This Rotten World: Rally and Rot, page 8
"What's going on out there?" Scabs asked.
"I saw the twisted guy still crawling."
"No fucking way," Abyss said. "That dude should be dead by now."
"Well, he's not, and I saw him take a bite out of someone out there, and I get the feeling these other motherfuckers wanna take a bite too."
"What's going on?" Patch wondered.
The others patrons in the bar had noticed the visitors pressed against the glass. And then the bar began to positively fill with the reek of unbridled machismo.
"I'll kick their fucking ass!" a man yelled, his chest bare underneath his jean vest. Other men joined in, and from there the hivemind took over.
"Let's go to the back," Tarot said, and they maneuvered their way through the crowing bikers, snagging a few beers along the way.
"Maybe they're just fucked up," Patch said.
"I don't think so."
"Do you have… a feeling?" Tanya asked.
Tarot turned to her friend, hesitated, and then shook her head. The "feeling" Tanya referred to was a small gift of hers, or curse maybe; she still hadn't made up her mind which. It was the reason she and her friends had come to the rally in the first place. Tarot had a bit of a sixth sense, only her sixth sense didn't do anything anyone would actually want. At that moment, her "sick sense," as she called it, was entirely dead. There was nothing going on in the town of Monktree.
Out front, the bikers grew more agitated, more furious someone would deign to keep them trapped inside the bar. It was only a matter of time before they forced the owner to open the door, and then those stupid bikers were going to march out front and brawl with those people.
"I swear they're dead," Tarot said.
"That doesn't make any sense," Tanya said.
Abyss just nodded. "Tarot's never steered us wrong. I don't see why she'd do it now."
"Well, what do we do?" Tanya asked.
Tarot's reply was quick, emotionless. "I say we head out the back and get the fuck out of here before all these knuckleheads get themselves fucked up. Then we hit the road."
"Gonna be a pain in the ass getting to the bikes," Pudding said. Normally, Tarot would have told him to shut up. He wasn't allowed to have a say in the Stunts' business, but today was different.
"We'll figure it out."
They slid sideways through a hallway in the back as the jeering of the bikers up front grew louder. Any second now, they would pour through the front door and deliver alcohol-fueled justice to the men out front. When that happened, she wanted to be on her bike and riding the fuck out of town.
Chapter 17: Not Going Back
The toes of Tattoo Juan's boots scraped across the pavement. Underneath his arms, he felt the hands of his lieutenants, Los and Javy. The smell of discharged gunpowder still clung about him, thick and heavy, or else he was having a fucking stroke.
"Crazy fucker," Los said as they dragged him away.
"You killed a fucking cop, man." Tattoo Juan couldn't tell if Javy was impressed or thought he was out of his mind.
Maybe if Juan could have remembered what had happened, he would have been able to figure it out, but Tattoo Juan couldn't figure out what he'd done. His skull felt fractured, the thoughts within like fruit suspended in wobbling Jell-O. Will I even remember this?
All he knew was he was in pain, and he wasn't going back to the slammer. You know why they call it the slammer? a voice asked in his head. But he didn't want to think about it. I'll never go back to prison again. He shouldn't have been there the first time, but when the world decided you were something, sometimes that's all it would let you be. And hell, at that point, why not cover yourself in as many tattoos as possible? If the world wanted to see him as a criminal and a monster, he was damn sure going to let everyone know he was up to the task.
His mama had "tsked, tsked" him when he had come home from prison, that first teardrop tattoo glittering prison blue on his cheek. From there, he allowed more of the tattoos to infiltrate his body, each one putting a layer of protective ink between himself and the world around him. And with each tattoo, the world was peeled away, separated into two groups of people, those who wouldn't talk to him and those who would. The latter group grew smaller with every tattoo he had added to his skin.
A wave of nausea overcame him, and when he threw up on the sidewalk, he couldn't quite figure out where he was. The world didn't look familiar. In the background, he heard Los and Javy swearing. Los Chistadores. Jokers. But they didn't sound like they were joking now. I have a concussion. Then that thought disappeared as well. His gasping, out-of-breath friends set him on his belly, his legs bleeding through the rips in his jeans. He could smell the blood, and something else.
Ahead, in his blurry vision, he spotted those grinning jester heads, their skeletal teeth, their red, green, and white jester hats topped with little golden bells, the skeletal jaw with a snake clenched in its teeth. Los swung his arms, a length of glittering chain arcing and clocking some poor bastard in the head.
A fight. They're fighting. They need me.
Tattoo Juan pushed himself off the ground, an impossible push-up. He made it to one knee before his head swam, threatening to knock him over on his side again. But then the fog cleared, and he understood one of his legs was beyond fucked, that he wasn't going to be able to stand. With this realization came the pain from his shredded skin and his busted knee. He fell over on his side, even as he felt for his handgun. But it wasn't there. It was gone.
"Fuck," he managed to say as Javy kicked a blurry-faced man in the privates and then shoved him backward.
"Get him out of here," Los commanded, and Javy turned to pick up Tattoo Juan, pulling hard on his arm and ducking his head underneath Juan's shoulder. Up he went, grunting in pain as the fog in his mind thinned. Javy, almost as tall as Los and certainly taller than Tattoo Juan, grunted as he hustled down the street with Juan draped over his shoulder.
"This is fucked," Javy said.
"What is?" the injured man asked, sounding like a drunk on the edge of sobering up enough to drive home.
"Chales, Juan," Javy said. "Don't worry about it."
But Tattoo Juan did worry about it, and as Javy bounced him down the street, he asked, "Where are we going? Where are the others?"
"Some didn't make it," the big man replied. "That cop plugged some, and those other bikers, the ones with the pentagram on their backs, they shot back, took some out. After that, people scattered, but we were able to get you out of there. We're going to head back to the spot now. Hopefully some of the others made it."
"The Air B and B?" he asked, still trying to wrap his head around all of the information Javy had spilled. He imagined he could see the man's words fluttering from his mouth like butterflies and then flapping around his head. He was watching those words wreathing Javy's head when a gunshot rang out. At first, Javy seemed surprised, and then somehow his surprise grew, his eyes transforming into large circles and his mouth becoming a black O as blood spurted from the side of his neck. His hand went to the ragged hole, and Tattoo Juan dropped to the ground, landing hard upon the concrete.
As he rolled over on his back, Javy fell down next to him, his eyes perfectly round, and blood spilling through his fingers. Someone was running in their direction; the sound of boots echoed off the concrete. Then Los came into view. He spared one glance at Tattoo Juan and Javy, and then he sped right by.
"Where the fuck are you going?" Juan called.
Javy coughed, his own blood rising into the air and then splattering down on his face. Tattoo Juan put a hand on his shoulder to calm him, but Juan knew Javy wouldn't escape his fate. He stopped thinking about Javy altogether as another man appeared. He was dressed in deep blue denim, a vest with a black t-shirt underneath, a blue bandana wound around his throat to pull up over his face when he rode. In his hand, he gripped a handgun, its dark barrel pointed in his direction. To Tattoo Juan, it was like looking down the barrel of a tank's cannon.
The man grit his teeth, his angry blue eyes piercing Juan's soul. "You ran over my brother, you fucker."
Tattoo Juan didn't care. Fuck his brother. The man wanted him to talk, to beg for his own life, but he wasn't going to do that. He never would. Sometimes, a man had a bullet coming his way, and when it showed up, well, that's life, homes.
"You ran him right over," the denim man growled.
Tattoo Juan closed his eyes, though he rolled them underneath his eyelids.
"Aren't you going to say anything?"
He wasn't planning on it, and then the denim man kicked him in his fucked-up kneecap. The pain was more than he could handle, and he cried out. So much for going out as the tough silent type.
"I'm gonna kill all you Chistadores. Every single last one!"
Tattoo Juan, tears in his eyes from the pain, raised his fingers in the air, not all of them, just the two middle ones. "Chingas tu madre," he managed to say. It was a good phrase, because even the white boys knew what it meant, and to be honest, Tattoo Juan had grown tired of the denim man as soon as his mouth had opened. Better to speed things along.
He was wondering what a bullet in the skull would feel like when the denim man's hair jumped for a second. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, and then, out of nowhere, blood began to jet from the side of his skull. The gun slipped from his fingers and clattered to the pavement. The man's body followed a split-second after.
For a second, Tattoo Juan thought his prayers had been answered, but then he remembered he didn't pray. Maybe I was praying when I was all woozy and shit. And then, Javy tried to eat him.
Chapter 18: A Cold One
Ernie Windham listened as the police band blared behind him, painting a nightmarish picture of the towns around him. The street teemed with people running for their lives. The police band gave him the impression that whatever was going on wasn't an isolated incident. The reports on the police radio were too farfetched for Ernie to fully believe them.
Ernie was a "seeing is believing" sort. So, in order to prove the radio wrong, he headed to his living room, his rifle still in his hand, and his handgun tucked neatly into the holster on his hip. Anyone who saw him would think he looked like a tough, country sheriff right out of a '50s movie. Jeans, a white t-shirt, sturdy boots… all that was missing was the cowboy hat. But Ernie wasn't a cowboy, hated them in fact. And in Wyoming, it seemed that's all there was roaming the streets, cardboard cutouts masquerading as humans in their stupid fucking hats. No, give him a good baseball cap, and he'd be alright. He had a collection of them hanging on the coat rack next to the front door for when he worked in the yard. Hell, sometimes he even remembered to wear one.
In the living room, he grabbed the remote and popped the TV on, switching the channel to the nearest news station. Then he dragged a chair from the kitchen and sat down in it with a perfect old man groan. He didn't know when the groan had become a part of his daily routine; it just seemed to sneak up on him at some point. He supposed that's how his death would be. As his body failed, and he normalized the aches and pains, one day, he simply wouldn't wake up. Fuck Death. He had a love-hate relationship with that bitch.
Through the needlessly billowy drapes of the living room, he kept an eye on his property. Upstairs offered a better vantage point, but he didn't feel like dragging the TV to the second floor.
"Reports of rampant violence in Casper have the police out in full force."
Ernie's ears perked up. There was seldom a time when Wyoming's police force was fully mobilized. The last time had been when an armed cult of anti-American militants had tried to lead an uprising in the sticks. It had been a full-on Waco situation, although, without all the deaths in the end. An officer with a search warrant had been fired upon, though to be fair, the men in the militia—all white supremacists from what he had gathered—hadn't known he was a police officer when they shot at him. But that's the nature of being a bunch of gun-happy nuts. Sometimes you put the wrong fucker in your sights.
Speaking of sights, outside, more men ran in the night. Bikers, with their stupid colors. You either had to be dumb as shit or the baddest motherfucker in the world to walk around like that. And none of these fuckers looked all that tough. One of them was in pretty bad shape, limping along, his face covered in tattoos.
That was one thing Ernie could never get behind—the tattoos. God gave you skin, and to change that skin was to spit in the man's eye. Woman's eye. The memory of his wife corrected him. Olivia Windham wasn't like all the girls he had known in Chicago. She didn't believe everything she was told. She had her own thoughts about the world. She wasn't a homemaker, didn't get off on cooking and serving her man. She had been fiery, devoured books like a shark in a school of fish. Ernie still couldn't quite figure out how she fell in love with his dumb ass. Even more mystifying was how he had managed to keep her even after they'd married.
By his own admission, he wasn't the easiest guy to live with.
A gunshot rang out in the night, and Ernie shook his thoughts away. Damn age. There's another thing that goes along with the ability to sleep through the night without having to wake up and take a piss, the ability to focus.
A big, Mexican looking fella staggered and fell. Ernie, his face an inch from the window, looked in the direction where the shot came from and located the attacker. The piece of shit already had two men on the ground. The man wore a sick grin, a sociopath's grin, the type of grin you'd find on the weird kid from school whenever you found him in the woods torturing animals. Ernie knew that grin well, had used to pal around with dudes like that a lifetime ago.
He let those memories drift away and focused on the scene playing out before him in the street. Bloody and unarmed, those men lying on the pavement were as good as dead.
"Well, let's rock the boat a little. Shall we?"
Ernie picked up his Remington R4 Operator, and hustled to the front door. Throwing it open, he held the scope up to his eye, and without hesitation, squeezed the trigger. He didn’t have to account for anything. The man was maybe 25 yards away, the Wyoming wind was oddly calm, and his target was standing still. No blue ribbons for this shot.
After flipping the safety back on, to no one in particular, Ernie said, "Let's go see what we got."
Ernie didn't think twice about the consequences of his actions. He wasn't worried about cops or prisons. If anything, he would get a slap on the wrist and get his ass moved somewhere else if his handlers found out.
"Police are telling everyone to stay indoors."
Although if the fucking news was correct, maybe he wouldn't even have to deal with that. Ernie stepped out onto his porch, the cooler full of beer calling his name. I'll grab one after.
Trotting down the steps, he kept his rifle level and ready to fire. His boots skipped along the concrete path leading from his house to the street. On the ground, a large man attacked another one, which was bizarre, as when he had first seen the two men, they had been trying to help each other. From the small safety of his yard and standing behind his picket fence, Ernie leveled his rifle at the aggressor and said, "Get off 'im."
The large man, his lips pulled back and his teeth gnashing together, took no notice of Ernie.
"I said get off 'im."
"Help," the tattooed man called.
Ernie didn't see any way around it, not a way he cared for, at least. Oh, sure, he could have gone and wrestled the big man off the tattooed guy, but then he'd be opening himself up to an attack, and the dude had to weigh twice as much as Ernie himself. On top of that, who knew what fucking drugs the fucker was on? Acting the way he was, there was only one thing Ernie could do. He took aim and pulled the trigger. Tonight is definitely turning to shit.
His bullet entered the man's shoulder, exiting out his back with a spray of blood and flesh. For a second, the big man, already bleeding from a wound in his neck, stopped, but then he went right back at the tattooed fella. A strange thought crossed Ernie's mind. He's trying to eat him.
"What the fuck?" he whispered.
Ernie scanned up and down the street, really looked at what was going on. People ran in pockets and some shambled down the street. Several were headed in his direction all wounded, all sorts of fucked up in their own way.
"I must be losing my mind."
Ernie pushed open the gate to his picket fence, backing through it so he didn't have to take his hands off his rifle. His Remington was the only thing keeping him sane at the moment. On the other side of his fence, he clicked the safety on, then flipped his rifle around once he knew he wasn't going to blow his own face off. He jammed the butt of his weapon into the big man's wounded shoulder, but the hulking Mexican dude didn't even acknowledge him. Ernie, taking note of the interested parties stumbling in his direction, circled around behind the big dude, aimed his rifle at the base of the man's skull, and delivered a blow that would have knocked out any human being in the world. John would know, he'd knocked out plenty of people this way with less.
Nothing. The man kept going.
"Get his head up," he calmly said to the tattooed man.
But he didn't hear. Instead, he continued to slap at the hands of the great beast attacking him.
"I gotta do everything myself… like fucking always." Ernie leaned forward, snaked his rifle around the man's throat and pulled tight, lifting the big Mexican off the tattooed man. He pulled him backward like this for a few feet, and while an ordinary man would choke and gasp, this man put up no more of a fight than a block of wood. His arms waved in the air, still trying to ravage the tattooed man.
Once the big man was clear of the man with the tattoos, Ernie spun the dude to the ground and danced away.
"Stay down," Ernie warned.
