52) Super Sunday, 2/16: 3:30
– 3:45 AM – “How Effie Lou
became Miss Dominator!”
Someone else had been watching Ted and Ed’s excellent adventures
all the while – Tom Eppert. Still enraged by the loss of his prize, he’d
decided to join the other team, and said as much to the smirking, enigmatic
Marko.
“What the fuck
are we doing, working here… sitting here, actually, not getting paid, not
getting respect? All I wanted was a
cheap set to watch the game on, and they took that away from me. They took everybody’s TV… they took my job,
taking over my street, taking over the whole fuckin’ country… “
Marko rewarded
him with a knowing smirk. “So… you like killing the Kosovar?”
“The… yeah, you
mean those fuckin’ creeps up on the ceiling?” Tom remembered. “Yeah, I like, I’d like to kill them all… but
that ain’t enough.
It’s like killing rats, there’s always another one hiding out. You know what I’d really like to do…”
“Kill Mark
Tenison?” Marko suggested, lighting another cigarette…
“Well, that…” Eppert considered, as noise from the grenades resonated
from the corridor beyond the manager’s office and rancid smoke wafted in from
the crack under the door, “… yeah. But I
have a better idea…”
So – as soon as
the Manager had left his office, a handkerchief pressed over his face, Tom
slipped in behind Tenison and made for the fire door, suppressing a cough. Three persons had gone in, only one had left,
and Tom had a pretty good idea about what had happened. On his way to the fire door, he confiscated
Mark’s personal five-inch mini-set on the desk and tucked it under his arm like
a football…
“Better than nuthin’…” he said.
He opened the
fire door unobserved and followed the two techies down the corridor… allowing
six more fluorescent rats entry before the door closed behind him. The corridor was still smoky – a scene out of
Bosch, but leavened with Gaugin - with shattered
glass, screeching parrots and deranged Football Team fanatics. One stumbling, half-blinded fiend made a grab
for the five-incher but Tom swatted him away… it was the law of the jungle out
here. Having almost achieved the gates
of the Mall, the smoke began to fade and he found himself surrounded by a
peppery crowd of mixed and decidedly hostile origin… black kids, white kids,
old guys, another guy holding a length of rope.
There was also a man in a suit holding hands with a monkey and a big loonie in a wedding dress… nearly all packing some sort of
weapon from the looted gunshop, all of them united,
against him!
The rope-holder
whispered a few words to Slim and Easy from Nakonset.
“You work for
Giga-Plex…” Slim nodded.
“Hell no, ah… how
do you know?…”
The mob laughed
and Tom looked down… the blue temporary vest, of course, with the little GP
logo…
“Are you going to
steal my television?” he asked
“That little
piece o’shit?” Easy winced. “Hell no, man, we gonna hang you from that iron gate, out there!”
Rafe, the burly, hairy bride, grasped Eppert
in a hammerlock and frog-marched him towards the gate where, to his horror,
three people were already swaying… two dead, faces purple in the night, the
other still kicking, feebly. In
overrunning the One World Mall, these free-enterprise vigilantes had killed or
maimed every merchant, manager or service worker they’d crossed… the dying fat
lady in a Kravjak’s smock had been escorted into the
afterlife by a dishwasher from Mad Sam’s Steakhouse, on the right and, on her
left, a civilian… pointed out by the grinning Slim, who was wearing about a
dozen pounds of gold and silver chainlinks under his
torn shirt and holding the business end of a stolen shotgun, letting the stock
drag and bounce across the parking lot…
“Man thought he
could take off some bling, din’t belong to him…”
Before hanging their captive, the mob paraded Eppert in a circle round a looted and torched limo taking
up two handicapped spaces… Big Sonny’s wheels, his driver fled, or dead… but
Tom, thereby, looked out beyond the mall into the construction site, and saw
his salvation.
“What if I could break into Giga-Plex for you?”
“I’d think you were lying to save your rotten, white ass, but,
if you were serious… then you might
be allowed to live…” Easy proffered hope.
“Except you can’t break into that place,” the Bride
exclaimed, “we got guys in big cars ramming at those steel gates for almost an
hour, now…”
“They can’t do
what I can do…” Tom smiled.
Slim hoisted the
shotgun up over his shoulder. “Prove
it!”
So Tom set off towards
the construction site, escorted by Slim, Easy and Rafe…
whose demented cowgirl-bride appearance had been enhanced by a bandolier and a
Western belt with two holsters, hosting a mismatched tiny 9 mm. popgun and a
huge Smith and Wesson revolver. The man
with the rope was left behind, disappointed, until a cry went up from within
the mall…
“Hey! Hey!
Found a nut seller from the nut store, hidin’
in the back!”
¾ ¾ ¾
Beneath the One World
Mall, Ray Wilson had led his pulchritudinous partners through a yucky maze of
tunnels; cockroaches the size of rats… non-fluorescent rats bigger than cats…
fervidly violating their brightly coloured,
domesticated cousins with triumphant or piteous squealings
in the terrible deeds of rodentine miscegenation that
would, within a few weeks, lead to... who knew?... and then through sewer
drains to almost the opposite end of the Mall, before detouring down a cramped,
stifling alley to their left that dead-ended at a door plastered with warning
signs. Ray looked around, but casually,
as if he were the cool hero in an “I Spy” movie, and pulled a blue Taurus
semi-automatic pistol from his pants pocket.
“OK, this is the
only dicey part…”
“Ray, I don’t like the dicey parts,” Honey whined,
popping her gum. “Why didn’t you tell us that you had a gun…”
“Because, then,
you’d ask me why? and I would either
have to waste time coming up with more lies, or tell the truth – which might
scare your pretty, pink ass more than it deserved. Like they say in the
military: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’
Never know what might come in handy… buncha
zombies up above, or a locked door to the crank lab needs shootin’
out. But I have to do it careful-like,
‘cause those rednecks likely left something cooking behind, and meth vapor’s
worse than gasoline. Shouldn’t be a
spark this side of the door, but once we’re in… man, don’t smoke, don’t bump
into anything, anything could set
those fumes off…”
“How about I just
pick the lock?” Sabra interrupted.
Ray looked
up. “You pick locks?”
“I gotta lot of talents,” said the Miss Dominator runner-up, “mos’ people don’t know about which I used to use before I
was a Giga-Grrrl.
‘Cept that damn Effie Lou, she got most of her
teeth knocked out by a boyfriend or her daddy, so she can take off this bridge
when she gives Sonny his Lewinskis, and the boss
likes ‘em smooth. Only reason she’s Miss Dominator, not me…” Sabra added bitterly, giving the
lock a look with the looted Luminor.
There was, also,
a narrow plastic envelope of apparatus in Sabra’s purse, and the lock gave way
in under a minute. Ray pushed the heavy
door open – and a sour, acrid smell blew back on the intruders, something black
and bubbling in a pot under a Bunsen burner and lights were still on, more
evidence of a hasty departure. The
basement lab’s décor was predictably appalling – a pornographic calendar from
1978 and large, glass aquarium being the only embellishments not directly
related to the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine. There were several empty briefcases on the
floor, a large quantity of plastic bricks containing white powder… and
something large and brown, moving lazily across the sand at the bottom of the
waterless aquarium…
“Oh yuck…” Honey
shivered, “a snake!”
Sabra peered over
the top of the aquarium. “I don’t hear
any rattles, is it poisonous?
“Probably,” Ray
told the girls. “Start packing this
shit, we can each take two cases worth… I’m gonna look for the safe…”
Sabra pointed
under an old desk. “There it is!”
Ray shoved the
desk away, but carefully. “How are you
with combinations? Oh wait, there’s a
keyhole… and I bet I know where they keep the spare key…”
As one, three
faces turned towards the reptilarium.
¾ ¾ ¾
Vestless, Total Skinner and Thunder McHale reached the
gates of the mall and exited without any incident of the sort that had tripped
up Tom Eppert.
They transferred the remaining martial artifacts from Tenison’s boxes to
the various pockets of their windbreakers with the intent of using the
containers to hold ammunition, and circled through the parking lot, but stopped
when a voice cried out “Freeze”. It was
the shabby white kid from
“Better hand over
them boxes…” the stoner ordered.
“Sure!” said
Thunder. “Catch!”
And he tossed the
empty box towards the kid, who pointed his new gun away as he bobbled, then
caught it.
The kid held the
box up, looked into it, shook it. “Hey man,
this is empty…”
McHale affected
an insolent laughter. “Yeah, for the
time being…”
The kid lowered
the box, then remembered his gun. “Then
why shouldn’t I shoot you?” he said, with a mean little grin,
“Because you’d
waste ammo?” Total suggested.
This was
something worth thinking over… how many
bullets did he have? “Uh, yeah…” and he
began waving the Glock. “You, there,
leave your box behind, also…”
“If you want it…”
Ed Skinner lay
his box down on the parking lot pavement with a slow motion intended to fool
the imbecile gunman into thinking there was something worth checking out
inside, and they start walking towards the back of the Mall and the Giga-Plex
loading dock. Having a change of heart
once he’d ascertained that he’d claimed only two empty boxes for his trouble,
the kid trained his gun on Total’s back with a stoned grin, ready to blast him
off the face of the earth when a strange quartet approached… a determined,
marching Tom Eppert, two homies
from the ‘hood, covered with pilfered bling; finally, a hirsute monster of a
man in a snow-white wedding gown, wielding a shotgun as if searching for a
partner to his own shotgun wedding. All, except Tom, were heavily armed… so the
kid did the sensible thing, pointing the Glock at Eppert…
“Don’t even think about it, loser…” Tom sighed.
It had begun
snowing as the two tech savants reached the loading dock, finding only a few
dozen stragglers vainly beating fists against the metal, almost outnumbered by
the corpses scattered hither and thither… including two Screaming Eagles and
two Giga-Plex security guards, purple vests drenched in blood. The van lay on its side and, when they opened
the back panel, they found that it had been looted, the two other mercenaries
lying dead, throats cut.
“Bogus!” Thunder
swore.
“I think I’d be
sick… except,” Total remembered, “I didn’t take a dinner break…”
McHale looked
back at the shuttered loading dock.
“Should we go back and tell them?”
They looked at
one another, disbelieving, then around the ruins of the van…
“No guns,”
Thunder ascertained. “No ammo…”
“Yeah, but they
left behind some of this cool cop gear,” Skinner said. “Check it out! Directional shit, and hey…”
Thunder inhaled
sharply. “Night vision goggles! Way cool…”
Ed pointed back
across the parking lot. “We can cut
across the lot to the highway, hoof it back to my place. You can crash on the couch… better not risk
the parking lot til’ tomorrow. If then…”
“I… I love you,
dude!” Thunder broke down, fitting the precious goggles to his face.
“I know. Me too…”
¾ ¾ ¾
Tom Eppert led his captors towards the
construction crane, then broke out his cellphone. An odd urge to call home had come over him,
but the cellphone wasn’t working… Slim and Easy watched him, getting nervous,
trigger-happy…
“Just tryin’ to call my wife an’ kids, alright?”
“Tried to call my
Boopsie,” Rafe, the bride,
admitted… “we’re goin’ up to
The big man
reached into a pocket under the wedding gown and pulled out a photograph of a
tiny codger in a tux with amazingly long fingers, like a prehistoric lizard…
“He works in the
piano bar…” Rafe said, proudly.
“Lucky you,” Tom
said, resting a foot on the big wheel of the crane.
“Uh yeah… man, you
said you could knock down that gate with this?
You gotta key?”
“Key? Who needs a fuckin’ key?” Tom scoffed. “If I can’t get this baby started, you can
hang me from the top of that hook, up there…”
“I seen a
picture, in a book” Easy remembered, looking up and pointing at the snowy
sky. “This elephant, man, he stomped
some people so they held a trial, sentenced him to death. Only way they could hang that elephant was
using a big crane like this one… fucked up, man…”
Tom held a
penlight to the ignition,
“Ain’t no crane… nobody either… gonna
fuck with me!” He unhooked and hotwired
the beast into a low, ominous rumbling, glancing from the crane to the back
door of the loading dock.
“Showtime!”
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
VISIT THESE OTHER
GENERISIS SERIAL ABOMINATIONS…
THE GOLDEN DAWN BLACK HELICOPTERS
THE INSURGENCE
of CHAN SANTA CRUZ!