by B. L. Morgan
Blood spurted up into the air out of he neck stump. Elizabeth drank some and showered in the rest.
“You crazy fucking bitch!” I yelled and pulled out the .44 Magnum as I climbed to my feet. “And to think, I was going to fuck you tonight.”
Elizabeth tossed the wino to the side as the last of his blood washed over her.
She was close enough so that I didn’t even need to aim. I just pointed and fired.
Boom! Boom!
My first two shots knocked her backward. Elizabeth or Spider-bitch, which fit her better at that moment, staggered back and fell to the gravel.
The shots in the alley sounded like thunderclaps. My ears rang.
Elizabeth rolled and came up on six legs. Then she stood on her back two legs and waived the four middle legs at me.
Her mouth was open and I think she was laughing but I couldn’t hear anything over the loud roaring in my ears.
I blasted two more shots into her. Each one was like a punch knocking her backward. The holes appeared and green blood flew in the air but this time the Spider-bitch didn’t even go down.
Elizabeth opened her mouth and shouted something at me but the words wouldn’t sink past the clanging in my eardrums. I doubt it was anything I wanted to hear anyway.
She came at me again and this time I did aim, straight at her forehead. I had two bullets left and I had to make them count.
BOOM!
A huge hole appeared above that huge black left eye.
BOOM!
The right eye disappeared.
Elizabeth, the Spider-bitch went down again but this time she leaped back to her feet almost immediately.
The hole in her forehead sealed itself and her right eye reformed like time-lapse photography showing liquid freezing into the eyeball’s shape.
She grinned and green venom dripped from her teeth.
Oh shit! I thought.
There was a flash of light and someone was behind her. Then there was another flash, silvery in the darkness of the alley.
Someone was standing behind Elizabeth, someone with a sword. He’d struck while she was distracted and coming after me.
A green line appeared at Elizabeth’s, the Spider-bitch’s throat. Then her head toppled sideways off her body.
Afterword:
After The Killing
This time Elizabeth didn’t come back for more.
The man who’d cut her head off was Yuri Ivanov of the Hungarian Secret Police. I’d met him before although he wouldn’t know me.
When it was obvious that Elizabeth was done we both went over and looked down at her. She didn’t magically change back into a human and she didn’t just wink out of existence.
She was now just a dead ugly spider-thing.
Yuri turned to me. He was now joined by two other dark haired, dark suited men who had stood back in the shadows.
“You should leave now,” Yuri said. “We will clean this mess up. It has taken us a long time to find her. This is how it had to end.”
Leaving was fine by me.
There was one other thing that I had to do that night.
Elizabeth had never seen me coming.
Yuri didn’t know who I was.
Maybe ... just maybe, something else had been reset.
I pulled open the door to Johnny’s Bar and Grill. Three people were in the place.
One guy was sitting at a table in the shadows. I couldn’t see him clearly.
One was a drunk nursing a beer, staring at an old movie on the TV set. One glance let me know the movie was One Million Years BC and that Raquel Welch was bouncing around in her fur skin pre-historic bikini.
I didn’t blame the guy at the bar for staring.
The person tending was Jeanette. She glanced up and saw me enter the door.
Jeanette went to the drunk at the end of the bar.
“It is time for you to leave now,” she told him.
“But I ain’t done with my beer,” he answered.
She snatched the beer out from in front of him, poured it out in a small sink below the bar and tossed a dollar at him so fast it all looked like one motion.
“You are done now,” Jeanette told him.
“Well God-dam,” he muttered, got up and stumbled out the door.
The other person in Johnny’s Bar and Grill, the one I couldn’t see clearly until I took a few steps into the room was sitting at his table shaking his head like he had a bad headache.
That person was Johnny Davis himself.
I rushed into the room and picked him up off the chair and gave him a great big bear-hug.
“You’re alive bro. You’re alive!” I said and tears came to my eyes.
“Yeah, no shit,” Johnny said and pushed me away from him. “If you try to tongue kiss me I’ll knock your fucking teeth out.”
Jeanette came over to the two of us.
“Tell John what has been happening,” she said to her Grandson.
I took a seat and Jeanette took a seat.
Johnny began, “I started getting visions man,” he said. “Visions or memories or I don’t know what the fuck they are. But they started about three hours ago.”
I did some quick mental calculating. That matched roughly the length of time I’d been back.
Fate ... many lives, many bodies, but only one soul.
In some twisted way it all made sense to me now.
Johnny went on.
“It’s like I’m remembering shit that hasn’t happened yet.”
I turned to Jeanette.
“You know don’t you,” I told her.
“Yes,” she answered.
“I came back before we left,” I told her. “But how could you know?”
“Everything, all times, all things, happen simultaneously. There is only the now.”
I looked at Johnny.
“Yeah, she told me that too and I don’t know what the fuck she means either.”
“It doesn’t matter if you understand,” Jeanette told us. “What matters is that you did what you were meant to do.”
Johnny spoke again.
“Remembering this shit is like remembering some old movie that I saw a long time ago except that it’s really fucking fresh in my mind too. I’m not sure that I’ll ever really believe that it happened. I mean, I was taking a shit when all this hit me. I pushed down real hard man, and was getting ready to drop a ten pounder and all of a sudden there was a flash of light and I feel like I’ve fucking died. Jesus Christ man, I remember being a pirate and fighting a werewolf. Where the fuck did that come from? Did we do that? I mean, I’ve taken some massive shits before but that one was a surprise.”
“Oh you will believe that it all happened,” Jeanette told him. “That is a certainty.”
“Why the hell are you saying that?” Johnny asked.
“You told someone where the portal in Rome was, didn’t you?” Jeanette asked.
Johnny went blank faced for a moment like he was flipping through a catalogue of memories.
“It was pillow talk,” Johnny told us. “Guys do that to impress the girls. And besides, how would you ever find out about that anyway?”
“Because she followed you here,” Jeanette said.
Right on cue the front door to Johnny’s Bar and Grill swung open.
Standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips was the scourge of the high seas. She was dressed all in leather now. It was Captain Carmel.
“Johnny-David I am here to claim my soul-mate,” she shouted from the door. “We were fated to be together and I aim to make our fates come true!”
“Ain’t that the shits,” Johnny muttered beside me.
I decided at that moment that it was time for me to leave and go home. There are some battles a man has to fight alone.
“Have at her bro,” I told him and headed for the door.
Johnny was alive and I was getting the hell out of there to leave him to a fate worse than death.
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