Killherkillherkillherkillherkillherkillherkillherkillherkillherkillherkillher.
Now he was fully choking her. She'd destroyed his crew, one by one, and now she was taunting him. He'd killed plenty of times before, so this was no different, but still it felt like he was losing a part of himself. The bitch had gotten the best of him, something that was traumatic in its own special way.
If Dan was still alive, he would have used his favorite phrase, echoing inside of Marcus’ head like the little imp was still alive:
she got yer goat, didn’t she Marcus? Got yer goat real good.
As he tightened his knuckles up around the snickering bitch’s throat,
Marcus thought of the first time he killed an animal, choking the family Labrador until it sunk its baby teeth into his palm. The mutt resisted, delivering the best fight it could manage, but gave in rather quickly. Humans had a much larger fight in them Marcus found, but this tart didn't have an iota of that. She seemed to be enjoying her death. Or enjoying
something
.
He loosened his hands
. The grin would not leave her face.
"Gotcha," she said, gasping for breath, still clutching her ears.
“I gotcha. You don’t even know it, but I gotcha.”
"What do you
---"
And then
an eerie wooziness, and then a sticky red, plopping in the snow, and then the darkness.
Chapter
Five
He hadn’t realized that he was already dead by the time he’d reached her. A dead man walking, but consumed by viciousness.
She had taken another shot. She wasn’t sure how, but she’d taken another shot, and it was a perfect hit. For all she could remember between the shock of her ears ringing (ringing, hell, they were screeching) and the moment she struck the ground, she might have dropped the gun and pulled the trigger by accident. Or maybe it was blind luck. Or maybe it was a higher power. It was a stray shot, either way, and it had plugged him right in the chest.
Bang.
Baldy was dead.
It was the cold that had puzzled him so. It was so damn frigid that he hadn’t a clue that there was a bullet lodged in his chest, his body numb and in shock. Psychos like The Shiny Bald One were so out of touch with the real world that they couldn’t grasp simple concepts like “I’m hot” or “I’m cold” or “I’ve got a bullet in my chest.” So filled with rage was he that he couldn’t see anything but Annie’s face, smirking at him from the distance, goading him to finish her off.
His body slumped to the ground as a pulse of blood flowered inside of his jacket, dripping down his front side into the pristine, but well trampled on, snow.
“Good night, asshole,” she whispered, wishing her ears would stop ringing soon.
*
* *
Annie stepped past The Shiny Bald One's body. Part of her wanted to spit on his corpse for all he had done, but she retained her civility long enough to get past him, to leave him behind to rot, as he damn well deserved.
A wave of philosophical puttering drifted through her head.
What made a person turn to such vulgar actions? What made a person so innately horrible? Were they born that way or did the environment (be it snow, or bad parenting, or economics) trigger it? It was an age-old question and one that Annie hadn't the heart to consider any deeper. Regardless of how Shiny started out, she knew one thing for certain...
He was dead.
She was free.
Not just escaped, but free.
Free of all the lunatics who sought to do her harm.
"I survived," she whispered to nobody in particular, realizing that she was probably approaching the corner of Crazy and Cuckoo
, slowly but surely. "I survived," she said again, putting one foot in front of the other as she guided herself towards The Yeti and Shiny's snowmobiles. She could only hope that there was enough gas to stretch the last mile or so to her house.
She thought:
I beat those fuckers. This is the part where the cops show up and put one of those warm blankets around me. This is the part where they put me in a helicopter and fly me to safety. This is the part where the credits roll.
Annie couldn't help the smile that kept surfacing on her face. She couldn't be sure that Paulie and Christian were okay, but she was almost certain that they were. She'd defeated the evil-doers
, and so the reward awaited her.
A gust of wind picked up, driving her backwards with a chilly blast of snow.
Just enough to remind her optimism that she wasn’t quite through the ordeal yet. Still one more mile to go and anything could happen in that mile.
She looked to the
milky sky, praying for that cinematic helicopter to take her this last stretch.
No
luck. The usually helpful cops were in their houses, abandoning the duty to protect and serve. The police department in her town probably had one or two snowmobiles and they were most likely being put to use with selfish purposes. The world's rescuers had all run away, tucking their tails between their legs and thinking only about number one. They couldn't be blamed though--this storm spelled out the end of the world, after all. And if the world was ending, then why bother with hired duties or careers? Annie would have done the same thing.
As if on cue, the snow
got heavier once again, blasting through the trees as if it was being created by a huge machine. Though the temperatures had warmed a few degrees, the storm itself kept battling.
It’s the damn aliens. They’ve got a huge freakin’ snow machine. They just want to go skiing
, she thought. Annie accused extraterrestrials of the storm on more than one occasion. Tony had laughed at the notion, but there was something in his eyes that said he might have believed it, if given some time for it to settle in. There was no other explanation, even still, it was as good as any other.
When would
it stop? She was sick of asking herself that.
Never
, that’s when. Never. Annie knew that now. It would
never
stop. Not in her lifetime. Maybe in Paulie's, but not in hers. She would die in the snow. They’d all die in the snow, every last human being.
The Yeti's (or maybe it was Shiny's, she could not recall) snowmobile started right up.
It hummed better than the other one, so she took that as a good sign. Perhaps it was more fuel efficient than the first one. The key had a little chain hanging off it, and it said "OUTTA MY WAY, PUSSIES!"
Fitting. Very fitting,
thought Annie.
"Outta my way," she said to herself, revving the motor and pushing herself through the steadily accumulating snow, looking in the direction of Main Street,
and beyond that, her home, and towards her family.
Part V- HOMECOMING
When Paulie woke up, he found the boots. He put them on immediately, marching around the room in them.
He couldn’t resist looking at himself in the mirror to see how much he looked like a cowboy. He was freezing his
patootie
(as his mother would have said) off, but the boots made him feel warm. Such a nice gift. Eggah was the best! And even better, he didn't have to pay for them like he thought he’d have to. He could pass them on to his daddy for a gift, to make him more like a
scallion
. Just like Eggah. He couldn't wait to see his father's face. For Christmas, Paulie and his mother had picked out a bright red power saw for a gift, but his father didn't seem too thrilled about it. He'd seemed mad about the gift, actually. Paulie wasn't sure why. They were always fighting lately, even about gifts, which seemed just plain crazy.
But these boots... if they didn't make hi
s father smile, then nothing would.
Paulie took off the boots and got on his knees. He sniffed
inside the boots. They smelled just like Eggah; like a big, sweaty scallion.
When he came down the stairs, Eggah didn't even mention the boots.
Like he forgot all about it already. Eggah said that his daddy was sick and that he needed his rest. The night before, he hadn’t looked all that sick to Paulie. Maybe a little tired, but not sick. In fact, Paulie couldn't remember his father ever being sick, even the time he ate a whole platter of deviled eggs at a family cookout and his face turned purple.
Paulie asked for breakfast, but Eggah only growled at him.
Very cranky! Very rude! This made Paulie cry, so much so that he couldn't even see straight, his eyes all blurry from the tears. Eggah was being a meanie and Paulie didn't like it one bit.
He thanked Eggah for the boots, but Eggah only yelled louder
after that. His new friend calmed down some, once he started taking more drinks from the big bottle that daddy usually kept hidden.
Eggah drank a lot of the bottle and burped. He said that, "It's time you start callin' me your Dad." Paulie had stopped crying by this point, but something in the way Eggah said those words made him want to cry again. But he didn't. He felt like it would make
Eggah mad again.
Maybe, thought Paulie, he was angry because he wanted his boots back.
Maybe he changed his mind. Suddenly, the boots made him feel really guilty.
"When
a big person talks at ya’, then you gotta talk back, ya’ hear?"
Paulie nodded, but he wasn't sure why. He felt like he shouldn't have
given in with a nod. "Can't hear you?"
"Yes, Eggah."
"Not Edgar. Not anymore.
Dad
. You're going to call me Dad, just like I called my own pop. You got it?"
"Daddah's my daddah," Paulie protested, causing Eggah's face to turn bright red. He looked like he was eating spicy peppers, like the time his grandparents took Paulie out for
Mezzican
food. "Daddah's sick? Daddah’s in the hospital?" Changing the subject never hurt things too much, especially when an adult was sore at you.
"I'm your Dad now.
Don’t act like a retard."
"No
t," Paulie started to say, a new set of tears bursting out of the corners of his eyes. "My Daddah."
Eggah snapped,
"Your Daddah's
dead
. You know what that means, ya' little shit? You know what dead means? D-E-D, he’s dead as all get-out."
Yes.
Paulie knew what dead was. Just like S.A., the chinchilla. Just like his mom's great aunt Trudy. Just like the caterpillar he found in the driveway that time, all squished, sticky, and messy. Dead meant it wouldn’t ever play again. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t take naps. Wouldn’t do anything fun. Dead was dead, and nothing else happened after something was dead.
No, h
is daddy wasn't dead. People died when they got really old and gray and have wrinkles all over their bodies. That's what his daddy had told him. His mother had said the same thing. The thing that Eggah was saying was a big lie.
"
Got a thick skull on you. Now that I’m bein’ a’charged with learnin’ you something, I’ll get that skull fixed up just right, you bet."
Paulie went into a full eruption of tears now.
T
hat was when Eggah got super-mad. He said something about his own daddy again (
heleftmeyoushitheleftmeandnowyoursleftyoutoobutyouluckedthefuckoutwithme!!!
), and that's when he started to hurt Paulie. It didn't hurt too badly at first, when he whacked him in the arm with a wooden spoon from on top of the stove. Then he picked up a metal thingy, something that looked flat and square. It was the thing his mommy made peanut butter and jelly pancakes with.
The flat thing for making pancakes hurt a lot. Eggah hit Paulie in the back of his legs and
he fell down on his knees, crying out for his real daddy (not this mean, mean man that wanted Paulie to call him something he wasn't). The meanie hit him three more times, each time a little harder than the last. Paulie wanted to be dead, just like Eggah said his father was. It hurt so bad that Paulie closed his eyes, sobbing into the iced over floor tiles. His tears froze and stuck to his cheeks. That hurt almost as bad as the pancake-thing.
“What are you gonna call me, son?” Eggah asked, pacing around the kitchen, practicing swings with the
metal flipper. “Gonna call me your pop?”
Before
Paulie could respond, he started to see stars in his eyes. His chest was going up and down, like he couldn’t breathe at all. He couldn’t speak because he couldn’t get any air in his lungs.
This only made Eggah madder.
When he hit Paulie the next time, on the back of the head, everything went dark.
Paulie slept.