Resurrection Express

by Stephen Romano

. . . then drawling up my throat like the smell of blood and seawater . . .

  And I make noise like an animal.

  “You stay right there, buddy-boy. Don’t even think about it. I might just tell those good old boys to wipe what’s left of yer high IQ all over the ceiling.”

  I almost don’t hear Hartman’s voice, the thunder is so loud in my head now. I feel the shadows on all sides of us tighten, the choking sweat and steel-hard grunge of ten men holding me back. I almost try to break free and spring forward.

  But I stop.

  I hang on for dear life, in a clutch of stinking muscle.

  I look at Toni, who bites her bottom lip again—she looks like a movie star full of self-doubt when she does that. Some impossibly beautiful porcelain doll streaked with one fatal weakness that throws the whole illusion. It makes her human, makes her dangerous and elegant in mysterious imperfection. As the image rolls at me, and the mythology of her is rewritten from one second to the next, I want to reach out and touch her face. And I am stopped cold. So many gorillas on me now. Wholesale slaughter aimed point-blank at my head. More guns behind them. Hopeless.

  Two of the men step over and remove Franklin’s machine gun from his hand. They pat him down and find the Korth revolver, too. He stands there like a statue and lets them do it. The guy holding me takes my Colt from the dirty floor where I dropped it, and I notice for the first time that he looks like a mule wearing a dirty suit. He smells like his own leavings. They all do. Cheap backup, typical Hartman. But they’ll kill me just as well as real professionals.

  Toni stares at me with those eyes.

  The pain almost recedes as the mythology mutates further.

  Hartman does one of his wet snorts, and keeps himself from laughing out loud. “Ain’t love grand? I just knew this would be a right teary-eyed little reunion.”

  I look at her hard.

  I’m filled with the scent.

  She shivers in the real world, wobbling on her feet. I look harder now. I see that her long black hair is sweaty and hanging in her face, makeup clots running down her chin like some kind of goth-harlequin nightmare. She stares at me, a lost ghost.

  Shivering. Shaking. Unsure of anything.

  I felt the tremors in her body when I touched her. I can still feel them now, like electric shocks in the space between us. She’s been drugged. Or worse.

  Hartman laughs again, soggy and awful.

  “We’ve had a lot of fun since you went away,” he says. “I guess you know that. She was a wild one, boy. But everyone has their breaking point, don’t they?”

  She bites her lip again.

  She is so beautiful when she does that.

  My rage, held barely in check:

  “What have you done to her?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Don’t make me angry, boy. Just don’t do it.”

  The heat shocks through my body again, and this time I try to break free—but they still have me good. I scream Hartman’s name. I writhe and I kick and I get smothered under the gorillas again. Dumb laughter and drool in my ears, the thunder of a dozen heartbeats . . . David, you son of a bitch . . . you son of a bitch . . .

  The big guy doesn’t look amused anymore.

  He shakes his head as they hold me down.

  And he says:

  “Okay, fine. Have it your way.”

  He rolls over to one of the curtains and pulls it back along the steel bar. On the other side of the curtain are racks of equipment. Tools. A butcher’s block on a table. On the butcher’s block is a meat cleaver. There’s blood all over it.

  Just to the left of the table is a really big guy.

  He’s upside down.

  Naked.

  Strapped helpless into leather and iron.

  The Weasel.

  Hartman looks at me and burns.

  “You’re just so goddamn smart, ain’t ya?”

  • • •

  The Weasel gurgles through rivers of blood. He’s been worked over pretty bad already, his nose mashed back the other way on his face like a pulverized fruit.

  Marcie lies at his feet, facedown.

  Out cold or dead, I can’t tell.

  She’s half naked and part of her midsection looks hacked away.

  Hartman’s face stitches with a hideous crooked spider-grin, scrawled there like bad sidewalk art, his fist grabbing the handle of the big meat blade.

  “Looks like you’re running with a new posse, huh? Guess that means the old man is out of the game. That’s a shame, ain’t it? Old Ringo was a hell of a lot better at sneaking up on someone than these two idiots.”

  He looks right in the Weasel’s eyes.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  The Weasel tries to say something and the sound crashes and burns, a blubbering nonsense full of hatred and agony—but it’s a lot louder this time, right in Hartman’s face. And then he finally gets the words out: “Fuck YOU!”

  Hartman grabs the Weasel by his dreadlocks and spits: “You know it’s a funny thing, boy. That’s my name, too.”

  He holds the meat cleaver up to the guy’s face.

  I look away. I hear it loud. The Weasel doesn’t scream.

  But the sounds he does make are horrifying.

  Like a baby choking back its own birth.

  And then Hartman slices him again.

  And again.

  When I finally look, part of the Weasel’s face is gone, peeled away, dripping awful. Franklin’s fifty-yard stare never changes. Doesn’t even shake his head or flinch once. Can’t tell if he’s seen worse, but he’s cold as ice under fire.

  Toni doesn’t look, her back to the whole thing. She doesn’t even have to close her eyes.

  What have you done to her?

  Lots of things.

  I tense again. Almost try to fight the goons again. Hartman sees me move and wags his eyebrows, tasting the blood on his finger.

  “Just stay right there.”

  “David . . . don’t hurt him anymore. He’s just hired help.”

  “Well, then you shouldn’t have hired him. You knew I wasn’t kidding when I told you people were gonna die. After you hit my vault, it got pretty damn nasty around here. These boys will tell you all about that. My girls will tell you all about it, too.”

  He turns and hacks off one of the Weasel’s ears.

  I almost don’t look away fast enough.

  I hear Hartman’s wheezing breath as he does the deed with three long, hard thrusts—this was always a real workout for the fat slob.

  The Weasel still doesn’t scream.

  A couple of the goons giggle like animals.

  “You made a real sloppy getaway, kiddo. Hell, it was all over the street about your meeting with Kim Hammer in less than twenty-four hours. Of course, Jenison got to you first, the lousy bitch.”

  He points at Toni with the cleaver.

  Blood drips on the floor.

  “I thought I’d send you a familiar voice,” he says. “At the hotel, I mean. It was a long shot, but I figured what the hell? You were always so good at following the bread crumbs.”

  “Like SAVIOR-1? That was you, too, wasn’t it?”

  “You like that? One of my hackers. But you probably had that figured, didn’t you?”

  “Actually I didn’t. You keep surprising me, David.”

  “I’d like to take credit for that—but you know I ain’t a guy who likes to change his act, not like you. If I need an extra brain, I just buy the fucker.”

  Never underestimate the power of cold cash.

  Shit.

  “I had to do some real shopping when you went in the can, kiddo. You’re a tough act to follow. You’ve been talking to a lot of my ghosts in the last few days. They tell me what to do and I bring the hammer down.”

  “So this is Resurrection Express?”

  He grabs the Weasel by the hair.

  Licks a tiny spot of blood off his face, then winks at me.


  “No. But you’re damn close.”

  I look away, just as he does something much bigger and a lot wetter to the guy. It’s a huge sound of metal on flesh, right in the Weasel’s thick side flank. I hear it happen, deep and terrible. And the poor bastard almost gets to scream this time, before the backwash drowns him. Then, silence.

  The air freezing again between us.

  Hartman rips out the cleaver and giggles.

  “Here’s where it gets fun, kiddo. See, you can break a hunk of meat like this one in half so easy. You put another notch in your belt and move on to the next good old boy. But a woman like yours . . .”

  I look deep in her eyes, trying to find what he took from her. I see tears, finally welling in there. Her whole body quakes, her lips trembling.

  “. . . now, buddy-boy, she was a challenge. That’s why I always wanted her. That’s why it became my own little project. I saw what she did to everyone around her and I knew the old gal was special. A prize.”

  I see months and months of torture.

  Chains in a dark place, hard cocktails mixed in syringes.

  Cruel steel and endless dark.

  “She glowed, the old gal did. She made every man who could come up with spit drool all over themselves. And she could make a man love her, too. On the dime, just like that.”

  I don’t want to see it, but I do. She was broken on the rack while I rotted in jail. Forced to stay with him at gunpoint, at knifepoint—at lifepoint. Drugs and madness and endless doubt. Just like the sickness that claimed me. The endless spiral.

  The whole world, dropping out from under you.

  “There ain’t a whole lot of beautiful ladies on this earth who have that power, kiddo. Most of them just rely on what they look like. This one was smart. She had the sass and she had the glow. You were right as hell to love her like you did. Right as hell to go crazy like you did. So damn crazy and screwed up and shot to hell that you couldn’t even remember her face. That was a new one on me. Damn strange.”

  He sees my eyes fill with shock.

  Laughs.

  “Does it really surprise you that I know about that, buddy? It shouldn’t. I got a look at all your reports and medical records after you went in the joint. Had to protect my investment, after all.”

  “What investment?”

  “The lady, stupid! I made a promise to her that I wouldn’t kill you, so long as she stayed with me. Had to make sure you never croaked. Plus, you’re just so damn smart—I knew I might need you one day. Didn’t you ever wonder why I never let my boys kill you when you came in my house and raised all that hell?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s why I spared no expense with all those doctors. That’s why we fixed it to keep you in that nice deep hole of yours for so long. I was watching you every day when you were in prison. I saw your shrink reports while you were in there, too. That shouldn’t surprise you, either.”

  “It does and it doesn’t. Didn’t think you would care.”

  “Now that just hurts me. You and I are pals, aren’t we? And pals look out for each other, don’t they?”

  “Go to hell.”

  He laughs. “I even knew the exact day Jayne Jenison bought you out of the joint. Tried to stop it, of course . . . but her people are pretty serious.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Didn’t matter, though—I always had my trump card handy. The lady. She’s such a sexy thing, ain’t she?”

  Toni stares at me as he laughs again.

  Goddamn.

  He fixed us all real good.

  Took everything from her, and from me, too.

  And here we are.

  “Jayne told you I was running some kinda white slavery racket, didn’t she? Well, I guess maybe that’s true . . . but it ain’t exactly true, either. You might say I’ve been saving up for a rainy day. You know all about the rainy day, too, don’t ya? Those . . . evil sons of bitches. Jayne . . .”

  Toni, I . . .

  Wait.

  What did he just say?

  Christ . . .

  I am filled with pain and the smell of roses. The side of beef is almost dead now, hanging there in pieces. Still trying to tell the world to go fuck itself, still failing like an animal cut loose in the world of men. The smell of blood almost energizes me—cancels out the pain in my head.

  I hate that so much.

  Hartman nods to the goons holding me, and the knot uncoils, letting me go. One of them shoves me towards the boss like a real tough guy. I want to turn around and rearrange his mule face. I move towards Toni instead.

  “Don’t touch her,” Hartman says sharply, growling a little. “If you touch her again, I’ll have these boys shoot you where it really hurts. And you won’t die, either. We’ll open up that steel can in your head and play some more games. You won’t even be able to smell her when we’re done with you, boy.”

  I freeze in place.

  He really has done his homework—all those reports from the hospital and the joint, all those doctors who could never explain why she was locked away behind a wall of shadows that smelled like roses.

  He read all of that.

  He knows everything.

  Fuck.

  Hartman licks his lips. “Remember the other day when you asked me what I wanted? Back when I took a shot at you in the street?”

  “You said it was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “You know what that number means? You’re too young to remember. I used to watch that old game show when I was kneehigh to a grasshopper. Everybody back in the fifties watched those shows, like it was some kind of religion.”

  “They cancelled it 1958.”

  His eyes light up, his perfect white teeth gleaming just past fat, wet lips like a rich man’s beacon slobbering through slime. “Yeah, they did, didn’t they?”

  “Changed it to the 128 Thousand Dollar Question in the seventies.”

  He still looks really impressed. “I always wondered about that. Why they didn’t round it off to a hundred and thirty, I mean. Always seemed like an odd number.”

  “They doubled it, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still odd-sounding. I figure someone was doing some heavy negotiating somewhere. That’s how these thing tend to work most of the time. One guy comes up with an idea, another guy talks him out of it, and then the whole thing starts over. Until you’ve got a number that just don’t make any sense.”

  Then he slams the cleaver into a side of beef.

  Wham.

  “You’re just so goddamn smart, boy.”

  He tosses a piece of the Weasel on the carving block.

  Sears me with his next look.

  “Come over here, boy,” he says, tapping the block with the bloody cleaver. “Come over here and keep me company. I’ve got a great game we can play right now.”

  “You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

  “You may be right . . . but, see, there’s a big difference between me and Jayne Jenison. People like her aren’t maniacs like us. They want to do things that will put me and you outta business forever.”

  “I’m not like you. I’m not anything like you.”

  “And yet we do keep finding each other, don’t we?”

  He slams the meat cleaver down, into almost-dead meat. No screams now. Just the terrible sound of destroyed flesh. The gurgle of an animal trying to be a man.

  Keep the big guy talking.

  Say anything.

  “I have what you want, David. What I stole from the vault. I’ll give it to you right now, tell you where I hid it.”

  “I know you will. But that’s for later. I need something else first. See, it all comes down to negotiations. That’s the way it was when I had your old daddy on my ranch. He wanted something and I wanted something. He named a price and I named a price.”

  Yeah.

  Down in a dark room, just like this one.

  “I wanted his hands. He wanted your life. S
tartin’ to get the gist?”

  Dad’s flesh and bones on the chopping block.

  Madness and blood.

  “We were just three fingers into the deal when Jayne’s people grabbed him. Your daddy welshed. Probably by default, but that can’t be helped. A deal’s a deal and he broke it. And now someone’s got to pay. So I’m negotiating with you.”

  Dad’s body, hung from a hook and left to bleed, if Jenison hadn’t saved his life.

  And for what?

  “Did they tell you, David? Did she tell you what they were going to do?”

  He smiles thinly. Then stops himself from laughing, keeping the gruff chuckle deep in his body. Shakes his head. Waves a finger in front of his smirk.

  Wouldn’t you like to know?

  “Dammit, David, you have to tell me. What the hell is Jenison going to do? What the hell is Resurrection Express?”

  “Calm down, kiddo. We’ve got all night for that.”

  “This isn’t a goddamn game show!”

  “Says who?”

  He looks at the ceiling again.

  I throw a glance after him and I see the cameras, finally. Six of them, bolted to the steel supports and tangled up in a mess of wires and connections, glimmering with red lights, like embers from a dying fire.

  He’s recording all of this.

  Wants it for later.

  I feel his breath roll across the room in a long, terrible sigh, and his next words come slow and dark, floating like phantom traces, as he stares away into some remote dark corner: “I know you think I’m pretty sick. I know that’s what you’ve always thought. And who can blame you . . .”

  He looks right at me now.

  His eyes, terrified.

  I’ve never seen him like this, not ever.

  “. . . but believe me when I tell you that I’m nothing like those assholes who let you out of jail, Elroy. They’ve been crawling all over the world forever, doing their dirt. Controlling things, while nobody is looking. You don’t negotiate with people like that. They have priorities that go straight into the Twilight Zone. And there’s more of them out there than you can imagine.”

  He pulls the meat cleaver close to him.

  Speaks to someone far away, reflected in the bloody metal.

  “When you first came to me, Jayne, didn’t you say I was the only man who could help you? And weren’t you right on the money, you nasty bitch? Didn’t I make you millions? Wasn’t it Christmas every day of the week? You always said I was your best asset. You always called me a sick man. But I’m not evil like you, Jayne . . .”