A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous (16 page)

Big Karl turned away from his wife and stomped around in a circle, still whooping maniacally. It was as though he was bursting from the inside with gallons of adrenaline, or perhaps some potent drug racing through his veins. His eyes bulged and veins stood out along his temples and forearms like virulent earthworms burrowing beneath his skin.

Junior’s senses slowly returned as he lay there. The Pulaski lay on the floor next to the rest of his father’s forgotten firefighting equipment. Big Karl stopped at the opposite wall, his back to them, grunting and growling and punching holes through the drywall. Junior wiggled his extremities, making sure he could still feel them. He reached for the Pulaski and stumbled to his feet, a shower of sparks exploding in his vision.

Big Karl pummeled the wall, leaving bloody streaks on the edges of the holes, while mumbling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” He turned and took a step forward but stopped when he saw Junior, wobbly on his feet, the Pulaski high in the air. Big Karl sidestepped just enough, a slight tilt back and to the right, so the axe-end of the Pulaski just missed his face. He brought his left hand up to catch it, but instead the blade landed in the meat between his middle and ring fingers, and did not stop until it struck the top of his radius bone at the wrist.

Blood sprayed from the wound and covered Junior. It ran in his eyes and he staggered back, wiping at them. When he could see again, Big Karl was gone, the Pulaski on the floor in a pool of red. Junior stood in the middle of the apartment listening to the intensifying chaos outside, the Great Awakening whipping up toward a crescendo. He swayed on his feet and tried to maintain consciousness.

He had no idea how long he stood there. The next image he could recall was sitting on the floor, blood from his broken mouth splatting on the carpet between his legs. Marie’s screams barely registered in his mind. She pulled at his arms and spoke to him, and the memory of her tear-streaked face as she dragged him out of the apartment clouded his mind as he tried once more to sleep.

The world changed that day, a little over a year ago, April 23
^rd
, the Venerated Day of the Great Awakening on the Hallmark calendar. The one-year anniversary “celebration” had lasted more than a month, but with so many holidays in between, it was impossible to tell when one excuse for bedlam ended and the next began. The world was an orgy of violence and destruction and lawlessness, but only one of the 365 holidays mattered at all to Junior now.

Father’s Day was tomorrow.

IN THE MONTH AFTER the Great Awakening, Junior lost track of Marie. It was a dark time that he found more difficult to remember with each passing day, as though none of it much mattered after what Big Karl had done to them. He spent most of the last twelve months lost, above ground and below, where many sought a respite from the depravity topside, but found only a darker version had sprouted up underground. Once Junior knew what he would do, he had searched for weeks until he found Marie, in an abandoned subway tunnel that had been repurposed as a marketplace for vice. He barely recognized her at first. She looked like an old black-and-white photographic version of herself.

“You’ll have to move the cover,” she said, rousing him from his mind fog. “It’s too heavy for me.”

Junior climbed the slick ladder to the sewer grate and pressed against it, using all of his strength to lift the heavy iron disk and slide it away enough so they could pass. He clambered up and then reached back to aide his sister.

He stood and looked around the alley, listening to the din of random gunfire and shouting male voices on a nearby main street. The day’s revelry was beginning again. “I haven’t been topside in some time,” he said.

“Neither have I.” Marie looked around nervously, checking the dark corners and doorways along the alley that the waning afternoon sun failed to penetrate.

When she turned back to Junior, he was gone. “Junior?” “Hey, baby.”

A drunk appeared from a doorway behind her and stumbled up the alley, his left foot dragging along the ground, disturbing the trash and sodden ticker tape from forgotten parades. Marie backed away, eyes darting around for something to defend herself with.

“Where you going, bitch?”

Before she could respond, Junior sprang from behind a flipped-over dumpster, the Polack a blur through the air. The sharpened tip entered the back of the drunk’s neck and burst through the other side. He froze for a moment, his eyes bulging. The liquor bottle in his left hand clattered to the ground as he clawed at his throat, his mouth opening and closing silently like a dying fish. Junior put a foot in the small of the man’s back and kicked him forward, off of the Polack. Blood coated the cracked brick wall to his right as if it had been dispensed from a paint sprayer. Junior picked up the liquor bottle, wiped the mouth with his shirt, and held it up to the light to see its contents. Then he drained what liquid had not spilled on the ground and tossed the empty bottle on top of its former owner.

Marie stood aside as Junior passed and said, “Aren’t you just a chip off the old block?”

Junior grasped her throat and hissed in her face, hot and boozy. “Don’t you ever say that again.”

He immediately regretted doing it and backed off, unable to look Marie in the eyes. She stood rubbing her neck, watching him. “You really hate him, don’t you?”

Heat flushed into his cheeks. “Don’t you?”

She responded immediately. “Yes.”

“Then let’s go find him.” Junior grabbed her by the elbow, not as rough as before, and guided her toward the sound of merrymaking on the next block.

JUNIOR LEANED THE POLACK next to him and watched the parade through a fist-sized hole in the cinderblock wall of what had once been a Chinese market. Men in flamboyant suits walked alongside and danced atop a trailer being pulled by a pickup truck outfitted with metal grates over the windows. The trailer was adorned with torn, dirty bunting and a sign, which had been written on and painted over several times. The misspelled words “Celabrashun of Pullies and Levers” had been hastily crossed out with black spray paint. Above those letters, in the same spray paint, had been written “Festivul Of Archers.”

At the front of the float, a man hung from a metal pole, swaying from a chain affixed to the top and strung under his arms and back around his neck, looking like a human tetherball. The truck lurched forward, the driver gunning the engine whenever a reveler crossed in front of his path. He ran one man’s leg over and the crowd cheered when the man fell to the ground in agony. He lay in the street screaming until another man in filthy white pants and heavy-soled boots kicked him in the teeth. He lay there spitting the contents of his mouth onto the pavement in silence as the party moved on without him.

Screams from the man on the pole drew Junior’s attention back to the procession as it passed directly in front of the store. The parade goers were armed with all manner of bows and arrows and crossbows, and they randomly fired bolts into their captive’s non-vital organs. He began to resemble a voodoo doll, or a pincushion. The bed of the trailer was slick with his blood and he moaned in soft agony when his voice gave out. The centerpiece of the Festival of Archers celebration.

Junior scanned the crowd for the one face he cared to see. Among them, a full head above the rest, strode Big Karl. He lingered toward the back of the procession, watching everything unfolding before him, a smirk on his clean-shaven face. He was dressed in a fine looking suit, and Junior thought there was an emblem stitched onto the breast of the jacket, but he couldn’t tell from that distance.

“There he is,” Junior said.

Marie peeked around the edge of a broken window and looked at the crowd who whooped and laughed and hurled catcalls and arrows at the man on the pole. After a moment, she slipped away from the window, back into the shadows. “How will you do it?”

Junior thought a moment, counting the men walking with Big Karl. While he watched the parade, his men watched everything else. In his mind, Junior saw it unfold. He was quick and, with the Polack in his hand, he was a killing machine. He would wait for them to pass and slip out to the street, come in from behind low and fast, using the settling dusk as his cover. He only needed one swing. Anything that happened after that didn’t matter.

Junior slipped his boots off to maintain the advantage of stealth, eyes still locked on Big Karl and the parade. He said to Marie, “You should go now. This will be done in less than a minute and you don’t want to be around when it’s over. Big Karl will be dead and that will be that.”

Marie did not respond. He waited for her to say something, put up some kind of protest, but she remained silent. He reached for the Polack and turned to look at her one last time, to tell her goodbye. At the same moment he realized the leather-wrapped handle of the Polack was not where he had left it, a red streak entered his field of vision. Heavy metal struck him on the right cheek and a burst of stars exploded in his head just before he passed out.

JUNIOR AWOKE TO INTENSE pain running down his arms into his shoulders. He looked up at each hand, clamped tight by thick metal cuffs, which were anchored into a wall by chains. His feet just barely scraped the ground and he put his weight on his toes, trying to take the strain off his wrists. His toes and calves instantly began to burn and cramp.

“Lookie who’s awake.”

Big Karl stepped from the shadows into the pale light of a single bare bulb in the ceiling just above Junior. He stood with his arms crossed at his chest, just below the official seal of the Hallmark Society, embroidered on the left breast of his navy blue jacket. He leaned down to look into Junior’s half-open left eye. “I was starting to wonder if you would come around.”

Junior spoke slowly, trying to enunciate around the swollen bulge that was the right side of his face. “Love the suit. Real Hallmark man now, huh?”

Big Karl ran a hand over the emblem on his jacket. “Yeah, you like that? Pretty snazzy. You remember the old guy in the apartment next door to us? Always banged on the wall because he thought we were making too much noise? Turns out he was a hell of a tailor. A real whiz with his hands. I’ve got them in a jar somewhere, in fact. I should have had a couple more suits made up first, but oh well.” His face lit up with a huge, deranged smile. “Live and learn.”

“You some kind of boss man now?”

“You could say that.”

“Pretty proud of yourself, huh?”

The big smile faded a bit. “Pride’s got nothing to do with it.”

“With what, murder? Mayhem? That’s what your Hallmark Society is all about, isn’t it?”

Big Karl shook his head. “You don’t seem to understand much, do you? We at Hallmark celebrate living. Life comes and goes. But
while
you’re alive, every day should be a celebration.”

“How is stringing up a man and shooting him full of arrows a celebration of life?”

Big Karl’s smile turned into a crooked grin and his face went from friendly to devious with the slightest adjustment of his eyebrows. “The world was already going to hell in a hand basket before Hallmark. We just help people get through each day they have left. Some folks accept this gift. Others don’t. We have no time for those who don’t.”

“So people have one choice? Become the murderer or the victim.”

The smile returned but the eyebrows remained angered, sending a chill through Junior.

“I see you’ve made your decision on which to be,” Big Karl said. “Gotten pretty damn good at it, too, from what I hear.”

Junior imagined Marie somewhere nearby, suffering a similar fate, or worse. “Where’s Marie? What did you do to her?”

“Marie? I think she should be the last of your worries. Marie will get what’s coming to her.”

Junior roared at his father and pushed off the wall with his feet, flailing a kick at Big Karl that didn’t come within three feet. He slammed back against the hard wall and felt most of the fight leave him along with the air in his lungs. He hung there, the cuffs biting into his wrists, his chest heaving. Big Karl leaned in close, laughing.

“I never did get you, kid. You always defied me, no matter what it was. Take out the trash, help me chop your mother’s head off. Didn’t matter, you never would go along.”

Big Karl held out his left hand, shrouded in a black leather glove, and said, “How about now, son? I’ll give you one last chance. Join me and we’ll rule the galaxy together as father and son.”

Junior tried to spit on him, but struggled to pucker properly due to the pain in his face. Instead, the saliva just dribbled from his lips and down the front of his shirt. He turned his head away from Big Karl, who laughed again. “That was from an old movie. Before your time, though, I guess.”

“Tell me, you bastard. What have you done with her?”

Big Karl just stood there smiling, his hands in the pockets of his nice blue suit. He remained that way for a moment with a wistful look on his face before turning to his right and nodding his head.

Marie appeared from the darkness. She sauntered up to their father and placed a hand on his shoulder. She laid her head against his arm and they both smiled at Junior. “Happy Father’s Day, daddy,” she said.

Big Karl kissed her forehead and walked away. “Thank you, baby. I’m glad you’re back.”

“Me too.” He handed her the Polack and she watched him as he left the room. Then she turned back to Junior, who sputtered and choked on his confusion.

“Sorry, Junior,” she said. “It’s a brave new world. Gotta do what you gotta do.”

Marie spit into her hands and rubbed them together, then hefted the Polack over her head and reared back twice, measuring the feel of it. Once satisfied, she sucked in a deep breath and swung hard, gritting her teeth, sending the honed spike into Junior’s screaming mouth.

SEEING RED

by Chris Lewis Carter

O
ur company picnic is almost over when my boss climbs the makeshift stage built alongside a wall of cresting sand dunes. He wrenches the microphone free from its stand, causing a whine of feedback that jolts the crowd to attention.