We are trouble, bro. The hell happened?”
Dub glanced up at a group of bikers who had just exited the front of the jailhouse, turned back to Teddy, and said, “We caught some carnival-ass midget coming out of a pawn shop. Started getting medieval on his hide and he gave up his old lady. Said she was his old lady, don’t think she was, though—just… old.”
Teddy snorted out a laugh, and Dub said, “Wasn’t too old, though.” Dub smiled. “If you get my drift.”
“Not too old to pass the cootchie around, huh?”
“Well, you know how it goes.”
“Looks a little rough around the edges now, brother.”
“Yeah, they always look a little rough by the time we’re done with ‘em.”
“No shit.”
“Anyway,” Dub said. “We take off and leave Crazy Joe and his pals working on the midget’s squeeze, go looking to see what else we can get ourselves into, but, well, you know how it is. People hear the hogs churning up the road, they scatter like cockroaches. ‘Bout the time we’re coming back down the drag, all hell breaks loose, shotgun blasts exploding all over the place—and I know they ain’t carrying no shotguns. So we pull up a couple of streets to the west, run over on foot and there they are blown to Kingdom Come. All four of ‘em, Crazy Joe’s head blasted clean away, the rest of ‘em a bloody, chunkified mess.”
“What’dya think, the Puerto Ricans?”
“Them, some John Q’s, maybe. Who the hell knows? Whoever it was sure as shit took ‘em apart. We looked around but they were gone, probably hiding up one of those dark alleys, hoping we’d venture their way so they could cut us down too. It’s dog eat dog out there, man. Sometimes the puppies bite back.”
“Not these puppies, brother,” Teddy said, nodding at the two drones, who had turned their backs to them and now stood watching the empty street.
Dub stared out at the tanker truck. With a fleet of them tucked away at a secret location known only to him and Teddy and a handful of their most trusted associates, (not Bert and Ernie—they’d tell the first skank to give them a blowjob) they had fuel enough to last for years, surely enough to keep them going until they figured a way to get the power plants up and running. But that was a ways down the road. First they needed to turn the gang into an army, use the army to quell any resistance that might rise up. Spread out and turn this patch of the country into a police state, a dictatorship governed by Dub, ruler of the land, King of The Devil’s Own.
Finally, he said, “Fuck ‘em. C’mon, Teddy. Let’s get us a beer and talk some business.”
Dub and Teddy left the drones to their misery. Pausing just long enough to exchange pleasantries with the armed bikers at the jailhouse entrance, they headed through the glass doors, down the hallway and into a lobby, where all the office furniture had been removed, the desks and chairs, fax and copy machines, all swapped out with an array of plush La-Z-Boy chairs and fine leather couches, arranged in a semi-circle in the middle of the great room. Behind the furniture were banquet tables piled high with every canned food item imaginable, from roast beef to ham, to canned Spam to caviar. Paper plates, plastic cups and cutlery and rolls of paper towels were scattered across the tables as well. A wall-sized plasma television screen book-ended by six-foot stacks of speaker cabinets adorned the western end of the room, fed by an HD DVD player that had been run through a high-powered, state of the art sound system. All items summarily ripped straight from the Best Buy showroom the day the generators were hooked up and power returned to the jailhouse. Four refrigerators stood along the back wall of the room, sandwiched between rows of cases of beer and wine that were intermingled with various cartons of canned foods and soft drinks, stacked nearly as high as the refrigerators.
Bert and Ernie and their two compatriots stood by one of the tables, Bert thumbing through a Hustler magazine while Ernie looked over his shoulder. Several bikers lay around the couches, some with women and some without. On the massive television screen, the actor Russell Crowe stalked the Roman Coliseum in his gladiator garb.
Dub and Teddy grabbed a couple of Coors from one of the fridges and continued through the lobby, down a hallway to what had once been a booking room. As a teenager, Dub had spent enough time in this facility to actually come to have known some of the officers by name: Shaunessy, with his huge gut and bald pate, and a drunkard’s bulbous nose; Minerva Wray, the corrections officer with tits out to there; Smitty, the gap-toothed photographer who had snapped Dub’s picture more times than he could remember. He wondered where they were now. Probably hanging upside-down from a metal beam, or bubbling in some lunatic’s soup pot. Either that or hiding out in suburbia, hoping like hell The Devil’s Own didn’t come calling, or someone worse, if there was someone worse.
All the desks and tables and chairs in this room had been left untouched. Teddy sat down in an office chair, leaning back and drinking from his beer as Dub leaned against a long, waist-high table. Dub knew this piece of furniture well. Many times his fingers had been inked and rolled against eight-by-eight-inch squares of paper, like the ones that now lay scattered along the rectangular wooden surface.
Dub drew a vial of cocaine from his pocket, uncapped it and tapped some of its contents onto the back of his hand. After snorting the powder, he capped the vial and tossed it to Teddy, who performed the same operation, smiling as Dub took a long drink of beer, sat his bottle on the table and said, “Fire us up a joint, brother.”
Teddy pulled a Bic lighter and a rolled-up plastic bag of marijuana from his front pants pocket, opened the baggy and fished out one of three pre-rolled joints. Fire crackled the cigarette paper when he lit up and sucked some smoke into his lungs.
Dub said, “We’ve got us a nice piece of real estate here—here and the clubhouse. We need more, Teddy. But to get more, we need more men. We need to do some long term planning, lay out some goals. Seven weeks into this shit, the smoke’s still in the air. When that shit clears out, we need to be in charge. Firmly in charge. Of this whole area, not just our little corner of town.”
Teddy took another hit, blew out some s
moke and passed the joint to Dub. “Look, I hear what you’re saying, but, sooner or later things are gonna come back online, the army or the National Guard is gonna roll through here and shut our ass down.”
“We act now, we could have our own army by then. Kick their asses and send ‘em hightailing it back to where they came from.”
“The United States Army. We’re gonna kick the shit outa the United States Army.”
Dub let out a stream of smoke, took a drink of beer, hit the joint again and looked at his friend. “Teddy, where’re all the cops? Why haven’t they shut us down?”
Teddy, shrugging his shoulders, accepted the joint Dub held out to him.
“They’re gone, just like the army’s gone. Sure, there might be some rag-tag, bullshit groups out there, but they’re not organized.”
“How do you know what’s out there?”
“Think about it, bro. The same thing that happened here’s happened all over the world. All those people who vanished—you don’t think a shit-load of ‘em were in the army, the National Guard, the government? Just like the cops, man; shit hit the fan and half of ‘em vanished, the rest of ‘em scattered the fuck outa Dodge, except the sorry bunch that stayed with us.” Dub took another toke, handed the joint to Teddy, and said, “What do you think happened, bro? How do you think you got outa that cell?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ever read the Bible?”
“Fuck no. Not since I was a kid, anyways.”
“You’ve heard of The Rapture though, right? That someday the righteous would be called up to Heaven? Or some kinda shit like that. Hell, I ain’t read much of the good book myself. But I do recognize what’s going on. What the hell else could it be? I saw Bernie-the-accountant blink out like some kinda crazy science fiction flick—right in front of my eyes. Just like—” Dub snapped his fingers. “—that, he was gone. One second he was here, then he wasn’t. Just like—”
“That. Yeah, you told me before.”
“I know I told you before. I’m telling you now ‘cause I want you to understand: we’re at the ground floor of this shit. If we act now, act boldly, we’ll come out on top. We’ll rule this area—hell, there’s no telling how far we can go if we come out of this with enough people behind us.”
“Dub… Bro. We’ve got like a hundred and fifty dudes, and half of them are stragglers we’ve picked up. Hell, most of our hard core brothers are morons like the four who got themselves killed this afternoon. And you want to take on an army? What’dya think, we can just throw some kinda conscription on the Q’s? Give those fuckers some artillery and force ‘em to man up against an organized militia? You gonna lead ‘em into battle? ‘Cause I sure as hell ain’t.”
“We will, bro. You and me.”
“You’ve been smokin’ too much of that shit, you think I’m gonna—”
“Teddy, how far we go back, man?”
“A long damn way.”
“Have I ever steered you wrong?”
Teddy wanted to say, ‘What’re you, kidding me? You steered my ass straight onto death row’. But he didn’t say anything. He just took another drink of beer and stared off into the distance, at the open window on the far side of the room.
“Look. Teddy. I need you with me. ‘Cause if you aren’t with me…” It was a threat, a thinly-veiled ultimatum that hung in the air a moment before Teddy answered it: “With you? Dude, I always have been, haven’t I?”
“True enough, bro. True enough.” Dub took another drink of beer, the bottle half empty now as he sat it on the table. “Just leave it to me. I’ve got it all worked out. You and me giving the orders, Bert and Ernie and the boys carrying them out. We’ll be the leaders. They’ll be the generals leading our troops into battle, keeping the Q’s in line—the ones who don’t join us, that is. I imagine most will when they see how we treat the ones who don’t.”
Teddy hit the joint a couple of times, dropped the spent roach to floor and ground it against the tile. “Dude, you got any word on the scouts?”
“Nothing.”
“They should’ve been back by now.”
“If they’re coming back. Who knows, maybe they decided to keep going, get the hell out and see what’s at the end of the line. What do you think?”
Teddy shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe we should send somebody after them.”
“I’ll think about it,” Dub said. “In the meantime, we’ve gotta see the old man tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yep. That business I was talking about? Carlicci wants another load of girls. We’ll run some up there and check him out, stock up on some of that killer flake of his.”
“Where does he get all that shit?”
“You kiddin’? Probably has a team of chemists grinding it out in his basement or something.”
“Chained to the wall in his basement.”
Chuckling, Dub said, “No doubt.” He finished off his beer and set the empty bottle on the table. “You can bet your ass that old man’s playing all the angles—all the angles.”
“Probably sittin’ up there in that fortress of his trying to figure a way for him to come out on top. Maybe we should think about a long term plan to short circuit his plans.”
Dub shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe we should. Let’s snort a couple more lines and talk about it. Then we’ll round up Bert and Ernie and the boys, go check out the inventory.”
Chapter Eight
Karen Turner could pinpoint the day her life started its slow spiral toward the drain: that morning four years ago when two vials of morphine from a locked medicine cabinet on the eighth floor of Hope Memorial found their way into her pocket—two drawn out but only one given to Mrs. Chambers. She selected her two units, pocketed one and doctored the chart, leaving poor old Mrs. C fending off her pain with a woefully inadequate supply of medication. It was easy, really. So easy that the next morning she did it again, and later that day with another patient. On and on she went, until a once in a lifetime event had become a daily occurrence, a shameful routine of lies and deceits that started with her miserable ritual of crawling hung-over from bed, into the bathroom for a cold shower and a couple of diet pills to get that motor turning. Then it was out the door and off to the hospital—not to comfort and nurture those hapless souls unlucky enough to have been placed in her care, but to raid from the pharmaceutical cookie jar as much Schedule-Two narcotics as she could lay her hands on. Squirreling away her illicit bounty until she could go running home to David, the love of her life, the hot guitarist on his way to a life of fame and fortune and rock ‘n roll riches. A predestined life, if you asked him. Not that anybody had to—he was perfectly willing to tell anyone who’d listen. Whip out that guitar and run those slim fingers of his up and down the fretboard and, well, it was easy enough to believe. Karen sure believed in him. She was certain he would make it, and that he would take her with him, even if he’d never actually said he would.
When she hit the skids, when she could no longer cope with or hide her surreptitious activities, the job and the drugs gone, rock ‘n roll Davey out the door and on his way to the next pretty young fool, Karen found herself residing in the gutter, scratching and clawing her way through state-sponsored rehab centers, hating every minute of it as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, in and out and back on the streets, until one day she found that she had actually reclaimed a piece of her life, a small measure of the dignity she had left behind so many years ago. From a Registered Nurse to a flop-house-floozy in and out of rehab, to a barely recovered addict unable to get a job anywhere within the medical community who, somehow, during all her trials and tribulations, had managed to hang onto her nurse’s license, Karen finally found herself working as a lowly dental assistant, far away from the state of the art critical care facility she had once taken for granted—a starting point, a humbling experience to look back upon as she slowly edged her way up the ladder and back into the fold.
Now look at me, she tho
ught, as she rifled through some picked-over garments at the old abandoned fashion boutique a couple of blocks from the warehouse in which she’d been crashing, a worn and frazzled knapsack half full of peaches and Spam, Hostess Twinkies and bottled water by her side, the spiked bat she’d found back at that gruesome site leaning against the glass-enclosed counter behind her, empty of the watches, jewelry and toiletries it had once contained.
Karen fluffed out the garment she had pulled from a disarrayed pile on one of the display shelves, a sleeveless tan top she probably would never actually have bought if she’d had a reasonable amount of stock to choose from. But it was clean, and it wasn’t white like most of the tops that lay in the snarled and tangled mess. She sat it atop the pile and pulled the black halter she had worn for the last couple of weeks over her shoulders. It was dirty, soiled with smoke and ash, and she smelled her body odor when the garment brushed across her face. It was a sad and disheartening situation: no food, no clean clothes, nowhere to bathe, unseen dangers at every nook and cranny, nowhere to turn to avoid them, except to hide out quiet as a church mouse, hoping above all hope that no one noticed her. And, of course, eventually someone would notice her—it was inevitable. Karen sighed and dropped the garment to the floor, staring down at her bare breasts a moment before snatching up the new top, shrugging herself into it and brushing her shoulder-length tresses away from her neck. Her eyes were brown, her hair the color of chestnuts. She had lost a considerable amount of weight these last seven weeks, but somehow had managed to halt the slide into emaciation, with her cans of food and snacks, the bottled water and the occasional bottle of wine she’d managed to pilfer along the way.
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