60) Super Sunday, 2/19: 5:00
– 5:10 AM – “Dora the Explora!”
Avoiding the fires and gunshots in the parking lot and, then,
the onrushing mob headed towards the loading dock, Ray Wilson and Sabra Martin
alternately coaxed and bullied Honey Keissler into
dragging her load through a maze of trashed cars and lurching zombies – anxiety
writ large on their faces as they realized the extent of the damage.
“Thank god Mark
makes us park way out, by the street…” Ray set his suitcases down, sat on one
and wiped his face on his shirt, “not so many people around, wrecking
stuff.”
Honey
brightened. “My car is closer to the
store. It’s a Kia…”
“Leave it,” Ray
retorted, whacking the suitcase like Odell Beckham slapping a Louisiana
security guard. “You can buy a hundred new Kias with
what we got…”
Sabra, pointedly,
had been holding up her suitcases but now… as the delay progressed… she set them
down, too. “Don’t wanna
get difficult, now, but what happens next?
I mean, I can use a taste now and then, even deal a couple grams, but
two whole briefcases of crank? What do I
do with the stuff…”
Ray pointed out
across the lot to a twentieth century Honda Civic parked all by its
lonesome. “That’s my wheels. Uh, I know this motel, ‘bout five miles up
the pike, quiet place… we can cop some sleep and talk this over in the
morning. Or afternoon. I know people… you just wanna
sell me your share and get out with some more money,” he smiled, “we can work
something out…”
“That’ll do. Honey?”
“Sure! I just wanna go
somewhere and go to sleep for, like, a thousand years. But take a shower, first…” she added, running
fingers through her stringy, smoky hair.
Which was when a tall guy in a hooded parka slipped out from
between two SUVs, a Sig-9 from the looted gunshop in
his fist.
“Nice night,
huh? You comin’
from Giga-Plex?”
“Maybe…” Ray
said, flexing his fingers to work the stiffness out.
“Uh… when I ask,
you answer, dig mo’fucka?” and the bandit waved his
gun, somewhat carelessly in Ray’s opinion.
But he kept the
stupid grin plastered on his face.
“Giga-Plex is locked down,” Ray informed
him. “Metal gates. They been tryin’ to
get in all night, no luck…”
“Not what I
heard. I heard that they got in through
the back… somebody punched a hole through the damn concrete and people are
streaming out with whatever they want.
What you all got in them bags…” he waved the Sig again, “some of them
plasmas?”
“Do we look like
we could haul plasmas all the way from Giga-Plex? We got Beanie Babies, from Kravjak’s,” Sabra said,
proudly. “They’re collectibles…”
“Well, then, lay
the bag down, bitch and step away from Mister Goodbar’s
collectibles, he’s takin’ charge…”
He stroked his
junk with a wicked, stoned grin.
“Mr. Goodbar? Puh-leeze! There’s
plenty of stuff in the Mall, why are you hanging around out here,” Honey
protested, “vampin’ on other people for their stuff?”
“Your stuff? Cuz I’s a lazy motherfucka, hee-heeeah!” Goodbar hollered, then asked Ray: “You bangin’ these
bitches cuz they’re white, or cuz
they’re stupid? Now those are nice
briefcases, nice… prob’ly somethin’
nice inside, too…”
Ray turned up the
stupid on his smile volume a couple of decibels. “Jus’ candy, from a candy machine… Mister Goodbar… I been thinkin’, maybe
you wanna taste, I sure do…”
“Maybe a
taste. Maybe more… open up… or just toss
them bags and cases into my shaggin’
wagon,” and the gangsta slapped the Explorer that had served as his hiding
place.
“Them too, they
got candy in their cases, too…” Ray pointed.
Goodbar did a shambling little dance that owed more
whatever he’d been drinking, smoking or snorting than to the stars. “Yeah!
Yeah! All of you, open up them
candy machines… hot diddy-daddy, gonna powder my
face…”
As Ray had hoped,
Mr. Goodbar was watching the girls, fairly panting,
as he unsnapped the briefcase and removed the Taurus that he’d placed atop the
crank… before the jacker could fully turn around, Ray
plugged him in the throat and, then, between the eyes… the Sig clattered from
his dead fingers and bounced under the SUV as its proprietor swayed and tried
to speak.
“See, fool… I’m a
thief, a workin’ thief… not no parasite hiding out in
no parking lot. Now you a dead fool,”
Ray ordered, “so why don’t you just fall over an’ die?”
And, obedient to
a fault, Mister Goodbar did exactly that…
While Ray
unzipped his fly and pissed on the corpse, Sabra, checking out his wheels,
peered through a window. “Hey, there’s a
lotta shit back here… looks like clothes, some power
tools, whole sack of… what is this shit, cabbage?”
Ray looked up,
suddenly interested. “Fool got money?”
“No, cabbage… I
mean vegetables, except they’re kinda red.
Funny stuff…”
“What the fuck
are you foolin’ round with some dead fool’s
vegetables girl, get yo’ ass over here and into
Dora…” Ray snapped, removing the dead man’s keys and wallet.
“Who’s Dora?”
asked a suddenly suspicious Honey…
“Dora,” Ray
explained patiently, “is my new
Explorer. Sayonara, Honda! Either of you got kids… well I’m just a
regular guy, I got kids… it’s a program that they watch, an’ after I take this
stuff to my people, they gonna be watching on the widest, baddest
screen someother stores got; it’s gonna be like their
birthday and Christmas, all rolled into one…”
He jangled Goodbar’s keys, unlocked the van and tossed bag and
briefcases in the back. Honey followed
suit and then, stepping over the dead looter-looter, Sabra…
“I call shotgun…”
Honey brayed, waiting by the passenger’s door.
“I call Taurus,”
Ray answered.
He fired once,
breaking her heart… also a lung, and several ribs. As her body hit the pavement, Ray turned,
covering Sabra.
“Man, I sorta hate to do this.
Under different circumstances, I think I really could get to like you,
but there’s just too much money here, and I fly strictly solo. Still, I hate doin’
this…”
“Then don’t.”
And she pulled
Mister Goodbar’s Sig out of her plastic miniskirt and
shot Ray in the gut. Amazed, he frowned
“Damn, bitch!” and fired back, twice… Sabra returned fire and both kept
planting lead into each other until the guns clicked empty, whereupon both
collapsed in half an inch of bloody snow.
The wind teased open one of the black bags, and twenty, fifty and
hundred dollar bills started blowing across the One World Mall parking lot as
heavier snow began to fall.
¾ ¾ ¾
Tom had backed up the construction crane all the way to the edge
of the parking lot… crushing two more cars and five more people in the
process. Most of the mob were able to
follow, with their eyes, the path from crane to cracked Giga-Plex wall and
moved back, except for a couple of fools who stared at the great machine
dead-on like Chinese students in Tiananmen Square as Tom swigged the last of
the vile schnapps and bantered with Dreibach and his
new, more sympathetic guest, FCC Commissioner, Turk Jackson.
“…and all of
this,” the voice at Tom’s shoe saying, “attributable to football?”
Tom tossed the
bottle out the window and threw the gearshift all the way forward. “Damn straight! Gonna do this job, go home with my baby,” he
added, jiggling the mini-TV on his lap, “and take a nap, and then… gametime!”
“Well, of course,
that’s the excuse you would expect…” the new Commissioner situated atop his junk pontificated, “I prefer to
attribute it to years and years of secular humanism, envy and indolence, the
workings of an evil power, if you will, through instant gratification. Americans are indolent, insolent and… soon enough…
insolvent. Which, in his own way,
Brother Augsberg seems to be trying to express…”
Tom jammed his
foot down on the gas. “Gratify this,
Giga-Plex. An’ away we goo-ah!”
The giant crane
punched through a weakened north wall of the Giga-Plex
storage room like a fist through glass and kept going… plowing through the
plasterboard barrier between store and storage dock, scattering Screaming
Eagles and their Maginot Line of televisions, speakers and appliances, burying
mercenaries and looters alike under a rain of rebar and concrete rubble. Westy Soames saved himself by bolting out from behind his
improvised fortification onto the deserted battlefield while the remaining
zombies stood paralyzed with shock and awe.
Rifleman Stu dodged the other way… into the ruptured loading dock and
then, espying the charred security truck, back towards the store, turning once
to perceive dozens of frenetic zombies pouring into the stockroom despite the
concrete shards still falling. The
crane’s impact had actually shaken three more looters off the catwalk, sending
them plummeting to the floor while the surviving employees and visitors merely
looked up, paralyzed, then down again towards a frenzied, frothing Mark Tenison, waving a replica of a classic Colt revolver, lifted
off a dead looter…
“Everybody grab a weapon and get behind something!” he
decreed. “Keep them pinned down in the
loading dock… protect our merchandise.”
He stopped, looked left, then right.
“Let’s do this for Big Sonny…”
“Protect our merchandise, hell… it’s over!”
Captain Capps punched the rabid store manager on the arm. “Time to boogie… every man, and woman, for
themselves, are you gonna shoot me with that?
Are you on drugs?”
As Mark swiveled,
aiming the Colt at Capps, then the invaders, then Capps, again, Tom Eppert… forehead bloodied, too, gun in his belt, TV in hand
squawking about riots and rebellion in California… hurriedly descended the
ladder to the cab, vaulted over the rubble, the smashed merchandise, and the
moaning bodies only to find an army of looters already clearing out the
stockroom like ants at a picnic. He
looked left, saw Westy Soames
beginning to climb the yellow stairs, pointed and cried out…
“Where is my money,
motherfucker! Where’s my thirty-five dollars for that no-good box
your cousin or whomever sold me, plus the hundred dollars for my set! Goddam you…”
And firing
wildly, he raced across the stockroom floor after his quarry…
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!