Body Counting Page 9

  Ernie had killed his own wife. Sound familiar? “Ernie, I had to do the same thing. Mary came at me with a frying pan this morning and then tried to stab me. If I come out from behind this table, are you going to shoot me?”

  “Come on out,” Ernie said. “But do it slowly with your hands up.”

  After we realized that neither of us was a threat, we decided to go out and find out if we were alone in this mess. Ernie had come to my house simply because he was my friend. He tried to reach someone on his scanner, but no one answered. Now we were driving down the street with a sense of dread, staring at the corpses that lay scattered about like some surreal nightmare. Almost all of them appeared to have died violently—some of them were even missing body parts.

  I drove around the body of a woman who was lying in the middle of the street. She had a large knife sticking out of her back like some perverse idea of a sundial. Ernie had stopped the car at one point and vomited onto the road. After that, he had insisted that I drive.

  I was about to say something to Ernie when the side window shattered in my ear. I slammed my foot on the gas, swerving the car wildly as bullets ricocheted on the pavement around us. I sped up until we were a safe distance away from the shooting psycho.

  We spoke very little, the situation completely numbing our minds into submission. Somebody was standing in the middle of the street farther down the road, holding what was probably a shotgun.

  “Duck down,” I told Ernie, increasing the speed of the squad car as the windshield on Ernie’s side broke into a spider web of cracked glass. We were running out of windows real fast.

  The idiot was still standing there in the middle of the goddamn road, rapidly trying to reload the shotgun. When we were only within ten feet of him, he brought the gun up and fired, putting a large hole through the center of the windshield and sending glass slicing into my cheek. I gripped the steering wheel with gritted teeth, and hurled us forward.

  The car slammed into him so hard I think we actually went through him. Some really sick part of me had actually enjoyed it. I was finding things out about myself that were really surprising. I looked up into the rear view mirror and saw that he was lying on the road in a puddle of blood.

  “Ever see Death Race 2000?” I asked Ernie, smiling.

  Ernie slowly got up from where he was crouching down in the seat and looked at me nervously. “You know something, Walter? You’re sick.”

  “What do you mean, ‘You’re sick?’” I asked. “I’m just defending myself.”

  “You call it defending yourself. I call it enjoying yourself just a wee bit too much. You’ve been telling jokes ever since I ran into you. You actually smiled a couple of times when you told me the story of how you killed Mary. You’re scaring me, Walter. The fucking world is falling apart around us and I need some sanity in my life right now. You’re acting like a damn psychopath. That was a real person that you just ran over and then cracked a joke. I just killed my wife this morning, Walter. I don’t need to be hanging out with some psycho when I feel dangerously close to being one myself. It’s liable to just drop me over the edge.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I reluctantly admitted, looking over at Walter. “I’ve been this way ever since I killed Mary. I’ve been scaring myself actually. For some reason I’m having trouble giving a shit. Some part of me does actually enjoy what’s going on and I’m finding all this humorous for some reason. Maybe it’s just the stress of the situation, but I’m actually struggling not to break out into hysterics here.”

  “Maybe,” Ernie said, looking around the street nervously. The town of Rawley looked like a nightmarish war zone.

  Looking upon Joe’s house made me feel like giggling insanely, but I managed to hold it in check. Three men were standing on his front lawn, shooting into his living room window like a firing squad.

  “That’s Joe’s house!” Ernie yelled excitedly.

  “No shit. Watson, sometimes you really astound me,” I joked again. I was definitely losing my grip.

  Ernie pulled out his gun. “Maybe Joe’s normal, too.” He eyed me suspiciously “Normal being a very relative term lately. We’re going to have to find out if Joe’s all right.”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to do, Ern my man,” I said, once again increasing the speed of the car. “At least Joe’s a bachelor so he doesn’t have to worry about having a wife wake up and try to play black widow with him.”

  “What are you doing, Walter?” Ernie asked, his voice getting high and squeaky. “We’re going to shoot them.”

  “What are you fucking crazy, Ernie?” I asked, laughing. “Pedestrians with guns are worth twenty points each. If I get all three of them, I’ll have sixty points. Eighty really, when you factor in that poor fuck with the shotgun that’s lying in the road back there.”

  “Walter, you’re going to hit the house!” Ernie shrieked in panic.

  I brought the car through the front lawn at a terrifying speed, taking out Joe’s mailbox as I went, sending grass and dirt into the house. I mowed all three of them down with one swoop. One of them I even recognized. It was Robert Stilsky, my hated boss at work. The world is full of poetic justice. I skidded back out onto the street and turned the car around.

  “Walter, you asshole!” Ernie shouted. “You almost got us friggin’ killed!”

  I brought the car onto the lawn, parking it right on top of my boss. I looked over at Ernie and grinned. “Boy, talk about living your fantasies out, huh?”

  “You need help, Walter,” Ernie said as the blood began to drain back into his face.

  I ignored him and looked out my shattered window into Joe’s living room. I saw him peeking out at me.

  “Joe!” I yelled. “It’s me and Ernie! We’re here to save your ass!”

  “What if he’s one of them?” Ernie asked.

  “What if he is,” I said, pulling my .38 out from my belt. “He doesn’t have any guns. Joe hates guns, you know that. If he throws something out the window at us, we’ll take off.”

  The front door opened up a crack. “Is it really you, Walter!” Joe yelled from behind the door.

  “It’s us, Joe,” I said. “It’s us.”

  Joe ran out of the door and jumped in the back seat. “Thank God! I thought I was screwed! I went out to grab my morning paper and almost got my ass shot off. What in the hell is going on? The whole damn town’s gone crazy.”

  “Don’t we know it, Joe,” I said turning around and flashing him my best smile.

  “What in the hell are you smiling about?” Joe asked, staring at me as if I had farted in front of his mother.

  “He’s been acting like that since I found him,” Ernie said.

  “Why is it that the whole town has gone crazy except for us three?” Joe asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Ernie said.

  “Got any more of that dope, Joe?” I asked. “God knows we could sure use it about now.”

  “I got a whole bunch of it left, but I sure as hell ain’t going to smoke it,” Joe said. “Shit makes me paranoid if I smoke it when I’m nervous. Paranoia is not something that I need more of right now.”

  Ernie slammed his fist down on the dashboard making us all jump. “That’s it!” he yelled excitedly. “It’s the dope. There must have been hallucinogens in it. None of this is real.”

  “Uh, Ernie,” I said. “Hallucinations are subjective, my friend. We’re all experiencing this, in case you forgot.”

  “That don’t mean shit,” Ernie said. “You two may just be figments of my imagination. I’m hallucinating.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Joe said. “If there was shit in my dope then I’m hallucinating you two. I’m the one thinking all this shit up, man, not you. It’s my dope, so that makes it my fantasy.”

  “I hope you’re right, Joe,” Ernie said. “I killed Ethel this morning. She left me no choice.”

  “You two can sit around and decide who’s god of our world all morning, but I h
ave a better theory,” I said. “Ernie, didn’t you say that the whole town is surrounded by men in gas masks and automatic weapons?” Ernie nodded. “Well, maybe there is some kind of government experiment going on here. An experiment on aggression. Maybe the government is testing some kind of chemical weapon on us. We’re guinea pigs. Maybe it’s some kind of chemical that will be used to make soldiers fight more aggressively.”

  “That doesn’t explain why we’re not affected,” Joe said.

  “It does if you factor in that maybe the marijuana somehow made us immune to it,” I continued. “Maybe there is something in cannabis that makes the chemical ineffective on us. Maybe that’s why I’ve been having some of these psychotic impulses and this amazingly perverse sense of humor. I didn’t smoke as much as you guys. I wasn’t inhaling.”

  “Think we should smoke some more?” Joe asked.

  “Go get it and don’t forget the zigzags,” I said. “I’m rolling my own. I’m going to lick mine extra long so that I could get a slow burn going.”

  “You guys are really serious?” Ernie asked as Joe ran from the car to get a bag of weed. “The whole town has gone rabid and you’re going to get high. Besides, I’m a little more prone to the theory that there was bad acid in the weed. All this may be some really bad trip. Smoking any more will hardly help the situation.”

  “Got a better idea?” I asked.

  Ernie shrugged and admitted that he didn’t.

  Joe brought a large bag out and we smoked a fat joint, even Ernie. When we were pleasantly high, Ernie tried to reach someone on the radio, but there was only silence.

  There was still one more Thursday night poker player left, Billy Loomis. I pulled the car off of Joe’s lawn and began to drive down the corpse-littered street. A couple of times we ran into some rabid kids with some rocks, but like everyone else that tried to fuck with the death car, they were soon road kill. Obviously the marijuana didn’t cure me of my psychotic sense of humor. I also still felt the urge to seriously hurt someone, although I had no desire to harm Joe or Ernie, which was fortunate for them. The marijuana must have protected us from the initial wave of gas, but any damage that our brains suffered was probably permanent.

  “Do you really think the government would do something like this to its own people?” Joe asked, from where he was crouched down in the seat. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Maybe it was accidental,” Ernie said.

  “We can speculate all the rest of our most likely short lives, but I doubt we’ll know the truth,” I said, slowing down the car as we neared Billy’s house. “This is our new world and we’re just going to have to deal with it.”

  “In an insane world only the sane are the lunatics,” Ernie said.

  I looked over at him surprised. It was perhaps the cleverest thing I had ever heard Ernie say. Cleverness was not a virtue of which Ernie was known for. “Did you make that up?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Ernie said. “Heard it on some movie once. Truth is I never even understood what that meant until now. Think Billy’s normal too?”

  “Well, he should be,” I answered him, smiling. “He smoked more reefer than all of us.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, laughing. “I think Billy almost floated away from the poker table.”

  When we pulled near Billy’s house he was sitting in the driveway. Well, part of him was anyway. His head was perched in the middle of the blood-splattered cement, his eyes bugging out even more than they did when he was alive. It looked like someone had beat it with a blunt object. The rest of his body was lying in the grass.

  I pulled over to the side and put the car in park. “Well, guys, I guess we just put a double meaning into the term ‘heading down to Billy’s house’, wouldn’t you say?”

  Ernie looked at me frowning. “You know something, Walter. I think that you’re even closer to the mentality of the rest of this psycho town than you think you are.”

  Joe, who was disturbingly stupid, never even got my joke, which was for the best I suppose.

  I was about to say another thing in bad taste when Applehead Skip came running out from behind Billy’s front bushes brandishing a claw hammer. Applehead Skip was crazier than Charlie Manson on speed. I could just imagine how bad he was now with his brand-new rabid-dog mentality. He used to walk up and down main street shouting “Applehead! We’re all Appleheads!” over and over again, hence his name. No one had ever heard him say anything else. Well, Ernie said that one time he heard him speaking German, but Ernie lied all the time.

  We were all so busy howling high-pitched screams that we forgot that we had guns. Applehead Skip was on the hood of the car slamming his weapon into the hood like a white version of John Henry with a miniature hammer. I shifted the car into drive and slammed my foot on the gas pedal.

  “Shoot him, Ernie!” I yelled, trying to knock Skip off by turning the wheel sharply. I ducked to the side as the hammer came through what was left of the windshield, sending shards of glass into my mouth and lap. Applehead Skip looked into the hole through the windshield and smiled widely, revealing that he had no teeth. I guess Billy must have put up a better fight than his decapitated head indicated.

  Skip began to climb through the jagged hole, cutting up his head badly in the process. Joe was in the back seat screaming like he was the one up front.

  “Appleheads!” Skip shouted. “We’re all Appleheads! Der Apfel!”

  Well I’ll be goddamned, Ernie wasn’t lying about the German.

  His head was all the way through the windshield and I couldn’t see a thing. Ernie put a bullet into the center of his head at about the same time that we slammed into a parked car. Skip went flying out of the windshield, rolling over the car in front of us, disappearing behind it. Joe followed him, screaming as he went, pretty much taking out what was left of the windshield.

  A seat belt probably would have helped.

  I looked over at Ernie who was looking at his gun with a cretinous look on his face. Due to my sick mind, I found the whole thing funny as hell. I laughed so hard my chest even hurt. Ernie was the opposite, he sat on the passenger seat crying like a little baby, which made me laugh all the harder. It was probably for the best that my brain was slightly damaged. At least I was happy.

  We were in the town square. I undid my seat belt, got out of the car, and went to see if Joe might have somehow lived his impromptu flight through the windshield. One quick look showed me that he did not. He was laying on top of Applehead Skip, almost holding him in a kind of embrace. The way his neck was twisted around assured me that it was broken.

  Ernie got out of the car, his whole ill-fitting uniform covered in blood. He must have got a good squirt from Skip’s bullet wound because he didn’t appear injured. He looked down at Joe and immediately began sobbing, which once again made me laugh. I slapped him across the face to calm him down, but it only made him cry harder, which made me laugh even more.

  I looked up, seeing something moving down the street like a black cloud. It was a mob of people. They must have gotten themselves organized somehow. I knew that my brain was getting worse because I found the whole thing funnier than a pratfall. I tapped Ernie on the shoulder and pointed to the incoming mob of loonies. His eyes widened considerably and he immediately began sobbing, his shoulders shaking with every tear from his eye.

  At that moment, my head ringing with my own laughter, I knew that we were fucked. There were too many of them for me and Ernie to survive long. If I was going to go down, I was going to do it in Wild Bunch style, with a good fight and a hell of a lot of blood. I made sure that my gun was fully loaded, and tucked it back into my belt. I dragged Ernie toward the gazebo in the middle of the town square. This was to be our final fighting place, and we would defend it to the death.

  I stood on the final step of the gazebo and looked toward the ravenous mob with a spacious smile on my face. It was moving fast and it would be upon us in minutes. When I saw Ernie reloading his gun I broke out into laughter again, w
hich Ernie returned with his own scary-looking smile. The last of the Thursday night poker players were going to up the ante.

  I killed at least ten of them before they overran the gazebo, filling it to capacity. I was still laughing when I fell into unconsciousness.

  What Love Was

  “Don’t even think of copping out on me now, Claire,” Kenny said as pushed the dirt away from the top of the coffin lid. “I didn’t dig this fucking hole for the last four hours so you can all the sudden get one of your patented mood swings.”

  Claire flipped her dark hair to the side and sighed. The reality of what they were doing was beginning sink into her brain like corrosive acid. She thought she had worshipped everything about Kenny. She had changed considerably over the course of the year, though. “Well, it’s just that this is really starting to creep me out. What if she’s all well preserved? Ick. I don’t think I can handle that.”

  “As opposed to being a decayed hunk of tightly pulled dead flesh?” Kenny said, removing the baseball hat from his sweaty head and scratching his shaved scalp. He held out his scrawny, tattooed arm. “Fuck, it’s hot! Can you toss me the crowbar, please?”

  Claire could remember a time when Kenny was a dream come true, a time that she referred to as “the pre-drug years”. She had known Kenny since they were five years old. There was never a time when she did not doubt that they would be married. The drugs had changed him to such a degree that it almost felt like demon possession. Of course she was no angel, she had spent six months in a juvenile detention herself, but she had begun to grow up a little this year. She wanted a normal life now.

  She threw the crowbar down into the hole where it landed with a soft thud. Kenny had a dimly lit lantern to the right of the coffin, providing a much-needed light to the darkness that surrounded them. The humid heat of the summer evening was beginning to get to her as well and she wished she were home lying naked in her air-conditioned bedroom.