by Kirk Alex
“Dear God! Delonzo, no! No, Delonzo! NO! Be a good boy, Delonzo! Please, Delonzo; please.”
The cat kept on. These words that came out of the woman’s mouth meant nothing to the animal. All the cat wanted was to get out, save itself—and could not figure how. The cat’s sharp claws dug into Fay’s neck and cleavage area, between deep, sharp bites into various parts of the woman’s face.
Somehow, Fay was able to position her arms over her face and keep the cat away from doing further damage. And, just as suddenly, the assault stopped, and Delonzo was at the other end, clawing and scratching at the wood, shrieking, desperate to break out. Only nothing doing.
“We treated you right, Delonzo. We always done right by you, Harold and me. Took you in and treated you kind.”
Delonzo paid no mind to any of it. Remained down where the woman’s feet were, continued to scramble from one corner to the other, and pretty soon was back where her head was: scratching and clawing at the top of the coffin; clawed away at the hole that Biggs had made with the jackhammer, until the jackhammer bit made another appearance and hammered away.
This was enough for the cat. Didn’t want any part of it. Wanted out of this predicament, and nothing short would do. Scrambled back down to the other end, and was soon back at Fay’s face, clawing at her forehead and eyes.
“STOP IT, DELONZO! PLEASE STOP IT! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP IT!”
Somehow, at last, she was able to grab at the cat with both hands and shove it down, away from her face. Kicked up with her knees at it, hurting it enough to get it to settle down. Then pushed it down some more, where the tom stayed put by her feet.
CHAPTER 555
Cecil withdrew the jackhammer. Positioned it directly over Harold Crust’s head and pressed down on it. Drove the bit through his face and back of his skull.
Forced it some more. Cut through Fay Crust’s coffin. Pushed through the wood. Some more of her husband’s blood landed inside her mouth, causing her to choke. Biggs was persistent. Applied pressure and force. Drove the bit through the left side of her face. Blood poured down.
Biggs worked the jackhammer. Circled it about, and then shoved down one final time and felt the bit crush her skull.
He jerked up on the jackhammer handle, pulling the bit up and out, then forced it back down again, hard. Once, twice, three times. And he knew he had done it: Fay Crust no longer made any noise or whimpered about anything.
This was how you dealt with them. Crushed them, smashed them, annihilated them. Without mercy. Without remorse, or second thought. There was incredible satisfaction in it. Yes. Only there was the matter of the cat left. Delonzo? About as stupid as the name Agenda Marie had given his offspring. Delonzo/Honesto, Honesto/Delonzo.
Where was he?
Biggs could hear him down there, mewling. Sure enough, but failed to pinpoint his location. He had the stripper take her open palm and slam the side of the coffin where Fay Crust’s feet were.
“Do it again.”
She did it again.
“Where’s the fucking cat? Can you tell?”
She shook her head. No matter. Wouldn’t stop him. It would be like drilling for oil, or water. You put the bit down and you probed. So began the probing process. Drilled and drilled. Cat kept scrambling about down there. At some point could tell the cat had made it up through a hole in Fay’s coffin and was presently inside with Harold Crust’s body.
He shut the thing off. Waited. And waited. The cat, blood-soaked and desperate, began to claw its way out the top of Harold’s box. Cecil yanked his gloves off. Dropped them to the stripper. Had her get into them. Quickly. Commanded her to grab the cat and hold it.
Pearleen turned her own head away, held on to the cat, while Biggs lowered the bit and drilled it through the animal. The cat was dead. He rubbed the bit against the plywood until he had the feline and its guts scraped off. Watched it drop back down into the coffin.
CHAPTER 556
Biggs shut the jackhammer off. Yanked the cord out of the socket in the wall. Handed the jackhammer to Pearleen, who lowered it against the floor, by the wall. He got his gear off, and sat back down in the folding chair. Signaled Pearleen to open the door and let the geeks in. Watched as they rushed in, surrounding the butcher’s block, scrambling for the best spot to duck under with their mouths open wide in order to gobble up the blood that poured down from both coffins.
Ionesco wondered, as did Norbert Fimple, if they had the bishop’s permission to drink up the blood in the buckets?
Biggs gestured: Fine. Go ahead. Enjoy yourselves. You only live once.
What he loved about them. There wasn’t much that he did, but the one thing he loved about them was their lack of inhibition. A byproduct of madness. Insanity. When you were insane you did whatever the hell you felt like, sans inhibition.
All, except for one, that is: Marvin Muck. Free Base. Free Ride. Ritalin. The Fuck. Mack Daddy wannabe. Sure. Yes. Any day now. The world needed one more. Had rocks for brains—but his goal in life was to be Iceberg.
Fine. That meant more blood for the geeks. He’d had his share for the time being anyway. Besides, plasma from an old, tired couple like Fay and Harold lacked something, that certain type of flavor that younger victims or beef blood had. He felt like having Hawaiian Punch instead, and maybe a couple of Ding Dongs.
Asked Pearl if she was up for it. The peeler, seemingly out of it, in that her mind appeared to be elsewhere, said that she was.
That’s what they would have, then: Fruit Juice Red Hawaiian Punch, and Ding Dongs. And his medication. Don’t forget your meds.
Biggs tossed the key to the cooler to the sidekick and rested back and waited for his Hawaiian Punch.
CHAPTER 557
Marvin left the Fun Room. Took two steps, waited, and could hear Petunia sobbing somewhere in the basement. He walked to the cooler door. Unlocked the lock hanging from the chain wrapped around the handle on the metal door itself as well as the “handle” bolted into the wall to the right of it. Went in.
Biggs kept a case of Ding Dongs on a wire shelf to his right. Beside it, a case of Cherry Coke and another of Hawaiian Punch, and a large case of Twinkies. Marvin reached for a blue and white box of Ding Dongs. Each of these boxes contained twelve individually wrapped cakes.
He tore the box open, dug out a Ding Dong wrapped in tin foil. He unwrapped the tin foil and jammed the cream-filled chocolate cake in his mouth.
Hawaiian Punch tasted like crap, but it still be better than tap water. He preferred hooch, any kind: Night Train, Thunderbird, MD 20/20, Cold Duck, or malt liquor: Colt 45, King Cobra; any kind, don’t matter; beer; any kind, don’t matter. Instead had to settle for this cat piss he be drinkin’. What chu gonna do? Omar like’ it. Mofo be buyin’ what he like, what he keep’ around. His daddy was a wino, so he don’t touch wine. Fuck him and his dead daddy both.
Hawaiian Punch be for fag’ and wimp’. Lot’ of them big fat hoe’ like Big Bertha like Hawaiian Punch. Only the ho be gone now. It was Omar plan that one. Don’t be none of my idea.
He unwrapped another Ding Dong and scarfed it down. Drained the can. Crammed the foil the Ding Dong had been wrapped in inside the can, crushed the can, and tossed it aside. And then he stood there trying to remember what in hell he was supposed to be doing.
Oh, yeah. Mofo be wantin’ his Ding Dong and cat piss. Marvin got his hands on a few Ding Dongs for Biggs, grabbed a couple more for himself that he stuffed in his baggy jeans. Grabbed a can of HP. Made it out. Tied the chain around the handle on the door and saw to it that the lock was locked.
Petunia continued to sob. Couldn’t quite tell what part of the basement she was in. Don’t make no difference. Wouldn’t save her. Could hear her moaning and carrying on. What they get for fuckin’ wiff Cecil. Had it comin’, her and Roscoe. There was nothin’ he could do about it.
Marvin walked back.
CHAPTER 558
When he re-entered the Fun Room, the geeks were going at it, devouri
ng what was left of Harold and his wife Fay. The scene grossed him out. What a mess. Staff and board member’ was at it, drinkin’ up the blood in the bucket’, fightin’ over organ’ and other meaty part’ like before wiff them other victim’.
Marvin Ritalin Muck thought he’d seen enough. Handed Biggs the Hawaiian Punch, Ding Dongs. Kind of stood back. Felt less than comfortable with what was taking place.
“That be some strange shit there. I seen some strange shit in my time, some evil mothafuckin’ shit in my time. . . . Them’s some nasty, blood-suckin’, hungry fool’.”
“Homo faggia.”
“Homo faggot?”
“No. Homo faggia: eating of raw flesh.”
“Whatever it be called, had enough, me.”
Biggs’s “response” was to drink down about half the Hawaiian Punch in one swift gulp. He looked contented. Peaceful. He unwrapped a Ding Dong. Bit into it. He was happy. Yeah; life was fine. They couldn’t touch him now. He didn’t give a damn about anything. What if the bulls finally appeared the way he thought they might? What would they do? He didn’t care.
Sure, Monroe Perez was out rounding up a posse, but so what? It didn’t matter. What the assholes did not know is that he’d wanted to give it up all along, wanted to be stopped. That was the truth. He’d needed help, real help, that would cure him, not just the meds. The Thorazine, Stelazine, Zoloft, Elavil, Paxil they’d had him on hadn’t done the trick. None of it worked; to the contrary, had only managed to make him worse, exacerbated the psychosis and made him suicidal. All those ridiculously stupid chances he’d kept taking had been for one reason: he’d wanted to get snagged, subconsciously wished to be reined in. Why else walk around with guns and drive with fake plates and a van with a blood-stained mattress in the back? That’s asking for trouble, is it not? Begging to be bagged, is it not? But nobody had been able to figure out what was going on.
Bunch of dummies. Dumb-fucks. World’s full of them. What else could they be when they couldn’t even stop a guy like him? If nothing else, they should have been able to detect his evil notions and presence; they should have been able to sense the enormous evil he was capable of. Dumb-fucks.
It didn’t matter. There was probably enough time left to kill some more of them, maybe the rest of the defectives.
All that nonsense he’d given Marvin about why he’d never wanted to touch any of them, that BS about feeling a certain kinship toward them because they were the world’s lost souls, the world’s freaks, the undesirables nobody wanted or understood, the crazies that this world could not help or wanted to truly protect. That’s what that had been: bullshit.
The stories he’d told himself all that time about assisting the rejects because he was able to relate to them, because he understood: they were outcasts and he was an outcast; they’d all had their short end of the stick, received the mud end every time, every single one of them, had been bullshit. Because, you see, no matter what they’d lived through, no matter the degree or extent of harsh times and mistreatment anyone had ever experienced, it could never compare to what John Joseph and the whore had put him through. No one’s psyche was scarred the way his was by his stepfather’s Russian roulette stunts. Then you had the beatings and injuries; being smacked around so hard, punched in the face and about the head and back so often and so goddamn severely that he’d been plagued by migraines all his life; the aching head and spine, the ringing in his ears that would not go away, the ringing in his ears that sounded like flies buzzing around inside his head, other times sounded something like a faint, although distracting enough, jackhammer hammering, or even both: yes, at times seemed to take turns, alternate, the sounds did, but then would gang up on him, and it was like a mixture of both—and it came and it went, never to leave him entirely.
The abuse: physical, mental—as well as emotional—had fixed him well. Left him with a skewed take on life. Damaged him forever. He knew it. What kindness and understanding he may have possessed at one time as a child had been ripped right out of him, had been brutally beaten out of his soul. Empathy and compassion were alien states these days, as far as he was concerned. It had been too many years to recall what being “better rounded” was about. So what was he supposed to feel now?
He saw the look of disgust on Marvin’s face and he couldn’t figure it. What the hell did Free Ride have to be disgusted about? Did the purse-snatching rapo actually have enough feeling in his worthless center, enough conscience left to be bothered by what he was seeing?
What did it matter? Biggs grinned. Finished off his Hawaiian Punch. He heard someone say, could have been Marvin: “When you think about it, Harold and Fay was all right. Never bothered nobody. . . .”
“Their number just came up. It’s that simple.”
“Roe still be out there, Trusty. What chu gonna do about that?”
“I can swat but one fly at a time, can fry but one spider at a time.” Biggs had another Ding Dong. Looked at the frenzied geeks. “Christ, that was one of the best for me. I liked double-decking the coffins like that. It was great.”
He thought of Pearleen’s hot cunt and asshole. Had it in his mind to assault the whore’s tight butt hole for old time’s sake, after he tied up some loose ends first: the redneck who liked to make obscene phone calls, and wondered if the Dragon Lady had any life left in her by now?
He looked about the room. Where was Peaches? Made herself scarce? Was here a minute ago. Asked Marvin.
“You mean Pearleen? Musta slipped out while I was gettin’ the Hawaiian Punch. Told you ho be no good.”
“No matter. Wherever she is she has to be somewhere in the basement.”
He squeezed the erection inside his trousers. Brother Trusty had wood.
CHAPTER 559
Marty Roscoe knew that he was still in the basement in a room considerably smaller than the one he had discovered Pearleen in earlier with the blood-stained tub and torture contraption. He helped his wife to a corner on the far side below what appeared to be a single window, dragged two of the old mattresses over that reeked of urine, pulled them to the corner and propped them up on either side of his wife to create a protective, teepee-like enclosure about her. It was all he could think of. There was nowhere else to go. As in the other room, what he perceived to be a window in this darkness (pretty well sealed on the outside, no doubt, and had wrought iron bars), was too high to reach.
Roscoe had attempted to fortify the flimsy door by dragging a third mattress over, pulling it up against the door and then bracing himself against the mattress. But he grew weaker by the minute and did not know how much longer he would be able to keep going, how much longer before he passed out.
“It ain’t the end of the world, babe. We’ll fix you up. That’s a promise, babe; soon as Monroe gets back with help. That’s what Roe Perez is doing right about now—getting us some help.” He paused to catch his breath and to convince himself that help was truly on the way. Help had to be coming. This was North Hollywood this was happening in, and not out in the sticks somewhere away from everything.
“I love you, honey. Ain’t nothing changed with us.”
“Marty, my eyes—I can’t see. I can’t see.”
“There ain’t nothing to see. It’s kind of dark in here.”
“I can’t stand the pain, honey.”
Petunia’s husband wished he could have done something to ease her agony, wished he didn’t feel so helpless. He wondered what Biggs was up to now that he had shut the jackhammer off? How much longer before he came after them?
All the crazy bastard’s gotta do is get them psychos to rush the door and we’re through. There’s just too many of them. There’s only so much I can do by myself. One-on-one wouldn’t be a problem. Yeah, I’d take him on. Bet you anything the pissant’s too yella to face me even in my condition.
Christ, what’s keeping Monroe? Where is he? Where the fuck is he? We need help. My baby is dying. . . . My baby . . .
“You two mouthed off to the wrong man,
didn’t you, busybodies?” Biggs’s voice echoed throughout the basement.
“SHOW YOUR FACE, PECKERWOOD! COME AND GET IT LIKE A MAN! IF YOU GOT ANY BALLS—ONLY I AIN’T SO SURE A FAG LIKE YOU WOULD HAVE THE BALLS!”
“There you go again, bad-mouthing others. There is but one cure for that redneck mentality.”
Roscoe turned, his eyes searching out the corner his wife was in, the upper case “A” he’d created for her with the mattresses that she was huddled inside of and hardly provided any real protection. He was aware of it, and was at a loss to come up with anything better. Custer had his last stand; this was Marty Roscoe’s—unless help showed in time to save them.
CHAPTER 560
He walked back there. Knelt beside her. He reached for her hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.
“Babe, don’t leave me. . . . I love you, Petunia honey. . . . I always loved you, sweetheart. I know I ain’t perfect. . . .”
“Bullshit,” said Biggs, who was standing outside the closed door to the Mattress Room.
“SHUT YOUR FACE! SICK SUMBITCH!”
“You gave a shit about her pocketbook, the bank account. You’re a fraud, redneck. Nothing more than a suitcase pimp. She earned the money/you helped spend it. I knew somebody like that once.”
“Don’t listen to that, babe. I got feelings, you know that.”
Roscoe slowly rose. Made it to the door. The mattress he’d propped against it had slid to the floor by now and he was not about to expend what strength remained in his deteriorating condition to prop it back up again.
