He felt it coming the day that it did. Wind moist in the morning. Carrying with it a wet chill, and the cement smell of rain. It was a favorite trick to try to influence the weather adversely in the hopes of catching somebody off guard.
They sent the test of the three stooges, and I passed it. They probably won't deal in such half-measures any longer. I got an extra week out of it – more than I could have hoped for if this was a trap like I suspected. Did they plant the store here? Invent Unk and his killers? It does all seem pretty perfect, in retrospect. Nothing's ever that perfect.
It was gloomy and windswept by noon. Tower clouds hovered on the horizon from the west, sweeping in on the gales that were strong enough to rattle the windows and send discarded pop cans and plastic bags sailing down the street. Everybody stayed inside. The video store unmanned and derelict.
The clerk sat up in his room at the motel. The girl he'd saved from the customers slept in the next room on the clerk's money. The innkeeper kept having discussions with her about maybe staying, maybe taking on some work you know, but nothing bad or anything, just you know, a little fun for the fellas comin' inta town – lord knows they don't hardly show up so what's the harm in a little extra money?
The clerk felt no need to go to her rescue a second time, mostly because it didn't appear to him that the woman understood anything said to her. She hadn't said a word since her salvation at his hands. The only thing she had done was kick the dead customer's face until his nose popped like a grape. This after the clerk dragged the ruined body out of the fountain's water in preparation for dragging it out to the desert.
Since then, she'd done nothing, accepting food when Kayla brought it and staring blankly whenever the clerk or anybody else went into her room to see if she would respond to anything. She seemed happy enough to be left alone. The clerk didn't seem to mind paying for her. She recoiled at his attempts to touch her, so he left that whole line of inquiry alone.
A thoughtless animal with the humanity raped out of her by a bunch of clowns. One of the ones that did it still running around out there somewhere, probably. Has there ever been any clearer indication that you can't save anybody – that the time for saving was before any of this, and you fucked up and now here you are?
---
The clouds spread across the sky by noon. The distant thunder rumbling – the complaint of a tired old man. The clerk looked out into the perfect blackness to the west from the other side of the motel. There came a chill gust. Inadvertent caterpillars dancing up his spine. He turned to see the girl Kayla watching him from the back stoop of the motel, eyes still desirous after all the rebukes and indifference.
He did not acknowledge her as he went back up to his room and sat at the desk. There stood the ridiculous pony doll, standing obedient watch over his courier bag. He undid the gunbelt at his hips and slung it over the desk, removing the guns and opening the back pouch. The back pouch held a few spare magazines, each brimming with the little glints of brass.
From the bag he removed more empty ones and two boxes of .45 ACP. He became aware of Kayla and Henry watching him – the boy evidently come from leaving the store unoccupied. It was he that piped up first.
They comin'?
Silence from the clerk. The girl moving next to him, body tense with worry, talking low, on the verge of tears.
You can go and hide under the rock, in the cave. We won't tell nobody. I promise we won't. They'll just go if they don't see you here.
Still no answer. The fingers, callused with work and killing. Moving like acrobats with the bullets, each clinking sharply and just-so into the magazine. He'd filled four of them – six of them – eight of them. He kept filling them.
The boy tried to say something, but the clerk cut them both off.
Go unlock the store, but turn off all the lights. Go hide. Not in Unk's cave. They might know about it. There's a basement under the big empty cardboard box in the stock room. Door swings down, box is real light. Hide in there with the box on top of it. There's food. After you know it's over, wait three days before you come out.
Twelve magazines – fourteen – sixteen – he kept bringing more out of the bag and filling them. There were more than could fit in the back pouch at that point. He kept filling them.
Kayla ran away sobbing – the boy stayed.
Are you gonna die?
I reckon probably.
Why don't you run?
I am running.
Who are they?
It doesn't matter.
Who are you?
It doesn't matter.
Well it matters to me!
He turned and looked at the boy. Tears in the boy's eyes, his fists curled into balls.
I know it does. That's why it hurts. That's why things stopped mattering to me. Go now.
The footsteps of the boy fading down the stairs. Quiet, deliberate, perfectly controlled. Stop being proud of that damn kid. Put all of it out of your mind. This is what getting ready to die feels like. This is what it's like to know there isn't any tomorrow.
---
The boy did not say goodbye to his mother. He took Kayla by the hand and dragged her down the street while she sobbed and carried on. There was the old man and his wife around the corner from the motel – they watched lazily from their front porch. The boy looked at them and they just stared back. Nothing in their eyes. Nothing behind them.
Inside some of the houses, the telltale glow of TV sets brought back to life by the clerk's business. He could warn everybody, but there wasn't time. The dark on the western horizon had spread to completely blot out the sun as it dipped toward that resting place. The boy heard the sound of the rain hours before it arrived.
The first drop had not yet fallen when he shoved Kayla down into the cellar, her hands slapping at him, wailing and shrieking in hysterics. He kicked her in the nose and dragged the cardboard box back over the hole, shutting the door behind them. There was a single fluorescent light that buzzed eternally without stopping. Three crates filled with sealed bags of beef jerky, peanut butter, some vitamins, and bottled water. A cot in the corner, and a small bound book laying on it – the boy recognized it as the clerk's.
In the corner was a small, deep hole with the sound of flowing water far down at the bottom, and the boy understood it was for pissing.
He nodded. We've got everything here, for a little while, I reckon.
---
The clerk heard the roar of the vehicles beating their rhythms across the ground. There would be no horses this time. He had a few minutes left. He checked his rig one last time – both guns secure. The horse doll tucked into the very bottom of the back pouch so that it would not fall out while he retrieved mags. He slid the leather jacket back on, then reached for the name tag.
Paused. Looked at it.
J A C K
He hadn't looked at it in what seemed a long time – hadn't read it in what might have been years, for all he'd been counting. Not my name. Not fitting to die that way – mislabeled. That would be ironic, to end misshelved.
He'd cast aside the actual one. He remembered the glint of the pin as it stuck up in the air after it fell to the ground – stabbing his retinas in one last accusation as he turned away from it for the last time.
I wish I hadn't done that. I suppose this is me regretting it at leisure. Have to make do some other way, I reckon. His hands searched inside the bag and dug out a thin black marker.
---
It was by then pitch-black outside, but it did not matter to them, because they could see in the dark. The helicopter did not touch down. It glided two or three dozen feet off the ground and the men in black armor with glowing red goggles and masks and machineguns came down on ropes.
The chopper disappeared above the black clouds. Below came little flashes – deafening thunder following them, but hardly any screams. Surgical. Precise. Calculated. By the time people knew, half the town was dead. By the time people started trying to escape, better than three out of four were dead. When the booted foot of the gentleman struck the ground as he swung off his horse, there were only a few struggling with their last breaths – and then there were the three people in the motel.
One of them was dangerous – the other two were too close to eliminate, at the risk of provoking him before they'd had a chance to chat.
---
The clerk descended the stairs calmly, with the same practiced nonchalance with which he'd waited for the customer to arrive with his late video.
Five of them. Two at the inside of the batwings, machineguns trained on him. Two flanking the fifth – a foppish man sitting at a table facing the stairs. His back to the batwings and the outside. A coy smile on his face. The innkeeper rested his head on the counter – shot through his left eyehole. Blood all over the mirrored back wall of the bar. The innkeeper's hand clutched around a bottle of Bacardi 151. The clerk had not heard the shot. Somebody, the fop probably, had a silencer on something somewhere – and on a very small weapon, too, for there not even to be the high-pressure pop of a gun too big for anything other than a suppressor.
The clerk did not look at any of the men assembled, or at least none of them knew for sure if he was. He wore the circular-frame shades again, his eyes hidden behind them. As he moved forward, his leather jacket swung as if the pockets were weighted down. He clinked noticeably as he pulled out the chair opposite their apparent leader.
They sat that way for a while – the gentleman making no move, the clerk making no move. Both staring at one another. A drip – the innkeeper's blood pattering to the ground over the edge of the counter. Another. The rumble, barely audible, of the chopper as it circled by again, accompanied by a brief snippet of gibberish from the radio at the shoulder of one of the men at the batwings, to which he did not respond.
The gentleman lost his patience first.
This wasn't necessary. I know you blame me, that you're angry and disenfranchised, but options were made available to you earlier and it is not our fault if they were not taken. Your reputation is that of an intelligent man – surely you're intelligent enough to know when you must accept the consequences of your action or inaction.
The clerk continued staring right at him, not moving, not saying anything.
You should feel honored. I'm the last man in Loss Prevention. Aside from a few false alarms, I haven't run across any of you in... I want to say years, but I haven't been counting. It certainly seems like it.
Silence from the clerk.
Fine. You don't want to talk. You're smart like me, so I know you'll listen. That's why we have watched you, you realize. Such anomalies. The rest of the world folded, and you and perhaps a couple hundred others did not. You've come the farthest of any of them. We set up this toy town some time back to catch any of you that wanted to come west. Here you are. Not content to live out your days quietly. Determined to show that you must pick a fight at the slightest and most trivial provocations. Who do you think you are, I wonder?
The clerk leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. Bored. Impatient for it to be over.
Recalcitrance, then. Very well. The offer. He reached into the dapper folds of his jacket, pulling forth what looked like a photograph or postcard. Here – it should explain everything. He slid it across the table to rest before the clerk.
He looked down at it, a dubious expression on his face. With a careful hand, picked it up and turned it over.
A crowded line of people, dressed to the height of fashion, a window behind them looking out upon a city of towering steel and elegantly sloped glass. A movie theater? Concert hall? So many faces, laughing, shouting, looking annoyed, looking worried, looking bored, looking in love.
Among them and one of them, her. Taller. The hair different. The eyes and shape of the face the same. So alien to him, to see a healthy face.
The man from loss prevention gave it a moment. The clerk showed no outward sign of recognition – but he knew he'd hurt the clerk deeper than perhaps he'd ever been hurt before.
It wasn't any difficulty finding her, you know. Oh, it was time-consuming, certainly – took some historical research, some interviews, you realize – but how worth it. I wish we'd taken a picture so you could see how she smiled when we mentioned your name. You could surprise her. Tonight, even.
The clerk looked down at the picture again, then back to the man from loss prevention. He shrugged, shaking his head, and slid the picture back.
I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about.
The man from loss prevention stood to his full height, knocking over the chair he sat on, slamming his hands down the table between them, thrusting his face forward into the clerk's. His eyes glazed over with the redness that had only been telltale in the halflight of the motel. The voice echoing in the clerk's mind though the man's mouth made no movement.
We are not here because we WANT to be, JACK. We are here because you insist on leaving little twos of diamonds on dead men that belong to US and we will LEAVE here with you one of two ways – in our favor or in a bodybag. Tell us, JACK, HOW ARE WE GOING TO GO HOME TONIGHT?
The clerk raised his left hand up to his shades and inched them down his nose just enough to reveal his eyes. The man from loss prevention found himself staring back at two pits of fire as cold as his own. The clerk's hand returned to where it had been – under the table with his other hand – and the man from loss prevention heard two sharp metal clicks just as the clerk's voice spoke independent of his own mouth.
Go home happy.
Two roars simultaneous, bursting from beneath the table. Both the fop's thumbs blown from his hands. Blood, fat, bone, splinters, smoke in his eyes. One of the severed extremities bouncing off his cheek. He felt the fingerprint of the thumb on his cheek but did not feel the cheek on the tip of his thumb. The redness fading from them as he heard some inhuman howl. His own voice rising in panic. When he could see again he found himself staring at the vacant spaces where they used to be.
A deep-throated yell, the panicked shouts of the other four men and so many gunshots. The man from loss prevention felt the table fall on his knee – he realized he was on the ground in a sitting position. The clerk's guns pounded bullets into the two men that had flanked the thumbless man. Goggles shattering and issuing forth blood. The impossible force of the .45 ACP drilling straight through the body armor and burying in flesh. The two men collapsing in heaps with the machineguns spraying randomly and then dying.
The clerk crouched behind the table as the two other guards alternated between screaming into their radios and firing in his general vicinity. When they both clicked empty he stood and emptied the forty-fives into them.
Magazine releases – let them fall to the ground, don't bother going for them. Hit the slide release on the right and holster it. Reach into the right jacket pocket for another mag and jam it in, give the slide a little tug and let it slap home. Holster it. Out with the right gun. Left jacket pocket for a mag and jam it in, jack the slide good. Left gun back out and we're hot.
He looked down at the cringing form of the man from loss prevention. Blood flowing freely from the wounds. Making a noise like a trapped rabbit. The clerk looked over at the batwings, then down at him again.
Tell me how many. Don't lie... you've got plenty more little pieces I can shoot off.
Please don't... please, I'll...
Can. you assholes. understand. how much. I HATE. BEGGING.
F-fifty. Brought f-f-fiffty.
I reckon you brought about a thousand too few. He stooped down and unhooked the radio from one of the men fallen to the ground. The guard gasped at the clerk's touch. The clerk shot him in the head, the bullet striking the interior of the guard's helmet and bending the metal outward. He clicked on the radio.
I will kill all of you. It is already too late to run or to beg or to apologize. I am wrath heretofore unseen, and when I am through with each and every one of you, I will write down your names and I will seek out your children and your families and your friends, and I will one by one describe to them how each of you died before I kill them, too. I will burn your city to the ground, forever snuff out the light you have made at the end of the world at the detriment and to the suffering and through the betrayal of those who live outside of it. And when you arrive in hell, it will be my face you see first.
As he spoke he grabbed the thumbless man by the back of the shirt and dragged him behind the counter, throwing him into a corner. Before he'd finished his speech, he had the belt of one of the dead guards over one shoulder. As he signed off, the entire front of the motel shattered as an ocean of bullets struck it in unison. Glass shattering. The slats on the batwings bursting and flying across the room, altered in their course by yet more lead. Chairs and tables swept aside by the tide of metal sweeping through the room.
The clerk laid prone and covered his ears as the gunfire rattled like a hailstorm. Finally, silence punctuated by bits of falling plaster and the delicate noise of splinters settling to the ground.
He turned to the man from loss prevention, who was going into shock and could not move.
I want you to know that all silent treatment and de-thumbing aside, I really appreciate you coming out here today. I didn't think I had a reason to live. Now I reckon I do, and it's all because of that nice bit of candid photography you showed me. That's why I'm going to make sure to come back and take my time killing you proper, after I'm done with this rush job on your friends. Don't go anywhere now.
Outside there was a sea of red eyes, though mechanical. The chopper hovered low, facing the motel and shining a spotlight across the face, into the wreckage within. The cloud of hot dust defeating infrared imaging – the spotlight meeting with debris fog. The chopper came in closer. The men in their neat little rows and columns advanced, trying the radios again, trying to make contact again.
I want green and gold element to circle around the back – get the tear gas. We're going to smoke the place and then advance up by squads and just breach bang and clear every room until we're sure...
From the gap between the top of the batwings and the door frame came a single object trailing dust in its wake. Striking one of the armored men on the head. A struggle of booted feet to move away from it – some dashing to try to pick it up, but with the goggles it could not be seen amidst the scrambling of feet and the panicked -
Human shrapnel. Hair, blood, teeth, eyes, bits of ceramic plates. Fingers. Smoke and misery. Ringing as ear drums screamed their last.
The chopper's machineguns opened up on the front of the motel, strafing it from side to side. As it swept past the batwings, the clerk strode out of them just at the moment he was safe and hurled the last bottle of the innkeeper's at the cockpit, a lit rag stuffed down the neck. The pilot shouted into his radio as the bottle burst across the cockpit window.
The clerk looked upon the writhing mass of confusion and dismemberment and horror before him. He'd hit them with the whole belt of four grenades. He'd never seen what that could do to fifty people all standing in a neat crowd before. A single moment of reflection that was not regret. I did warn you.
The forty-fives had waited for just such a sea of immobile, helpless targets. They could not kill enough to be satisfied – not ever. He'd shot them until their firing pins turned to ashes and he'd replaced those – until he'd needed to figure out how to replace the barrels. Thousands and thousands of rounds he must have shot. Never aiming with particular care. What need? Fire enough and you'll hit – hit once and the story is over.
He turned them loose and they ended so many stories. The brass casings flashing in the red of the fire on the out-of-control chopper. Impossible in the roiling chaos to tell which men were in the act of dying and which were dead and which only thought they were as they struggled toward the outside, only to meet with those so disoriented they thought out was in.
He clicked empty as the chopper plowed into a squat little building kitty corner from the motel and exploded grandly, flinging rotors and fire and debris into the street. The process was so practiced that he didn't need to watch his hands as they did their work. The guns out and hot again and he hadn't moved an inch. Had made no attempt to seek cover or show in the least that he expected to be answered.
Some of them were coming around, and one aimed a wild salvo at the clerk, scything across the front of the motel. Missing him, blasting the top hinge off the right batwing so that it dangled down like when Jerry slams Tom in the mouth with a sledgehammer and Tom's teeth sort of dangle before they all fall out.
He pointed the forty-fives in the general direction of the offender and unleashed a torrent of hatred and lead. Only two of the bullets hit the man, but they popped both his lungs, and the rest hit a pair of troops trying to get up. Others were firing, and he knew it was time to move. There was a gap to his left – away from the video store, but he would have to take it – the helicopter was burning down everything to his right.
The clerk darted forward as if to run and the gunfire tracked in front of him – he slowed back to a double-time walk and strafed them until he'd emptied the pistols again. Mags falling to the ground and he reloaded while moving.
Pain in a single flash, right in the meat of his right arm. He had the left gun reloaded already, and pointed it at the troop. He was right there in the shadows – the clerk hadn't seen him in the blackness. He shot the man four times in the stomach, forcing his back up against the wall of the building with the force of the bullets. The troop stumbled to stay on his feet, to lift his rifle again to get off another three-round burst. The clerk shot him once more. Snap back goes the head. What light in the eyes... how it vanishes to where we know not, and how the body so balefully crumples.
He was down another street and behind the building and momentarily at least out of their immediate range. He heard their enraged and fearful footfalls. They had some semblance of tactics left – coming at him from both sides of the building. He wound up his leg and kicked in the back door, ducking inside as another arc of bullets tore the air behind him. Keep reloading. Don't run. Damned if you can aim while you're running.
He reloaded the right gun. There were dead people in the place already – machinegunned down by the invaders. They knew the layout already, then, and wouldn't be afraid to hit the place again. He didn't have time to examine the wound. Grabbed a chair and hurled it through the back door – machineguns chattering as they fired at anything that moved – some of them shot each other in the confusion as they attacked it in a pincer. The clerk turned to the front door as three men came in and shot and shot until he was empty again, spilling their bodies into the street head over heels, shattered rag dolls in heavy armor in the dust.
Front door clear. He still did not run as he reloaded. Hot again just as the first one of them overcame the confusion and rage from the chair ruse and burst past the back door, firing wildly and inaccurately. The clerk was in the act of shedding the leather jacket – now a burden without any ammunition left in the pockets. He hurled it at the troop, then pulled both guns free and gave each trigger three quick pulls. The bullets burst through the leather as the man struggled to get it off of him. He fell dead – the only body anyone had taken the trouble to cover.
More followed, the clerk backing out the front door and firing at the bottlenecked enemy until he again clicked empty. Another stinging bite – this one in the right ankle. He bit back a cry of pain and stepped off to the right. Stumbling on the damaged foot. The hands still doing what they did – now reaching back for the pouch to get at the mags. They were whispering to one another, trying to figure out some avenue of attack – maybe a dozen of them left at the very most, maybe less.
He backed toward the video store. The fire of the helicopter to his left and behind. Backing slowly, the right foot seizing and complaining. God, I fucking hate getting shot.
A grenade. He had long enough to realize it was a flash-bang. Closed his eyes. Wait for the explosion, and just hit them. The inside of his eyelids flashed with the color of his veins and his ears went numb and he pulled the triggers. Opening his eyes he saw them pour out of the building. His own bullets popping along the frame of the door and some burying themselves in the faces and chests and arms and legs of the last of them.
He reached the courtyard, took cover behind one of the trees as their machineguns ripped across the whole face of the world. Wood shrapnel raked across the back of his neck. He thought he felt a bullet graze his left shoulder.
DO YOU FUCKING KNOW HOW MUCH I FUCKING HATE GETTING SHOT?!
He was hot again as he stepped from the tree and fired at anything that had the shape of a man. Half a dozen of them went down while they reloaded. The others didn't have any ammunition left. Fumbled for grenades as the clerk advanced on them, reloading with his last mags. They couldn't drop a grenade that close. One of them remembered he had a sidearm in time to put a bullet in the clerk's left side before catching one in the throat.
The clerk caught another in the right collarbone as he clicked empty. His last bullet turned a man's face into the gruesome sort of smiling cross-section of flesh/fleshlessness found in medical textbooks. One of them was alive for sure. On the ground, wailing as blood burst forth from a stomach wound. The clerk stumbled over to him.
Lifted his left boot above the shrieking man's throat.
Quit complaining.
---
He had enough strength in his ravaged shell of a body to reload the 1911s a final time. Enough left to walk the town and make sure he hadn't missed any of them. Blood seeping from everywhere. A haze of pain. The world spinning with it – the ground uneven with it.
He checked on the thumbless loss prevention fop. There had been a silenced pistol, tucked right next to where the photo had been. In a move that brought a touch of bemused admiration to the clerk, he had somehow eaten a bullet without the use of his thumbs – it was no mean feat.
Spurn my friendship? I'm hurt. He spat across the dead man's face.
Back to the store. The first soft drips of rain. He would be dead in minutes. I'm sorry. I gave up for so long, and when I saw you again it was already too late. I'd already let them take me. I'm sorry. His hand reached into the back pouch, dislodging magazines onto the ground behind him, closing around the pony doll. I was so stupid to give up. You can't even forgive me. You'll never even know.
He sat, his back to the fountain rim, resting. Pain draining out. Eyes becoming heavy. In one hand, the pony doll. In the other, a gun. Always a gun.
A fat raindrop spattered on the name tag. He let go of the gun and lifted the other hand to cradle the name tag. So ironic, for a video store clerk to go to his maker misshelved.
It rains now. To weep for a hero's passing or to give life to whatever might have survived his final rampage. She will not see the name beneath the sheltering hand across his chest. But if we look, we may be privy to it.
