by Jude Hardin
The man punched swift and hard, but K-Rad somehow managed to dodge the blow.
Matt could see boils on K-Rad’s face oozing with thick pus the color and consistency of custard, and slimy brown earthworms crawled in and out of his eye sockets like living strands of lo mein. K-Rad ran out into the parking lot, bright red blood dripping down his rotting chin. Matt followed, limping as fast as he could, but K-Rad darted behind a minivan and Matt lost sight of him. Sirens wailed in the distance as more firefighters and rescue personnel headed to Nitko. Matt hobbled forward a few steps, looked between some cars for K-Rad, but didn’t see him anywhere.
A muffled gunshot crackled, and a bullet whistled past Matt’s left ear. K-Rad stood forty feet away with his elbows propped on the roof of a light blue compact automobile, a Camry or a Sentra or one of the other generic sedans from overseas. He fired a second time and a third, and both those rounds missed their mark, but the fourth time K-Rad pulled the trigger Matt felt a sizzling-hot bolus of lead burrow deep into his left shoulder. The shock and pain from the bullet’s impact, along with everything else that had happened over the past few hours, caused Matt to have a momentary lapse of consciousness. He fell dizzily to the pavement and lay flat on his back, clutching the fresh wound with his right hand.
K-Rad walked over with the pistol and aimed it straight at Matt’s face. “I don’t know who you are, but you just fucked with the wrong motherfucker, motherfucker.”
Matt stared Radowski down, resigned to his fate now but unwilling to beg or whimper or flinch, unwilling to give this poor excuse for a human being the satisfaction of seeing him sweat.
“Fuck you,” Matt said.
K-Rad laughed. He pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. While he was reaching into his backpack and pulling a second identical pistol out and jacking a round into the chamber, Matt felt something uncomfortable pressing against his right buttocks.
Then he remembered.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans. An instant before K-Rad took aim again, Matt sprayed the entire contents of the Mace canister at his unprotected face. Radowski squealed and cussed and clawed at his eyes. Matt scissored his legs with K-Rad’s and sent the gunman tumbling facedown onto the pavement.
Matt rose to a sitting position, grabbed K-Rad by the hair, and smashed his face into the hot blacktop. He picked up the pistol, rose and steadied himself, and limped toward the entrance.
11:37 a.m
From the ladies’ restroom Shelly heard women screaming and dishes breaking and pieces of silverware clanging metallically to the floor. A man shouted, “Oh my God, he’s got a gun.”
Shelly didn’t know what the hell was going on, but she was missing all the excitement and that wasn’t cool. Fuck a bunch of waiting around for these bitches to come in and potty. Time to kick things up a notch.
She pulled the Remington twelve-gauge pump from the pouch and stuffed some extra shells into her pockets. She pumped one into the chamber and walked out with the barrel leading the way.
The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms. There are people constantly walking by, on their way to piss or shit or hock a loogie, and in the worst establishments you can even hear the toilets flushing. Not very appetizing. Plus, the hallway to the restroom is usually near the door to the kitchen, so you have servers and busboys scurrying back and forth with trays of hot food or plastic bins of dirty dishes, and the chef is always shouting at someone for screwing something up. The worst table in a restaurant is always the one nearest the restrooms, and at the Retro it was a four-top nestled between the lobster tank and a life-sized statue of Elvis. Shelly turned the corner and saw the unlucky party, an elderly couple on one side of the table and a much younger couple on the other. Next to the younger woman there was a little girl, probably between the ages of one and two, strapped into a wooden high chair. The baby was screaming for all she was worth, and all four of the adults had their elbows on the table and their hands laced together and their eyes closed. They were praying. Shelly aimed the gun and pulled the trigger, and chunks of Grandma and Grandpa splattered all over Elvis’s chubby face. It looked like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at him. The young couple’s expressions had quickly turned from worry to terror, and they backed toward the wall and held their palms out in a defensive gesture as Shelly turned the gun on them and their baby.
“Stop!”
Shelly looked toward the front entrance. It was Matt Cahill, and he was pointing a pistol right at her.
11:45 a.m
Decaying flesh hung from Shelly’s face in strips, as though someone had fed rotten liver through a paper shredder. Her teeth were thick and yellow, her inflamed eyeballs bobbing around in their sockets like hardboiled eggs in some sort of ghastly stew. Matt had seen her car in the parking lot when he drove in, so he’d known she was here at the Retro, but he had no clue as to how she’d managed to get hold of a gun. A sawed-off shotgun, no less, a goddamn portable cannon. She had already slaughtered an elderly man and woman, and she was about to do the same to a young couple and their toddler.
“Let them go, Shelly,” Matt shouted. “They never did anything to you.”
Matt was still dizzy. Sweat trickled down his face in streams, and his heart raced, but jacked on adrenaline, he felt no pain from the shrapnel wound in his left leg or the slug embedded in his left shoulder. He felt nothing but an intense rage at all the bloodshed this horrible day had brought, and an intense sorrow for what he was going to have to do now.
He lined the pistol’s sites at Shelly’s chest, trying his best to focus.
“Drop your gun,” she said, pointing the shotgun directly at the baby’s head. “Or I shoot the baby.”
It was a stalemate. If Matt pulled the trigger, Shelly would die, but so would the baby.
“Why the baby?” Matt asked.
“Why not?” she said. “Aren’t they adorable? That’s all the bitches at the plant ever talk about. Let them talk about this.”
Matt saw her finger tense on the trigger. “What’s the baby’s name?” He turned to the terrified mother. “Tell me.”
In a quivering voice, the young woman said, “Kylie. Her name is Kylie.”
“You hear that, Shelly? Her name is Kylie. Why would you possibly-”
“Shut up,” Shelly said. “Or shoot me. I’d be doing this kid a favor.”
“A favor?”
Shelly gestured to the horrified mother. “Look at her, sopping up the beer. A couple years from now she’ll be too drunk to notice when her man starts feeling up little Kylie. Or she’ll notice and not even give a shit. Hell, maybe she’ll even pimp her out for drug money.”
“Or maybe her mother will love her and she’ll grow up to live a happy life,” Matt said.
“No such thing,” Shelly said.
Suddenly, blue lights started flashing against the restaurant’s window shades. Shelly saw them, too.
The cops had arrived, but Matt knew they wouldn’t storm in right away. They would secure the area, try to negotiate a surrender, and eventually send in a SWAT team. By that time, little Kylie and no telling how many others would perish.
One way or another, it would be over soon.
“I know you drift off sometimes,” Matt said. “When the pain becomes too much. Where do you go?”
Shelly turned and faced Matt. The expression on her gruesome face seemed to soften, and her voice sounded like it belonged to a little girl.
“High school. Isn’t that fucking pathetic? Everybody in the world hated high school, and it’s all I’ve got to look back on… I was almost head cheerleader, you know. I was…” She paused and then shouted, “Fuck you!”
She gritted her teeth and scrunched her brow, and as she started to turn back toward the child in the high chair, Matt squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession. Shelly spun and fell backward, and the shotgun blasted a hole in the ceiling as she crashed into the lobster tank. The glass shatter
ed, and a hundred gallons of murky green water flooded the floor.
The liberated creatures did not crawl on Shelly, or even toward her. They crawled away from her, as though she and they were opposite poles of a magnet.
The restaurant patrons, many of whom had climbed under tables or had taken other defensive positions, seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Someone began clapping.
It was Mr. Dark, sitting at a table, wearing a lobster bib, waiting for his meal.
“Nicely done,” Mr. Dark said. “Shame you couldn’t do it before.”
“I’m not a murderer,” Matt said.
“No, no, you’re not,” the baby’s mother said, clutching her baby now and sobbing. “You saved us. Thank God, you saved us.”
Matt looked at her, wanting to believe she was right. But the bodies on the floor said otherwise.
When he turned back around, Mr. Dark was gone.
Epilogue
A pair of police detectives grilled Matt as he lay on a gurney in the emergency room awaiting treatment. He told them everything he knew about the slayings at Nitko and at the Retro.
But he didn’t really have to convince them.
By the time he got to the hospital, they’d found Terri Bonach, and she backed up his story. And there was the mother, who credited him with saving her child.
And Kevin Radowski was still alive, somewhere in the same hospital, under heavy guard.
They said that Matt had probably saved thousands of lives.
But it was the few that he didn’t… and especially Shelly… that he couldn’t stop thinking about.
If only he’d killed her the instant Mr. Dark had touched her…
But he hadn’t had the guts.
Or the heart.
Shelly was broken long before he’d met her, but no more than millions of other people who were living lives they hated. The anger and bitterness were just small parts of her. There was joy in her, too. He’d seen it. He’d felt it. Maybe if she’d lived long enough she could have figured out how to let the good feelings overwhelm the bad. Or maybe not. But that was just life.
Then Mr. Dark had touched her and the bitterness and anger were all that were left.
Matt had kept hoping until the last minute that he could save her from what Mr. Dark had done with his touch. But he could never save her from what her life had done to her-and what she had done to herself. The seeds had been planted long ago. Mr. Dark just showed up for the harvest.
So now Radowski was alive and Shelly was in a body bag.
Matt figured the prosecution would seek the death penalty, but even if they were successful, no telling how many years K-Rad would spend on death row filing appeals. Books would be written, movies would be made, and curious women would make him their pen pal. Three hots and a cot, and worldwide fame. That was probably what he had wanted all along, and that was probably what he was going to get.
It wasn’t fair that K-Rad survived and Shelly did not.
Score one for Mr. Dark.
The plant may not have blown up, but K-Rad was still alive, someone other psychopaths could look to for bloody inspiration.
Matt asked the detectives about his ax.
The cops told him it had been used to kill a woman in the bathroom.
Matt asked for it back, which shocked the cops.
“It belonged to my grandfather,” he told them. “It’s very important to me.”
The cops figured that since the perp was dead and there wouldn’t be a trial, they wouldn’t have to hold on to it.
They were going against department regulations big-time, but they owed him something for stopping the bomb.
So they washed the blood off of the ax and gave it to him in a gym bag so nobody would see it.
He asked for one more thing.
He wanted his name out of the papers. He wanted no credit whatsoever for what he had done.
Or not done.
They were okay with that, too.
Matt spent several hours in the emergency room but refused to be admitted to the hospital. Hospitals were not good places for him. He healed too fast, which inevitably raised questions he didn’t want raised.
An on-call surgeon removed the bullet from Matt’s shoulder and the shrapnel from his leg. Once he was sewn up, cleaned, and bandaged, Matt dressed in a set of surgical scrubs he found on a linen cart, took the staff-only elevator to the basement, and walked out of the service entrance of the hospital before the media arrived.
Gym bag in hand, he slipped through the parking lot and up the ramp to the highway. A mile or so later he came to a sign that said 95 South to St. Augustine. He stuck his thumb out.
He didn’t know where he was going, but he was in no hurry to get there.
Because he knew one thing for certain.
Death would be waiting.
About the Author
Photograph by Pete Helow
Jude Hardin holds a BA in English from the University of Louisville and currently works as a registered nurse in a major urban medical center in North Florida. When he’s not pounding away at the computer keyboard, Hardin can be found pounding away on his drums, playing tennis, reading, or down at the pond fishing with his son.
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