Jake swallowed hard.
That thing out there was present to claim the souls of the countless departed. He tried to remember what he had ever heard about the spectral usher to the dead, but in his panicked state, Jake’s mind was unable to produce anything further than numb fear.
He began to despair, knowing that the end was coming for the passengers, who were all happily enjoying the ride and thinking nothing of their immediate death. Most of all, however, he was thinking of himself. Of how he would never again be able to take one of his beloved railway journeys. A stupid thing to preemptively miss when one’s life is flashing before his eyes, but he missed it anyhow. Jake began to cry, rocking back and forth on the toilet.
After a few minutes had passed, there was knocking on the restroom door.
“Excuse me, sir?” came a soft voice from the other side. “Are you alright? Some of the other passengers said there was a disturbance. Sir, will you please respond? If you don’t respond, we’ll have to force the door for your safety.”
Jake eyed the door warily. “Yes.” His safety. If they only knew. They were doomed. All of them.
From somewhere within him, Jake felt a calling of self-preservation, one which will often occur to an individual who is certain that his mortality is in peril and have decided to do something about it. No matter how futile.
Jake rubbed the wetness away from his eyes and stood to straighten out his appearance. But that was near impossible as he was a walking mess of sweat and waxen skin. When he opened the door, the plump steward backed away from him, perhaps certain she was going to have to barrel down the door and pull some drunk or junkie from the small lavatory closet by force.
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Are you absolutely sure everything’s in order?”
“Yes, thank you,” he said somewhat urgently. “Stomach flu or something.” He brushed her stare off and looked sharply down the aisle, toward the connecting car. Somewhere up the line—it had to be one or two cars—would be the engineer’s cabin. If Jake could make his way inconspicuously to that car, perhaps he could clobber the engineer and engage the brakes before the train found certain disaster. All of this flashed quickly in his brain, and, under normal circumstances, he would probably have been quite proud of himself for it, but at the moment only the thought of saving himself was of importance.
“You may want to check on that guy up in seat 18, though,” said Jake as steadily as he could. “The one dressed in the black suit. He seemed to be having some trouble.” The steward gave a skeptical look over Jake’s shoulder and proceeded to brush past him.
Jake followed closely behind, and was somewhat surprised to see that gaunt specter was no longer in his seat. He was nowhere to be seen. While the stocky woman turned back to look at Jake imploringly, something snapped inside of his head and he shoved her down into the seat, turning to run the length of the car and to the large door separating it from the next one.
Jake fumbled with the latch and finally pushed the door inward. Stepping into the breezeway, he cast a glance backward to the steward, who was speaking haughtily into a small pocket radio. She looked extremely angry, and so Jake wasted no time in slamming the door behind him and entering the next car. So much for inconspicuousness.
Running as fast as he could, Jake clambered through the second car and opened the doors to the third. It was here, however, he saw the only thing standing between him and the continuation of living. A sturdy-looking man stood in the middle of the aisle and watched Jake with the eyes of a predator, or simply a man trained to act like one.
“I’m going to have to ask you to stop right there, sir,” the man said gruffly. Jake spied a small silver badge fastened below the man’s lapel that marked him as either transportation security, or maybe even a police officer. Jake did not see a gun on the man, but noticed that his hand was held at the ready next to his breast coat pocket. “Please turn around slowly so that I can walk you back to your seat and figure out what the problem is.”
“The problem?” Jake shouted. “I’ll tell you what the problem is, man.” In the middle of speaking, Jake’s eye was caught by the man sitting at his elbow near the doorway.
Grinning slightly, the morphing face of the man Death stared up at him, and shook his head in disapproval. “Jacob, come now. Have a seat.”
“This man. This man right here is the goddam problem. He’s here for all of us!” Jake shook an accusing finger at the haunting figure, looking frantically between him and the security guard.
At first, the guard looked confused, but then concerned, and he began to step forward through the aisle. “Sir, what man?”
Jake looked down and saw Death still watching him intently, but he also saw an elderly woman sitting fearfully close to the window, not daring to look directly at Jake.
“They can’t see you,” Jake whispered.
“Of course not, Jacob. Come now, you are scaring these poor people. Even that man there is mere inches from drawing his weapon and shooting you on the spot.”
“You’re all going to die!” Jake shouted. “We all are!”
Those must have been the magic words that the guard had been waiting to hear, because his hand shot into his coat jacket and pulled at what was surely a large-caliber weapon. Something had caught, perhaps the snap release on the holster, but for a moment the guard was obviously struggling, and Jake rushed forward to bowl him over. During the course of the loud collision, a few things happened: the guard’s gun came free and spun out of his grasp, Jake slammed his head into a seat back, and a noise like breaking glass filled the cabin.
Opting to reach for his gun rather than for Jake, the guard managed to let him slip past. Jake hit the door and frantically grabbed at the handle, which would not budge. It was locked.
Jake gasped when he saw a frightened face looking back at him through the panes that joined to the engineer’s car. Stepping back, Jake realized it was the face of a very spooked train operator. In his back step, Jake also saw a glimmer on the floor. The guard’s keys. And the most noticeable thing on the ring was a large plastic access card, which Jake had little doubt would grant him access through the door. He stooped to pick them up.
“Freeze!” commanded the guard from behind him. “U.S. Transportation Security. You are threatening civilian lives, sir. If you do not step away from the door, I will open fire.” There was no uncertainty whatsoever in the stony voice.
Jake hesitated, eyeing the slot next to the handle where the keycard must pass through. Next to it was a lock, as well. Jake did not have time to fiddle with keys, and knew that if he tried, he had better be able to do it while full of holes.
“Three…” said the guard.
Jake looked at the engineer apologetically.
“Two…”
“Okay,” Jake said. The guard paused, and in the next second Jake shot his hand precisely with the card, miraculously finding the slot. The card slid through with a sharp explosion. A green light flashed on the reader and Jake fell forward into the adjoining breezeway. The door slipped shut behind him, with more explosions following.
Jake knew immediately that he had been shot. Blood coated his right hand; his ribs felt like they’d been slugged with a hammer. He fought nausea watching the ground slip by at an alarming rate. The junction separating the engineer’s cabin was not enclosed as were the other breezeways that Jake had passed through. Wind whipped through his hair in a deafening roar. The key card had tumbled out and onto the now distant tracks.
Pulling himself to his feet, Jake glimpsed back at the government guard through the blood-spattered glass of the closed door. Apparently, it had been bulletproof. Jake was not so fortunate.
The engineer watched Jake with an intense curiosity. His navy blue cap was knocked askew over a mess of gray hair as he pressed his face against the window.
“Let me in! You’ve gotta let me in!”
Jake pounded on the glass, leaving bloody fist prints on the pane.<
br />
“There’s something on the tracks! Please let me in!”
He began to lose strength, and finally found himself mouthing help to the engineer.
The engineer seemed to be struggling with the decision of letting an injured man die before him or letting a potential threat enter his cabin. Apparently, the engineer had a heart. He released the latch from his side and pulled Jake inside.
Not getting too friendly, he let Jake fall to the floor and asked him, “What in the hell is going on here? Tell me right now, or so help me God, you’re gonna bleed to death right there on the floor.”
“The tracks,” Jake spat. “There’s something on the tracks. It’s going to kill us all.”
“What! How in the hell do you know that?”
“Death. I saw death in the seat next to me.”
“Son, are you on drugs?”
“Just let me stop the train,” Jake said, summoning some inner reserve of strength. He climbed to his feet and stumbled forward toward the driver, who wound up a fist and socked him in the mouth. Jake stumbled backward into the door. “You’re all gonna die.”
Realizing that there was no visible brake like he had seen in so many movies, Jake groggily fell a few steps back and depressed the door hatch.
“I can still save me,” Jake slurred.
For a second the engineer looked like he was going to come forward and stop Jake, but finally the response to a potentially dangerous threat won out, and he let Jake step through the doorway and tumble off the side of the car junction.
As the train had begun to make an emergency stop in the distance, the dark figure loomed over a grit-toughened and bloody body lying facedown in the weeds.
He sighed.
“Ah, fear. I do not believe I shall ever comprehend it.”
The Untimely Death of Jimmy Gums
It takes damned little effort to pull a trigger.
The slightest twitch of only a few muscles in a single finger can end a life. This was something that Jimmy “Gums” Viglione realized in the final brutal moments of his natural time on Earth. Looking down the cold, nickel-plated barrel of Tommy Zatel’s Smith and Wesson .45 automatic pistol, Jimmy knew that he had reached the end of the road.
A sole halogen lamp blazed down from the rafters, leaving the dusty warehouse floor illuminated, a fitting stage for the final bloody act in the life of one of the deadliest hired killers Chicago’s streets had ever seen.
Jimmy did not find Jesus. Nor did he reach any grand fortune cookie epiphanies of enlightenment on the meaning of life. No, Jimmy Gums had been on the opposite end of this fatal transaction enough times before to know that any such comforting final notions did not serve to allay the eventual splatter of brain matter on the walls. Whining and pleading were repulsive. Even kneeling at the stoop of death’s door, the thought to beg for mercy never once crossed his mind.
Please don’t let ‘em find a wormy corpse. That was the final culminating thought of Jimmy’s forty-six years of life before Tommy Zatel, at the wave of his brother, gave the trigger a squeeze.
“Heavy son of a bitch, ain’t he?” Tommy asked as he struggled to fit the feet-end of Jimmy Gums’ bulky body into the trunk of the Lincoln Continental.
“Fat fuck didn’t miss any meals,” William grunted. “That’s for sure. Here, fold his legs up so I can…yeah, like that.” He spit out his cigarette and coughed.
With a little creative maneuvering, the brothers managed to get Jimmy’s pudgy body wrenched into the trunk compartment.
William wiped a bead of sweat off his brow, cast one last look around the abandoned industrial complex, and slammed the trunk lid, sealing away the dead man into the closest thing he would ever have to a coffin.
With half their job done, the two sibling enforcers climbed into the car and set out for their favorite dumping grounds, talking of broads and booze. William did most of the talking. His brother, while good with a gun, had unfortunately not been endowed with even a shameful amount of brains, and therefore contributed little to a conversation.
The sedan rolled at a smooth pace down the highway, a sleek chauffer to the dead making its final midnight pass into the territories of darkness. At that late an hour, on the outskirts of town, the men passed only a handful of cars. And not a single one of those a police cruiser: always a reassuring thought on the conscience of travelers in possession of human cargo.
There was only one small problem with the situation. Despite all outward appearances (immobility and the mess of blood and viscera), Jimmy Gums was not dead. His heart yet pumped at a drastically slowed pace. His muscles displayed the faintest amount of tension and relaxation when the Continental bounced over potholes, jostling his stowed body. And his mind—what was left of it—had but one image burned into it by way of muzzle flash: the faces of Tommy and William Zatel.
“That was easy,” Tommy said. “Easy as…well, that was easy.”
William cocked an eyebrow at his simpleton brother and hooked a thumb toward the now full trunk of the car. “Let me tell you something, Tom. No matter what that chubby bastard might look like now, he was one sick fuck.”
Tommy’s eyes darted nervously from his lap to the road. He hoped his brother was too preoccupied with handling the wheel to notice his guilt. “The teeth?”
“Yeah,” William agreed, distaste clear in his words. “The teeth.” He shuddered at the thought of the necklace. “How the hell you think he got the name Jimmy Gums?”
Tommy sat in silence, pondering the thoughts of a man whose mental hamster has not just stepped off its wheel, but jumped off the side of a fucking cliff.
“Tommy…hello? Jesus, are you awake? I’m talking to you.” William spun the wheel, directing them up the road toward the Battlebrook waste dump.
“Yeah, sorry,” Tommy said nervously. “The teeth, right?”
“Yeah,” William said. “All those dirty little teeth on that necklace of his…”
Tommy fingered the bulge in his pocket gently, getting a bad feeling that his brother might be angry if he knew he’d stolen the macabre piece of jewelry as a trophy from the dead man’s neck.
“Those are the teeth from guys he’s taken out. Now, you gotta figure…this guy’s been at it as a freelancer for almost fifteen years. That’s some collection he’s got there. Rumor has it that half of them are from Bert Dupont’s old gang. Crazy fuck took all them guys down one at a time with a pair of garden shears.”
Tommy swallowed hard, letting his fingers trace the prickly outline of his pocket’s pilfered contents. “Wow,” was all he could manage to string together. Outside, the last of the passing street lights marked the end of their trip by vehicle.
“That man was a goddam terror, Tommy. It ain’t nothing to be too proud of, but we’re lucky we caught him on the can,” William added. “Not saying it’s any great accomplishment on our part, but hey, you and I are both still breathing.” He threw the shifter into park and sighed. “Let’s get this shit over with. I’ve gotta get some puss tonight.”
Neither of them spoke again through the events of the following minutes. They heaved Jimmy Gums out of the car and tossed his plastic-wrapped body into the depths of a bottomless mound of garbage. Security at Battlebrook wasn’t exactly a concern. Their employer, Paul Geffert, owned the entirety of the property, as well as the waste management business that operated upon it.
In the past twenty years, an unknown number of bodies had been disposed of in such a manner on the filthy premises. And even though some of his hired help might have considered it risky, Paul Geffert ran a very tight operation. He was a man who valued his privacy and kept up payments to the right people to prevent any unnecessary snooping. And, being a good businessman, he even allowed some of the larger local industrialists to dump some of their nastier—and more toxic—byproducts there that would otherwise have cost quite a pretty penny to get rid of in far more legal (and environmentally sound) ways.
Jimmy Gums landed in a crumpled heap at the bas
e of a garbage pit. One of his own shoes stepped on his face. Ten feet above, his executioner swiftly kicked a pile of trash that produced an avalanche of sludge. Jimmy, still grasping to the finest threads of unconscious life, wheezed as the air was crushed from his lungs and replaced with something far worse. Irradiated liquid waste bathed his entire body, entering his nose, ears, and mouth. His skin sizzled upon contact with the swirl of noxious chemicals.
An unbearable pain tore through Jimmy’s ravaged body, pulling him back to the land of consciousness. His senses were overloaded with the sinister burn that filled his face, hands, and lungs. And then his nerves simply stopped sending signals, switched off at the source by noxious liquids. Hours passed while he drifted between life and death, his body corroding in the foul, slimy pit. Exposed by blazing ichor, many of Jimmy’s muscles began to twitch and jerk with immense force.
As his body convulsed, the faces of the Zatel brothers swam to him out of the blackness. One smirked stupidly in his rumpled suit; the other sucked a thin cigarette and smiled in relieved triumph. Jimmy watched the fat one grin while tensing at the last moment, expecting the recoil of the trigger. The man had good teeth, Jimmy thought. Great teeth. He could not recall either of their names, but that was no matter. Thanks to a stray nerve misfire, a flash of his former self’s memory told him where to find them.
Jimmy opened his single unburned eye and started to climb.
Tommy Zatel had reluctantly followed his brother to his most favored midnight haunt: The Spindle. William’s girl, Nina, danced for dollars on the center stage at the top of every hour on Saturday night. And William, being the caring lover that he was, was always present for the peak hours of her routines to ensure that some jackass didn’t let his hard-on get the better of his judgment and decide to thrust his face into the buffet table.
Tommy hated The Spindle. The pretty girls, though always friendly, ignited an inner insecurity that fired his hatred for their existence. The way they looked at him, as if they really wanted him, and not the money in his wallet, made him want to vomit. No woman could ever want fat Tommy Zatel, he thought. Not like they wanted his handsome brother. So their expectant and lusty stares pummeled him into a silent, self-loathing rage. It was for this reason he rarely let his eyes drift above their necks. And he never tipped.
Chasing the Sandman Page 4
