The Not

by A. R. Braun

  “Hey, knock it off!” Don looked up into the flaming eyes of the spirit that cut him to the heart and set his mind ablaze. Fear choked him like a piece of an apple stuck in his throat.

  The beak released him. “You insolent piece of shit,” the thunderous voice boomed as the beak opened and closed. “I ought to kill you right here, right now.” The noise of The Not’s vocal chords rumbled in Don’s chest.

  Scorpions filled the floor and divers crows landed on everything. Don was so frightened his heart pricked him. A jabbing pain assaulted his left arm. Don winced and waited for a coronary to claim his life, but the pain abated.

  “I’m going to turn Fay into a lesbian and parade her girlfriend in front of you everywhere you go. I’m going to get you fired from your job and bring your enemies back to life so they can stalk you. Maybe I’ll strike you dead right now.”

  What could Don do? “I… I…”

  “You what?”

  Don saw his life’s demise flash before his eyes. Like a mental movie, the pink slip handed to him by his boss, Fay walking arm-in-arm with a lesbian and a pissed off crowd of the living dead jumping him after Don got out of his car. That is, if he didn’t die in the next few seconds.

  He couldn’t take it. Don’s humanness got the best of him. Lord help him, he was weak. Don breathed deeply as the scorpions tried to sting him through his dress shoes. In another second, they’d reach the socks and inject their deadly venom.

  “I’m sorry,” Don said.

  The Not’s eyes turned back to red pupils with black irises. The scorpions disappeared. The deity gestured with its left wing and the crows flew through an invisible vortex in the French doors, except for a few that lingered on his couch, pecking at the supplies. The Not cocked his huge head, and his eyes were sad.

  “How could you? After all I’ve given you.”

  Nonplussed, Don held his hands out.

  The Not furrowed his brow and righted his head. “I told you not to talk to that squaw bitch!”

  Don wiped his sweat-slicked face with his handkerchief. He took a few moments to compose himself, then locked eyes with him. “I won’t, I mean, I didn’t mean, um — ”

  The Not crossed its wings. “Bah.”

  “I’ll…”

  “Obey? Oh, you’d better.”

  “There’s just one thing I, um, need to know. Please don’t be angry, but I must ask.”

  The eyes flamed again. The scorpions and the remnant of the crows crept back in. “Running Bear lied. The Pueblos want to keep all the blessings for themselves. They hate palefaces like you. They feel you’ve done enough, and don’t you agree?”

  Don had calmed considerably, but he still trembled. He nodded. The crows and the scorpions withdrew again. The Not’s eyes went back to some semblance of normalcy.

  “You stole their country. In God you trust, my ass! Your forbears savagely pilfered this land. You’ve degraded the remnant of their race, forcing them to sell out to you and run casinos. Except for that Pueblo. He makes a good living in that little store of his.

  “And now you want to buy his artifacts. Do you know how that makes him feel? I bet you don’t.”

  Don shook his head.

  “Then you want his god. Well, not without a fight.”

  Don fully realized what his ancestors had done. Every Fourth of July was a disgrace. Every Native American cartoon and old-time Cleveland Indian hat a slap in the red face, along with a knife in the back. The reservations of old, the casinos of new. Western Sky. What had the white race done?

  “But I like you. You admire that Testament song ‘Trail of Tears.’ You’ve had it hard all your life, just like the red man. And you never did what your founding fathers did. You wouldn’t, couldn’t.”

  Don shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t.” He sneaked a peek out of the French doors. The sun was down, but the glow of The Not lit the house like a lesser sun.

  “Did you enjoy your dates with Fay?”

  Don nodded.

  “Especially when you got that long-awaited piece of pussy, huh?”

  Don hesitated, but nodded his obeisance.

  “Do you like your job?”

  “Very much.”

  “Then continue in my nirvana. If you stay with me, I’ll help you rule the world. Remember your dream?”

  Don was still breathing heavily. He held his stomach as if to hold his guts in. “Um-hmm.”

  “I can give you everything. Think about it. Mayor, governor, president, chancellor!

  “And I can take it all away.”

  Chancellor? Does he mean the antichrist? But I don’t believe in that. Wait. I’m doing it again. How can I be so ungrateful?

  Tears leaked from Don’s eyes, and he sobbed, falling to his knees.

  The few crows on the couch flew through the portal. The Not cawed his joy so loudly the sound boxed Don’s eardrums. Then he lay prostrate.

  “One more thing and I leave you to your half-hearted loyalty. Give me entry to this town. Let me bless your neighbors so they no longer despair of life, but get so high on it they’ll think they’re tripping. I’m talking about joy unspeakable, like you have.”

  “But you’re, um, already here,” Don whimpered.

  “Unless you’re selfish, beckon me, or I can’t help them. Motherfucking invoke.”

  My God, what if he’s lying and Running Bear’s right? I could always perform the ritual later, I guess.

  These thoughts ran through Don’s brain in seconds. He didn’t dare think them coherently because the deity would read his mind. He had reservations though. The Not could be such a bully. Then he mused over he and Fay rocking out to Testament, part of the capacity crowd that worshiped as one.

  Doubting Thomas or no, what came out of his mouth was, “Yes. Come upon them.”

  Don fainted.

  CHAPTER 12

  Don woke with the side of his face on the floor. His mouth had drooled on the laminated wood.

  Did I really sleep till morning?

  His watch said he had.

  The memory of what happened last night took a few seconds to register, but when it did, he worried about being wrong concerning what Running Bear had told him. Don realized he wasn’t late for work. The birds chirped outside, and he hardly thought The Not had destroyed mankind. With a smile, Don pushed himself up and looked through the French doors. The gorgeous sunrise streamed over the mountains and sent rays of wonderful into the world. He was glad to be alive.

  Don leapt for joy, praising The Not at the top of his lungs, the neighbors be damned.

  Wait. The neighbors be damned?

  But what was there to worry about? Another beautiful day dawned, and the fringe and bead hocker had been lying, just like The Not had said.

  Don whistled a happy tune, making a beeline for the shower. Once inside, he imitated what the Testament concert would be like, singing their songs — off-key as they may have been — and faking crowd-roaring sounds as if he was a child playing solo baseball. The shower massager stroked him, a cleansing lover, and the hot water invigorated him. He even sang “A Beautiful Morning.”

  He had a shit and a shave to go along with his shower, then dressed and headed out to his car with a spring in his step. The dry heat kissed him. He blasted Testament the whole way to work. Looking at his watch, he realized he was a bit early. He stopped at a breakfast nook for a couple of bagels with cream cheese and a cappuccino, then strolled out the front door.

  And dropped the bag and the coffee.

  Pulses of energy rained onto the town. Don gasped at the eerie red, yellow and orange tendrils. Others saw it too, and that’s why the screaming had started. The temperature rose, but when the waves reached the shuffling businesspeople, they didn’t melt from the intense heat.

  For that would’ve been a blessing.

  Kiss the dry heat goodbye. Now it felt like a summer day in Texas — 110 degrees in the shade.

  An invisible force ripped off a blond businesswoman’s clothes,
including her underwear. Don gaped. A hoodlum ran up to her and performed a wrestling takedown move. On the cement, she struggled against him, but to no avail. He whipped out a switchblade, and she thrashed and flailed like a maniac. Still, he cut her tits off with a sawing motion. The lady shrieked and continued to fight, so the crook slit her throat. She fell onto her back and spasmed for a few minutes, then lay dreadfully still. Two-fisted, he had a breast in each hand, and the severed flesh leaked blood onto the pavement in pools. Don choked on his spit when the man bit into them and consumed them like a couple of P’zones.

  An old, blue-haired lady’s head fell off, falling to the ground with a sickening thud. Red lifeblood gushed from the stump, covering her sweater. The body kept walking for a few steps, then toppled over, pouring crimson all over the sidewalk. Her dead eyes stared at the world with the question of why.

  A man wielding a chainsaw rushed out of a hardware store. A mother pushing a stroller had started running when the more-than-devastation occurred; unfortunately, she was running his way. He caught her in the nose with the saw. She shrieked as he cut through the skull, her blood spraying all over the stroller. The baby cried. When the saw came out of the back of the woman’s head, Don turned away, but he had to look again to see if the baby would be all right.

  It was too late.

  The man had stuck the chainsaw into the stroller, and the infant’s blood covered his face in a nauseating gush.

  A group of frantic businesspeople ran across an intersection, which would’ve been fine if it hadn’t been for the trucks and the cars that failed to slow down. The vehicles ran over them with sickening bump-ta-bumps. Faces hit pavement and blood erupted in little lakes.

  Don grabbed his head, for heretofore he’d been in shock. “Oh, good goddamn, Running Bear was right!”

  A car of panicking schoolgirls stopped before the dead bodies in the road. A gangbanger walked up and shot out the windows, shattering them. The girls screamed. He proceeded to put bullets in the lovely schoolgirls’ heads. One kid caught a bullet in the eye, screaming and convulsing while a crimson spray jetted out of her socket and dotted the dashboard. The gangbanger reached into the car and dragged them out. The ones that were still alive, having involuntary spasms as they lay on the sidewalk, weren’t alive for long. He beat their faces into their skulls with the handle of his gun.

  A long-haired man with a sword came out of a pawn shop. He raised it in a martial arts stance and, with a fell swoop, lopped off the gangbanger’s head. Blood streaked the assailant’s face and hair as the head rolled into the gutter like a bowling ball.

  Don wanted to move, to help the victims, but all he could do was inch toward his car. Above his head, thunderclouds rumbled.

  A man with a scruffy face and a big nose ran up to Don, grabbing his shoulders and begging him for help. The destitute man was dressed in rags. From behind him, a middle-aged brunette lady with a butcher knife sneaked up and grabbed him, then twisted the man around. She clocked him, and he hit the pavement like a sack of onions. Whooping — a real mad hatter — she cut his nose with a sawing motion until it came off, then she stuck it in her mouth and chewed.

  Don gagged.

  The crazy lady undid the man’s pants, slid them down and cut off his manhood, munching on it like a sausage. Blood ran down her face in rivulets. Yet even that wasn’t enough. She cut off his balls, flaying the sacks open. Don’s eyes goggled when she popped the white testicles into her mouth like popcorn chicken, chewed them also, then cocked her head and smiled as if they were a delicacy, her mad eyes wide with frenzy.

  This was only the beginning.

  A parochial schoolgirl that couldn’t have been more than nine flew through the air until she went through the windshield of a parked car. When she crawled out, her cute face now a bloody mess, an invisible force made her fly into the air until she landed on top of a high-rise apartment building. She screamed the whole way up. At the top, she panicked, tottered and shrieked. A small crowd formed below, but they didn’t want to catch her because they yelled, “Jump.”

  An invisible force pushed her. The crowd parted to let her splat onto the pavement. Cheers accompanied the boom she made on the city street, where she exploded onto the surrounding crowd, raining blood and gore. The group cheered.

  Gangbangers, longhairs and skinheads whipped out guns and let rip. They caught a number of businesspeople in the back of the heads as they ran, dropping them onto the pavement. Then they caught up with them, stuck their guns in the cracks of their asses and opened fire before they turned on each other, the city now a war zone. Blood pooled all over the block.

  A sword on a statue came dislodged and traveled at the speed of light, it seemed, until it found a home in a running young man’s crotch. He uttered a loud grunt, then a falsetto scream when the red tip forced its way out of his asshole. He stopped and twisted his trunk, grabbing both ends of the weapon, unable to dislodge it and spinning around a few times until he fell over onto his side and flopped like a fish, then was still.

  A brunet businesswoman ran up to Don and screamed for help, then lost her head… literally, at the hands of a raving street lunatic holding a sledgehammer he’d probably lifted from the pawn shop. Her head bounced off Don’s car window, then rolled to his feet. The nutcase yelled at the top of his lungs, telling Don to “Punt.” The woman’s dead eyes looked up at Don in shock, her tongue lagging out of the side of her mouth.

  The sanguine atrocity raged until the streets and sidewalks were awash with fresh blood and grue.

  The madman raised the sledgehammer and got in Don’s face. “Motherfucker, I said punt.”

  More like first down. Don ran around the side of his car (slipping a couple times in the blood and almost losing his footing), unlocked it in record speed and dove in. He shut the door and locked it, as well as the rest of the doors. The madman followed Don and bashed at the glass with the sledgehammer, shattering it and raining fragments onto Don’s lap. The latter shook like a leaf in a hurricane, but managed to fire the vehicle up and pull away.

  Don winced as he drove over bodies.

  Bump-ta-bump, bump-ta-bump, bump-ta-bump.

  Don cranked the wheel sporadically, making the tires squeal because crazed citizens ran after him with knives, guns, swords and hammers. Bullets caved in his other windows as he sped toward his home. He realized he’d perspired through his clothes, leaving dark stains, and he ripped his sport coat off. Don thought he’d faint dead away.

  After turning a few streets, he passed a Girl Scout troop whose heads popped off and rolled down the sidewalk, tripping a female jogger in green sweats who’d been trying to pull her hair out. The color of her outfit changed to dark red when two of the schoolgirls’ bodies ran at her and ripped out her eyes, taking special care to place them into their detached heads’ mouths that chewed them and swallowed, then stopped moving. The eyes came out of the neck stumps.

  When Don stopped to avoid a speeding tow truck, a berserk man with maniacal eyes and a bloody human face mask ran up to his car and peeked in at him, the coppery stench stomach wrenching. Don put the pedal to the floor, freaking out so badly he almost hit a parked car. He heard a man scream, then realized it was himself.

  The clouds had a black cast now and hovered over the city. They rained on a woman dragging two little boys… until a bolt of lightning cut her in half down the middle. The boys screamed and continued to hold onto the halves before shrieking and running away. A couple more bolts of lightning cut the boys in half at the waist, the top halves flying into the air and landing in a rosebush of a nearby house.

  A schoolboy running and carrying his skateboard was caught in the leg with a machete wielded by a wide-eyed bald man in a business suit. The kid screamed and hit him over the head with his ‘board, but it didn’t even faze the crazed mammoth of a man, who kept hacking away until the boy’s leg came free. The child fell on the sidewalk where the fat guy finished the job, cutting off his other leg, both arms and his head.<
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  Don took the last turn toward his house. Bloody eyeballs and heads bounced off his windshield, the cracked corner part near Don that hadn’t been shot out. He climbed out and ran for the gate, and red-streaked fingers and toes smacked him in the face as he sprinted for the safety of his house.

  “Urgggghh. Ewww.”

  Don frantically unlocked the gate, but couldn’t help looking back. People were exploding in blood storms as they came out of their houses or ran down the street.

  BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

  The howling cats and barking dogs on his lawn exploded and splashed Don’s face red; the metallic scent made him gag. Gray matter landed on his face, in his ears, in his mouth — even in his eyes — and Don puked all over his property, now littered with (you’ve got to be kidding) eyes, ears, noses and human heads.

  “Akkkkk,” Don cried.

  Invisible impacts sent cars into flames, as well as the houses, one by one, the devastation heading Don’s way. He unlocked the doors and dashed for the supplies Running Bear had given him. Don gathered them up and ran for his car as quickly as he could. He slipped in gore on his yard and tried to keep his footing with an insane dance, then dropped the objects when he landed on his face. The pain in his nose was intense, as if someone had bored into it with a drill. He wondered if he’d broken it. When he rose, he touched it and found the two small oblong bones intact, a miracle because Don had landed on the lawn sprinkler. His hand came away bloody after smearing it on the mess. The lawn sprinkler came on, and Don allowed the water to wash the blood from him, then picked up the stuff and set a new record for himself in the 100 yard dash for his car.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I lied.”

  “Shut up! Shut up, you motherfucker! I want you out — !”

  “Shut your ass up, paleface! What are you doing with that shit the squaw bitch gave you? You want to die with your fellow citizens?”

  Don ignored him. He leapt in, fired the car up and drove over more bodies. Don had to dodge out-of-control cars that smashed into telephone poles, houses and kiddy houses. He tried to keep his eyes on the road, but couldn’t help spotting a couple of soot-covered children fly out of a chimney. One of them landed in a basketball hoop — two points! — and the other was impaled on a lawn gnome. Blood spurted upward, seeming to come from the Travelocity-like character’s head. Don worked his way to the street that led to the interstate turn-off ramp in a hurry. His hands shook so badly he didn’t think he’d be able to keep them on the wheel, but as he took a few sharp turns, almost running into a garbage truck bleating its horn, he found new life as the high rises exploded and fell from their heights.