Superbia 1-3 Box Set, page 40
"I know, I know," Frank said. "But he's not that bad when it comes to stuff like this. He loves the job and will see that it gets done." The words tasted like someone else's pre-chewed food in his mouth, so he spat them out quickly, then put it out of his mind and kissed his wife again. "I'm off this weekend, you know. I'm off every weekend now. Let's go camping."
"We don't even have a tent."
"We'll buy a tent. Or we'll sleep under the stars. Or I'll take you up to Potter County to see the Claytons. I'm tired of sitting around and I finally feel free! God, I feel free and I want you to feel it with me." He wrapped his arm around Devon and kissed her forehead, "We'll go horseback riding and shoot tin cans with a bb-gun." He stuck his hands under Cory's arms and scooped her up into his arms and kissed her on the mouth, "And we'll build campfires and cook hot dogs and eat beans. Whatever it is, we will do it together. Okay?"
Dawn stopped to look at him. To truly look at him. "Okay," was all she said, but it wasn't said to placate or be agreeable. It was the "okay" of understanding.
And this time, she kissed him.
Frank left them then to go to the train station. He left them with a quick kiss that all men give upon departing. It is the same kiss taken for granted a thousand times by a thousand wives and little girls, just another of many. It is the same kiss scored on the memory of those who will never receive it again.
Chapter Ten
The road leading back to the Hilltop Train Station was overgrown with weeds that stood tall enough to brush his door mirrors as he drove. Patches of gravel crunched under his car tires and Frank could see where other cars had recently driven through. He expected the train station was accustomed to skulking visitors and that there were probably dozens of empty beer bottles, heroin needles, and discarded condoms strewn throughout its abandoned rooms.
The station was aptly named. Frank felt himself pressed back against his seat as his car climbed the trail. The train tracks once ran along the crest of the ravine, once giving passengers a clear, if wobbling view of the undeveloped valleys surrounding the city. Now, the valleys had been paved over and filled with shopping centers and townhouses. The tracks going in either direction from the train station only went ten feet before they were lopped off like cancerous growths.
Dez's blacked-out SUV and a battered Honda belonging to Skip Fitzpatrick were parked in front of the station and Frank squinted to see into the dark building through the open front door. The sun was a blaze of gold and red as it prepared to descend from the valley and everything was in shadows. Frank could make out one figure standing in front of the door as he opened it and said, "You guys are all dressed in here, right? I'm not interrupting anything sexually deviant?"
"Very funny," Dez said. The embers of his cigarette flared in the dark, silhouetting Dez's face.
Skip nodded at Frank and Frank nodded at Skip and Frank said, "Thanks for coming. I appreciated it."
"I wouldn't have missed it," Skip said, his dark smile obscured by shadows.
Frank turned to peer around the rest of the dark lobby, "Is this everybody? I can't see shit."
"There's another guy, he'll be around later," Dez said. "We wanted to keep this intimate. That trouble I told you about? It's best to play it safe."
"I understand," Frank said. "So like I told you, we've got a guy in town who is trafficking child porn, but he's using all this fucked up technological mumbo jumbo to do it. We need to−" his eyes tracked Skip walking around his back, moving toward the front door.
"Keep talking," Skip said. "I'm just gonna prop this door open to give us more light."
Dez drew deeply on his cigarette again, filling the room with red light. "I'm listening, Frank."
"Long story short, I'd like to have him talk to the rabbit. Even if we don't get the codes from him, he might tell us about who he's selling it to or buying it from. Really I just want to shake his tree hard enough and see what falls out."
Dez blew out the last of the smoke from his lungs and dropped his cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with his boot. Behind Frank, Skip slammed the door closed and said, "Whoops. Wrong way."
"Did you come alone, Frank?" Dez said through the darkness.
"Yeah, why?"
The air filled with a sharp whistle of round wood cutting a wide arc down on Frank's bad knee, cracking him just above the shin. He dropped onto the dirty floor instantly, swimming in the rotting leaves and discarded cigarette butts as he screamed, his entire leg on fire with pain.
The door blew open again, allowing a sliver of light into the lobby as Frank lifted his head. Hot tears streamed down the sides of his face and he heard someone breathing heavy, panting like they were making love. He looked up into the large black eyes of a seven foot monster standing over him, its furry pink feet just inches from where he was lying crumpled.
"It only seemed fitting, Frank," Dez said.
Psycho Rabbit raised his orange nightstick and poked Frank in the shoulder, just enough to make him shift his arms, to taunt him, to hurt. "What the fuck is wrong with you people," Frank gasped.
"You sold us out, Frank," Skip said. "Tell us who you're working with and this stops now."
Frank laughed harshly, "I'm not working with anyone, you assholes."
Psycho Rabbit raised his foot and kicked Frank in the face, the hard soles of the boots he was wearing under the costume cracking him in the jaw hard enough to send an explosion of stars shooting through his head.
"Who are you working with?" Skip said.
"No one!" Frank screamed. "I came to you for help." He could taste blood in his mouth and ran his tongue along his teeth to make sure they were all there. The stick had missed his knee. It hurt like a bitch but in the darkness, the rabbit had missed.
Frank slid sideways on the floor to try and put distance between the rabbit and himself.
Dez took off his suit coat and laid it across one of the benches near the ticketing counter. He rolled up his sleeves and unhooked his watch band as the enormous rabbit circled Frank like a guard dog, slapping the long oak baton into the palm of his paw.
"What the hell happened to you, Frank?" Dez said. "You should have just stayed in the fold, but no, you weren't happy. You just had to go your own way, and now look at you. This isn't the sort of thing you just walk away from Frank. Did you seriously think you could?"
Frank slid another inch toward the far wall where fading sunlight glimmered through the rotting wooden frame surrounding the rear emergency exit. He pressed his hand on his knee and squeezed, checking for any new pain. His shin was intact. It hurt like a motherfucker, but the bones were intact and he could probably even walk on it if he had to.
Frank pressed his palms against the floor and leapt up to break for the rear door, hobbling wildly, but the rabbit was too fast. Psycho Rabbit skipped forward and swung his leg around to sweep Frank's feet from under him, sending him crashing to the ground with a thud. The air leapt out of Frank's lungs like popped tires and he wheezed trying to refill them.
"Who are you working with?" Dez said again. "You know what, fuck it. Hit him again."
"He can't breathe," Skip said. He looked down at Frank's crumpled form and felt his face twist in disgust, "Just give him a second."
"I don't care anymore. I'm sick and tired of these suburban assholes." Dez nodded at the pink bunny and said, "Have fun."
Psycho Rabbit raised the stick in the air with both paws like he was about to chop down a tree and aimed for Frank's head, swinging like he was about to cave it in. Frank looked up at the descending stick and closed his eyes. He saw his children receiving a folded flag just after the goddamn helicopters flew over.
The sharp, deafening report of a gunshot barked inside the empty station, stopping Psycho Rabbit in mid-swing and making the other men clutch their ears instinctively. Dust and splinters rained down on Skip from where he'd fired a hole in the roof of the station and he lowered his gun at the rabbit and said, "Give me that fucking stick." He snatched the baton and walked over to where Frank was laying and said, "Are you selling us out?"
Frank's ears were ringing and felt stuffed with cotton but he'd been able to make out enough of what Skip was saying to mutter, "No."
Skip got down on his knees and put the barrel of the gun to Frank's temple. It was shaking in his hand and the metal was hot against Frank's skin from just being fired. Skip's voice knotted in his throat and he said, "Are you fucking selling us out, Frank?"
Frank turned and looked him directly in the eye, his voice firm and steady when he said, "No. I came here for help."
Skip bit his lower lip and lowered the gun, "Get up."
"What the fuck are you doing, Skip?" Dez shouted.
"Shut the fuck up, Dez! I swear to Christ I will kill every single person in this room if I have to." He watched Frank struggle to his feet and said, "Can you walk?"
"Yeah," Frank said.
Skip held out the stained orange baton to Frank and said, "I'm leaving. Do you understand? I'm getting the fuck out of this shithole, and I was never here."
Frank took the baton from him and said, "Okay. Let me walk out with you, Skip."
Skip raised the gun at Frank and said, "No! That's between you three. All you know is that I was never here. Say it."
"You were never here."
Skip backed away from them all, now turning the gun on the others. "You fuckers can sort this out on your own. However you want. I don't give a shit if you all kill each other."
"You're a piece of shit," Dez spat. "You're finished. I hope you get AIDS from some fucking crackwhore in the twenty-ninth district, cocksucker."
Skip laughed bitterly as he backed away from them toward the door. He worked the lever with one hand while keeping his gun moving from man to man with the other, until he had finally opened it enough to step backwards through. He slammed the door shut on them, leaving them with only the soft amber light of the setting sun coming in through the cracks in the walls and ceiling to show as Dez Dolos calmly walked over to his folded suit coat and pulled out the Beretta 9mm he'd placed beneath it. "Put the nightstick down and we'll talk, Frank."
There would be no talking, Frank knew.
The Psycho Rabbit began to pace once more, stalking across the floor like a chained beast staring through its cell bars at Frank, just waiting for the moment to be unleashed. Its mask a distorted pink mass of bucktoothed smile and black mesh eyes.
There was nothing left but Dez and his gun, the maniac in the bunny suit and Frank with an old police baton.
A dozen police academy cadets lined up on either side of him, all of them dressed in the same dark blue t-shirt and sweatpants, their hands squished in the damp Conshohocken soil, pushing up and down at the instructors command. "Upppppppp, dowwwwwwn, uppppppp, dowwwwwwn," in a never ending sequence of pain. The instructor looked out over the field of young men and shouted, "There will come a time when you are faced with insurmountable odds and have the option to lay down and die like a maggot or fight, do you understand?"
"Sir, yes sir!" the cadets shouted back at him.
"There will be bullets flying in your direction or a horde of roving barbarians in your AO and it will fall to you to stop them, do you understand?"
Frank's arms were on fire and trembling with each pushup but he would not quit. None of them would quit. Not because it meant having to run laps or do extra work but because to quit was to die, and they were not there die. Frank threw back his head and bellowed, "Sir, yes sir!"
"You will be stabbed, you will be shot, you will be blown up by a motherfucking thermal nuclear explosion and what will you do?"
"Fight!"
"You will watch all of the people around you abandon their post and flee in terror, what will you do?"
"Fight!"
"Your wife and children will beg and plead for you to not die unless you do what?"
"Fight!"
"What do I expect you to do?"
"Fight!"
"What?"
Fight!
"What!"
Frank opened his mouth and roared an incomprehensible battle cry as he launched forward in the darkness, swinging the stick as hard as he could for the big pink target. Psycho Rabbit threw his right arm up in time to block and Frank heard the distinct crack of wood on bone through the soft felt layer of costume. Frank swung again and again, bashing the rabbit's arm and shoulder into strange formations like he was hammering steel, oblivious to the muffled yelps inside the helmet. He kicked the thing between the legs with the ball of his foot, driving the point of his sneaker up as hard and deep as he could, hoping to hear its nuts pop.
Dez was dancing frantically around in the darkness, screaming for Frank to stop or he'd shoot, but Frank bashed the rabbit again and again, chopping it on the knees and head like a lumberjack, like a man trying to break out of prison.
Dez's gun fired twice in rapid succession, its barrel bursting with bright yellow flame that lit the room for a millisecond. All of the muscles in Frank's body stiffened at the sharp sounds but he still had the stick and he hadn't been hit. He thought of all the movies he'd seen where the hero gets shot and doesn't realize it until after the action was over and someone said, "My God, you've been hit!" But Frank had been shot before and he fucking well knew it and when Dez's gun went off, all it did was tell Frank where the bastard was.
Frank darted across the room and swung wildly back and forth until he felt the baton crash into something that crunched. Dez howled miserably and the gun clattered against the floor. Frank swung his leg up as hard as he could and slammed his shin into Dez's bent over face, the pain of the man's chin and skull against his injured leg almost as bad as it was satisfying.
The other men were down, Frank could see that much. He gripped and re-gripped the baton like a clean-up hitter and heaved for breath, feeling like he was about to vomit. Whatever strength had possessed him to overcome them was now gone and he felt only sickness and disgust for what had happened.
He inched backward; clutching the stick with both hands for fear that it would slip out of his grip from both sweat and a sudden fit of trembling. He gasped in horror as Dez lifted his head from the ground and groaned. Dez's speech was mangled by his broken lips and cracked front teeth and he reached up to touch them with trembling fingers, feeling nothing but blood as he shouted, "You motherfucker!"
"Don't do it," Frank said. "Stay down!"
"You son of a bitch!"
Dez flopped on the ground in the area where the gun had fallen and Frank spun to get away, running for the only thing he could see, the rear exit framed by the now almost nonexistent light. He heard the gun scrape the lobby floor as Dez's fingers locked onto it. He even heard the cylinders and mechanisms inside the chamber move and creak as Dez squeezed the trigger and the firing pin punched the end of the hollow-point bullet within.
The bullet erupted out of the barrel with lethal speed, spinning through the air toward Frank just as he dove for the door, raising his arms to protect his face as he crashed through the rotted wood. He broke through a thick tangle of dry, thorny branches and felt himself thrown forward by the hill's steep decline. His ankles twisted on the roots and leaves, the entire woods in dark blur save for the distant lights of civilization somewhere far off, somewhere too far to know that Frank was running for his life.
His foot caught a root deeply buried in the much and it grabbed him like a skeleton's hand reaching up from the grave and Frank flipped in the air, rolling and falling and crashing and screaming as he tumbled end over end down into the tangled woods, down into the dark abyss.
Drip.
Drip. Drip.
Something leaked onto a bare concrete floor like water from a loose faucet, the kind the you think you can deal with when you go to bed but by three in the morning all you can hear is−
Drip.
Drip. Drip.
Frank tried to raise his head, but the sterile floor was cool against his face and he could not bring himself to leave it. His entire body ached and he wondered if he'd been shot, but even as he tried to collect his thoughts he was distracted by the−
Drip.
Drip. Drip.
It was nearby. Near enough that he could smell it, whatever it was. A copper smell, the smell of a rusty iron door, a dank basement with water seeping through the cracks in the walls that went−
Drip.
Drip. Drip.
Frank forced his eyes open just as the wheelchair rolled past him. He saw the white rubber wheels turn along the polished concrete floor and the girl slumped over in the seat. The Disney pillowcase stretched over her head like a hood was saturated with so much blood it ran down her arms and dripped over the sides, leaving a trail that glistened in the dark like the back of a long, red serpent.
He gasped and scrambled to get away, but the girl in the wheelchair suddenly flinched. The dead thing's withered, crippled hands unstuck themselves from her chest and she reached up with arched fingers to claw at the pillowcase. Her mouth opened and closed beneath it like she was being smothered and her head slowly turned to face him, the dark fabric sunk in around the places where her eyes should be. "Help me, Frankkkkkkk," she groaned. "You were supposed to help meeeeeeeeeeee."
Frank barked in terror as his hands touched the wet, leathery boots of someone standing behind him and he spun to see the enormous belly of Chief Claude Erinnyes looming over him. Erinnyes's face was swollen and purple like he'd been holding his breath until the blood vessels burst and his eyes were bulging, glaring down at Frank. The Chief opened his mouth and the hooded eyes of a black snake peered through, its tongue flicking the air as Erinnyes regurgitated it. The snake uncoiled from the base of the Chief's being and descended to the floor, coming toward Frank.
From every direction, they were coming. Eyes red and glowing with damnation, they closed in and grabbed for him. Their claws and fangs bit into his feet and legs and arms, drawing evil symbols on his chest in blood, marking him as their own, marking him as damned for all eternity.
Frank screamed and screamed and heard nothing but high-pitched laughter.
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