He stood for a moment behind them and watched, absently hefting the reassuring weight of the Polack in his hands. The bastard pushed so far up the whore’s bony backside his eyebrows disappeared into the gray flesh of her buttocks. Positioned on her hands and knees facing a blank wall, her back and her head sagging, she coughed and spat on the filthy ground before continuing her moaning.
Junior lined up his target on the gyrating back of the bastard’s filthy bald head. He practiced a couple half swings with the Polack, aiming the filed-down point at the base of the bastard’s skull.
The Polack had once been a Pulaski, a tool used in a time lost to history by smokejumpers to fight wildfires, but Junior had made some modifications to it. He shortened the wood handle by a foot for easier range of motion in tight quarters, and wrapped it with leather strapping for a better grip. With a wood-chopping axe head on one side, a normal Pulaski had a broad, flat opposite end that was useful for trenching the ground when cutting fire lines, but Junior had set the edges to a grindstone, shaping it into a murderous point. Plenty of bastards had screamed for mercy beneath its killing strike, but not this one. His life ended the moment the Polack pierced his brain stem.
The point entered the soft spot just below the skull at the top of the spinal column. The force drove his head further into the whore until the point struck the inside of his jawbone and stopped. The whore let out a sharp cry from the sudden pressure and turned to look at Junior through strands of mottled hair.
Junior pulled the Polack back, bringing the dead bastard with it, still affixed. Blood spurted from his mouth where the Polack had pushed through the back of his throat, severing his tongue, which remained in the whore’s backside, twitching and squirting red down her thighs. She screamed and clenched, and the tongue disappeared inside of her. She scrambled away on her hands and knees to the far corner of the room and huddled into a ball, shrieking and squirming against the foreign object inside of her.
Junior put his foot to the back of the bastard’s head and pulled the Polack free. He wiped it clean on the bastard’s pants then reached behind his back for his canteen. After a long swig of warm water, he screwed the cap back on and tossed it at the hysterical whore.
“Shut up, Marie,” he said. She immediately did so, her eyes wide with shock that he knew her name. “Take that and go clean yourself.”
JUNIOR STOOD WITH HIS back to her as she tended to her mess. When he turned back, she was wrapped in a torn, stained afghan. Junior recognized it as one that had once been draped over the back of their couch at home. She gave the bastard’s body on the floor a wide berth and sat on the stack of cardboard boxes that made up her bed, knees tucked up against her chest, arms wrapped tight around them. After a long moment of rocking and staring at nothing, she seemed to return to reality and looked up at him.
“Junior?”
He scanned her face, shrouded by shadow and twisted strands of hair. “Yeah, sis. It’s me.”
She looked back and forth from him to the bastard on the floor to the doorway, the only exit from the dank hole she called home.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“Why you think? I come for you.”
“No you didn’t.”
Junior leaned the Polack against an earthen wall and squatted on his haunches. “I did. For you and for information.”
“What information?”
“Like where Big Karl is.”
She didn’t answer at first, just watched him with huge round eyes that glittered in the low light. “What do you mean to do?”
Junior laid a hand on the Polack. “Just what you think. I mean to kill that son of a bitch with this.”
“You’ll never get close enough to him.”
“Watch me.”
She began to rock again. “Saying you do that. Then what?”
“Then nothing. I ain’t thought that far ahead.”
“His people won’t let you live, even if you do carry out the deed.”
“That don’t matter to me. All that matters is the deed be done.”
More silence. Both of them lost in their thoughts.
Finally, Marie said, “What is today?”
“I make it to be Friday, seventeenth of June.”
“No, I mean what holiday?”
“I believe that’s Metallurgist’s Day.” One of the new holidays invented after the so-called Great Awakening. Just another farce of a holiday. There was one for every day on the calendar now.
“Oh.” She fiddled and looked down at her hands. “So tomorrow is Appreciation Day, right?”
Appreciation Day, to show their deep and unending appreciation for being “liberated by the benevolent freedom fighters of the Hallmark Society.” Nothing but a bunch of psycho pseudo-anarchists parading around; essentially what every other day was. The holiday really didn’t matter, except for one. Junior spat on the ground in disgust. “Yeah.”
“And that means this Sunday is…” She watched him, waiting.
“Yep,” he said. “Father’s Day.”
Marie sat straight up, the tangles of hair falling away from her lined face. “I know where Big Karl is.”
SLEEP CAME IN FITS and starts to Junior that night. Tomorrow, Marie would lead him to their father. Junior had not seen Big Karl since the day of the Great Awakening, just over a year ago.
Junior was returning home from his shift at the printing press, a grueling 16-hour workday with no breaks. He shared a dank two-bedroom apartment with Marie and his mother and father. Big Karl no longer had a respectable vocation. Once a firefighter, he now came and went days at a time, and at all hours. He had grown secretive and strange, near incoherent much of the time. And violent. Mother’s face bore evidence of that, as did Marie’s.
A blow to the jaw dazed Junior as he stepped into the apartment, a heavy blast from something thick and metal that embedded bits of broken molars into his cheek and tongue. When he opened his eyes, the world was on its side. Marie and mother both sat on the floor, cowering and bleeding. They cried, but Junior heard nothing save the ringing in his ears.
“This is it!” Big Karl crossed in front of him, shouting, waving an axe around. He dropped to a knee and cocked his head sideways to look into Junior’s eyes. “Are you ready, boy?”
He spun the axe in his hands, waiting for an answer. “You ain’t ready,” he said. “You ain’t prepared to do your part. You never were with me.”
Junior coughed and spit out broken teeth. Somewhere nearby, an explosion rocked the apartment building and pieces of ceiling board dropped to the floor in dusty plumes.
“Hear that?” Big Karl threw back his head and whooped loudly. His eyes flared with insanity. “This is finally IT! The day is here!”
Junior’s father turned and kicked Marie in the chest with a heavy work boot, sending the slight girl hard into the wall. She slumped to her left and did not move. Big Karl turned to Junior’s mother and screamed at her with inhuman rage. She stared up at him in shock, a vacant look on her face. She never flinched, even as Big Karl raised the axe above his head and brought it down on her with all the force he could muster. The blade split the top of her skull with a meaty thock, pushing her head down between her shoulder blades. The sharp snap of her neck bounced off the walls of the close apartment like a thunderclap and the weight of the axe pulled her forward until the handle hit the floor. Her head wobbled on her shoulders like her neck was filled with gelatin and she slumped sideways until it came to rest against Marie’s leg.
Big Karl turned away from his wife and stomped around in a circle, still whooping maniacally. It was as though he was bursting from the inside with gallons of adrenaline, or perhaps some potent drug racing through his veins. His eyes bulged and veins stood out along his temples and forearms like virulent earthworms burrowing beneath his skin.
Junior’s senses slowly returned as he lay there. The Pulaski lay on the floor next to the rest of his father’s forgotten firefighting equipment. Big Karl stopped at
the opposite wall, his back to them, grunting and growling and punching holes through the drywall. Junior wiggled his extremities, making sure he could still feel them. He reached for the Pulaski and stumbled to his feet, a shower of sparks exploding in his vision.
Big Karl pummeled the wall, leaving bloody streaks on the edges of the holes, while mumbling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” He turned and took a step forward but stopped when he saw Junior, wobbly on his feet, the Pulaski high in the air. Big Karl sidestepped just enough, a slight tilt back and to the right, so the axe-end of the Pulaski just missed his face. He brought his left hand up to catch it, but instead the blade landed in the meat between his middle and ring fingers, and did not stop until it struck the top of his radius bone at the wrist.
Blood sprayed from the wound and covered Junior. It ran in his eyes and he staggered back, wiping at them. When he could see again, Big Karl was gone, the Pulaski on the floor in a pool of red. Junior stood in the middle of the apartment listening to the intensifying chaos outside, the Great Awakening whipping up toward a crescendo. He swayed on his feet and tried to maintain consciousness.
He had no idea how long he stood there. The next image he could recall was sitting on the floor, blood from his broken mouth splatting on the carpet between his legs. Marie’s screams barely registered in his mind. She pulled at his arms and spoke to him, and the memory of her tear-streaked face as she dragged him out of the apartment clouded his mind as he tried once more to sleep.
The world changed that day, a little over a year ago, April 23rd, the Venerated Day of the Great Awakening on the Hallmark calendar. The one-year anniversary “celebration” had lasted more than a month, but with so many holidays in between, it was impossible to tell when one excuse for bedlam ended and the next began. The world was an orgy of violence and destruction and lawlessness, but only one of the 365 holidays mattered at all to Junior now.
Father’s Day was tomorrow.
IN THE MONTH AFTER the Great Awakening, Junior lost track of Marie. It was a dark time that he found more difficult to remember with each passing day, as though none of it much mattered after what Big Karl had done to them. He spent most of the last twelve months lost, above ground and below, where many sought a respite from the depravity topside, but found only a darker version had sprouted up underground. Once Junior knew what he would do, he had searched for weeks until he found Marie, in an abandoned subway tunnel that had been repurposed as a marketplace for vice. He barely recognized her at first. She looked like an old black-and-white photographic version of herself.
“You’ll have to move the cover,” she said, rousing him from his mind fog. “It’s too heavy for me.”
Junior climbed the slick ladder to the sewer grate and pressed against it, using all of his strength to lift the heavy iron disk and slide it away enough so they could pass. He clambered up and then reached back to aide his sister.
He stood and looked around the alley, listening to the din of random gunfire and shouting male voices on a nearby main street. The day’s revelry was beginning again. “I haven’t been topside in some time,” he said.
“Neither have I.” Marie looked around nervously, checking the dark corners and doorways along the alley that the waning afternoon sun failed to penetrate.
When she turned back to Junior, he was gone. “Junior?” “Hey, baby.”
A drunk appeared from a doorway behind her and stumbled up the alley, his left foot dragging along the ground, disturbing the trash and sodden ticker tape from forgotten parades. Marie backed away, eyes darting around for something to defend herself with.
“Where you going, bitch?”
Before she could respond, Junior sprang from behind a flipped-over dumpster, the Polack a blur through the air. The sharpened tip entered the back of the drunk’s neck and burst through the other side. He froze for a moment, his eyes bulging. The liquor bottle in his left hand clattered to the ground as he clawed at his throat, his mouth opening and closing silently like a dying fish. Junior put a foot in the small of the man’s back and kicked him forward, off of the Polack. Blood coated the cracked brick wall to his right as if it had been dispensed from a paint sprayer. Junior picked up the liquor bottle, wiped the mouth with his shirt, and held it up to the light to see its contents. Then he drained what liquid had not spilled on the ground and tossed the empty bottle on top of its former owner.
Marie stood aside as Junior passed and said, “Aren’t you just a chip off the old block?”
Junior grasped her throat and hissed in her face, hot and boozy. “Don’t you ever say that again.”
He immediately regretted doing it and backed off, unable to look Marie in the eyes. She stood rubbing her neck, watching him. “You really hate him, don’t you?”
Heat flushed into his cheeks. “Don’t you?”
She responded immediately. “Yes.”
“Then let’s go find him.” Junior grabbed her by the elbow, not as rough as before, and guided her toward the sound of merrymaking on the next block.
JUNIOR LEANED THE POLACK next to him and watched the parade through a fist-sized hole in the cinderblock wall of what had once been a Chinese market. Men in flamboyant suits walked alongside and danced atop a trailer being pulled by a pickup truck outfitted with metal grates over the windows. The trailer was adorned with torn, dirty bunting and a sign, which had been written on and painted over several times. The misspelled words “Celabrashun of Pullies and Levers” had been hastily crossed out with black spray paint. Above those letters, in the same spray paint, had been written “Festivul Of Archers.”
At the front of the float, a man hung from a metal pole, swaying from a chain affixed to the top and strung under his arms and back around his neck, looking like a human tetherball. The truck lurched forward, the driver gunning the engine whenever a reveler crossed in front of his path. He ran one man’s leg over and the crowd cheered when the man fell to the ground in agony. He lay in the street screaming until another man in filthy white pants and heavy-soled boots kicked him in the teeth. He lay there spitting the contents of his mouth onto the pavement in silence as the party moved on without him.
Screams from the man on the pole drew Junior’s attention back to the procession as it passed directly in front of the store. The parade goers were armed with all manner of bows and arrows and crossbows, and they randomly fired bolts into their captive’s non-vital organs. He began to resemble a voodoo doll, or a pincushion. The bed of the trailer was slick with his blood and he moaned in soft agony when his voice gave out. The centerpiece of the Festival of Archers celebration.
Junior scanned the crowd for the one face he cared to see. Among them, a full head above the rest, strode Big Karl. He lingered toward the back of the procession, watching everything unfolding before him, a smirk on his clean-shaven face. He was dressed in a fine looking suit, and Junior thought there was an emblem stitched onto the breast of the jacket, but he couldn’t tell from that distance.
“There he is,” Junior said.
Marie peeked around the edge of a broken window and looked at the crowd who whooped and laughed and hurled catcalls and arrows at the man on the pole. After a moment, she slipped away from the window, back into the shadows. “How will you do it?”
Junior thought a moment, counting the men walking with Big Karl. While he watched the parade, his men watched everything else. In his mind, Junior saw it unfold. He was quick and, with the Polack in his hand, he was a killing machine. He would wait for them to pass and slip out to the street, come in from behind low and fast, using the settling dusk as his cover. He only needed one swing. Anything that happened after that didn’t matter.
Junior slipped his boots off to maintain the advantage of stealth, eyes still locked on Big Karl and the parade. He said to Marie, “You should go now. This will be done in less than a minute and you don’t want to be around when it’s over. Big Karl will be dead and that will be that.”
Marie did not respond. He waited
for her to say something, put up some kind of protest, but she remained silent. He reached for the Polack and turned to look at her one last time, to tell her goodbye. At the same moment he realized the leather-wrapped handle of the Polack was not where he had left it, a red streak entered his field of vision. Heavy metal struck him on the right cheek and a burst of stars exploded in his head just before he passed out.
JUNIOR AWOKE TO INTENSE pain running down his arms into his shoulders. He looked up at each hand, clamped tight by thick metal cuffs, which were anchored into a wall by chains. His feet just barely scraped the ground and he put his weight on his toes, trying to take the strain off his wrists. His toes and calves instantly began to burn and cramp.
“Lookie who’s awake.”
Big Karl stepped from the shadows into the pale light of a single bare bulb in the ceiling just above Junior. He stood with his arms crossed at his chest, just below the official seal of the Hallmark Society, embroidered on the left breast of his navy blue jacket. He leaned down to look into Junior’s half-open left eye. “I was starting to wonder if you would come around.”
Junior spoke slowly, trying to enunciate around the swollen bulge that was the right side of his face. “Love the suit. Real Hallmark man now, huh?”
Big Karl ran a hand over the emblem on his jacket. “Yeah, you like that? Pretty snazzy. You remember the old guy in the apartment next door to us? Always banged on the wall because he thought we were making too much noise? Turns out he was a hell of a tailor. A real whiz with his hands. I’ve got them in a jar somewhere, in fact. I should have had a couple more suits made up first, but oh well.” His face lit up with a huge, deranged smile. “Live and learn.”
A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous Page 12
