Processed cheese, p.32
Processed Cheese, page 32
“Friends of the family,” Crankcase said. “Okay, let’s make this interesting. Tell me, who’d you like to kill?”
“Me?” said Graveyard.
“You’re the one I’m looking at.”
“Well, at the moment, no one really. I’m a peaceful soul.”
“Cut the crap, Graveyard. I’ve known you too long. Everybody’s got at least one person in their life they wouldn’t mind taking a free shot at. For example, right now, if I could get away with it, I’d be happy to drill that piece of doo I just kicked out of here earlier today. Planet couldn’t help but be a more agreeable place without his nonsense in it. So right now, who’s the piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe?”
“Well, given no choice in the matter, I guess there might be a single special someone, now that I think of it.”
Crankcase spread one of the zombie sheets across the top of the table. He took a black marker from his shirt pocket and bent over. “Name?”
“He calls himself Mr. BlisterPac.”
Crankcase started printing in bold caps across the zombie’s decaying forehead.
“Leave off the k at the end,” said Ambience. “He’s the product of creative spelling.”
“I didn’t know that,” Graveyard said.
“It’s what it said on his business card.”
“Never noticed.”
“All right,” said Crankcase. “Your turn, Ambience.” He pulled out a second sheet and prepared to write.
“You know, I think I’m most comfortable with just plain Anonymous,” she said. “Anonymous Zombie.” Crankcase wrote. Then he took a third sheet and printed across the top in big block letters: LOOPHOLE. “Something personal for me,” he said. He looked around as if to check that everyone was there who was supposed to be there. “All right, now, let’s do her.” He had them put in earplugs. He had them put on earmuffs. Then he led them from the cafeteria to a door into a tunnel that led to another door and then a third door after that and at last they entered the telltale musk and crack of the range itself. They each chose a lane and a gun out of Graveyard’s bag. Crankcase, of course, opted for the Smashnikov. He let the gun settle into his arms, checked the heft and balance. “It’s a good fit,” he said.
“I’ll stick with the BoxcarSystem 20/10,” Graveyard said. His longtime favorite.
“The sniper’s friend,” said Crankcase.
Ambience chose the LampLighter 505, the weapon, incidentally, most favored by mass shooters in schools, office buildings, theaters, and churches. It did the job.
“Big firepower for the little lady,” Crankcase said.
“Why take prisoners?” she said.
They found their various ammo boxes and stepped up to the line. Crankcase clipped the individual zombie portraits to the overhead carriers and ran each one out to about twenty-five yards.
“Fire when ready,” he said. “Single rounds. Take out the head first. You know with zombies you got to go for the head.”
So they assumed their positions and began. Plink, plink. Plink, plink, plink. Very measured. Very polite. Then they stopped and pressed the buttons and the paper targets came rattling back to them. Crankcase had a nice tight cluster in the middle of Loophole’s decaying forehead. Graveyard’s BlisterPac displayed a scattered acne of lethal hits all across his livid flat face. All Ambience’s shots, however, were centered solely dead center on the hapless Anonymous’s bulging bloodshot eyes.
“Wow!” said Crankcase. “Look at little Annie Oakley here.” Both eye sockets had been completely obliterated. “Even if they’re still alive after such quality shooting, they sure as hell can’t see a damn thing.”
“I hate zombies,” said Ambience.
“When the apocalypse erupts,” Crankcase said, “I want to be on your team.”
“Sure. I’ll put you on the waitlist.”
“I look forward to the outbreak.”
They reloaded with fresh magazines. “All right,” Crankcase said. “Full automatic now. Tear the hell out of those zombies.” They took their places. They began firing. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. The explosion of sound was so abrupt, so fierce, so continuous that everyone in the room not only heard it through their ear protection, they also felt it through their skin. People in other lanes stopped their own shooting and stepped back to get a clear look at whoever could be responsible for such monstrous firepower. But they could barely see through the thick, enveloping smoke. The din didn’t cease until all the magazines were empty. And still the echo remained.
Crankcase let out a childish whoop and clapped his hands. “That was certainly something,” he said. “Let’s check the damage.” They retracted the targets. Crankcase’s and Graveyard’s zombies were completely obliterated, shreds of paper dangling uselessly in the air. They congratulated each other on their shooting skills. Then they turned to Ambience’s target. At first neither of them spoke. With the heavy LampLighter on full automatic she had managed to draw, as if with a powerful pen, a complete well-formed circle in hundreds of .308 rounds about the silently shrieking head of blind Anonymous.
“Hard-core,” said Crankcase. He couldn’t take his eyes off the mutilated photo. “Don’t want to get in a gunfight with her.”
“No,” Graveyard said, “you certainly don’t.”
And Ambience stood there quietly among two guys with guns and ever so slowly, ever so dramatically unveiled the biggest, broadest smile anyone had seen on her face since its arrival in Randomburg some eleven long days before.
Chapter 21
Deep in The Crevice
Of course, there was a deer’s head mounted to the wall behind the bar. Why should Ambience have expected anything different? The cobwebs strung between the points of the antlers were no big surprise, either. The place was dark—definitely, defiantly dark. Dark reliably fake wood paneling covering the walls, dark espresso Dura-Bomb vinyl sheeting on the floor, dark tiles of an unknown midpriced brand forming an unexpectedly high drop ceiling. In fact, the place looked and felt more like the rustic lobby of a remote hunting lodge than a neighborhood watering hole. The only breaks in the general gloom were the impressive flat screen streaming the early local news from its perch on the wall under the deer’s head and the spare, apartment-size year-round Christmas tree occupying a rear corner next to the entrance to the pissateriums. And even though the tree, too, was obviously fake, it simply looked tired. A sad string of miniature blue LED lights had been carelessly thrown atop the stiff aluminum branches. On the middle shelf behind the bar, which would ordinarily be stocked with bottles of liquor, was an eloquently arranged row of ceramic turtles in various sizes and colors. Very strange. What was that all about? It was early in the day, and The Crevice was relatively quiet, maybe a dozen or so customers scattered about the room, the sort of local types you’d expect to find hunkered down in a small-town bar, drinking an empty weekday afternoon away. Behind the bar, holding court and providing a steady flow of lubricant, was the owner, manager, and self-proclaimed consummate mixologist, Roulette himself. He was also serving up a slightly modified version of the self that had been on display at the family dinner the other night. He was now occupying his workaday retail persona—the ruddy-cheeked, hail-fellow-well-met publican of story and song.
“Once the sun sets and the real drinking starts,” he was saying, “you won’t be able to move in here.”
“It ain’t drinking time yet?” said Graveyard, taking a sip from the freshly minted BroomDuster he held in his hand. The BroomDuster, Roulette’s personal concoction, was the famous specialty of the house. It was a bizarre, fiery blend of closely guarded proportions of gin, vodka, tequila, white rum, lemon juice, white cranberry juice, and simple syrup, which, when completed, looked like a glass of water—“clear, clean, pure, innocent,” Roulette liked to brag, “camouflage for the explosives hidden inside and guaranteed, believe me, to thoroughly dust your broom.” Graveyard was just finishing his third of the day.
“How’s that barn burner working for you?” Roulette said.
“I can feel the shape of my stomach.”
“I can no longer feel anything,” Ambience said. She was seated at the bar on a rickety stool next to her husband, their only company for the moment a solitary woman of indeterminate age at the far end of the bar who had faded ombré hair and a faded face. If this were a movie, she’d be precisely the type of barfly who’d have been hired to fill out this space, occupy that particular bar stool. Only this wasn’t a movie and the woman was real. To Ambience she appeared to be someone it’d be good to know.
“Excellent,” Roulette said. “Isn’t that the point?”
“If you want it to be.”
Listening to his thin country voice, looking at his asymmetrical face, left eye slightly lower than the right, nose broken probably some time ago, one ear sticking out, one ear not, cheeks so red the coloring appeared as artificial as cheap makeup, Ambience was struck even more forcibly by the same observation she’d had at the family dinner: what an odd little man. He seemed assembled out of discarded parts lifted from a Dumpster behind a movieland cyborg plant. Probably located somewhere on a distant planet with an unpronounceable name.
“Alcohol,” he was saying. “The world’s great lubricant. It keeps all the gears running smoothly. Reduces wear and corrosion. Maintains the crucial machinery in tip-top condition. Plus it’s relaxing and just feels damn good. Imagine life without it. Unendurable.”
“You’ve given quite a bit of thought to this,” said Ambience.
“Only my life.”
“What about the people who don’t drink, not interested in it, never been interested in it? What about them? What about their machinery?”
“Sand in the wheels. Debris that needs to be filtered out.”
“Who’s going to be in charge of the filter?” Graveyard said.
“Who else? Drunks.”
“That’s your solution to everything, isn’t it? Put the juiceheads in charge.”
“Got a better idea?”
“No, but I believe Farrago does.”
“What, that ridiculous Leaf Life Line of hers?”
“She’s out to save the world, too, you know.”
“Might help if she saved herself first.”
“Well, a pox on all of us for not being as well put together as you are.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what happened, some glitch in the gene transmission with both of you.”
“But SideEffects, I suppose, got all the proper goodies pure and unadulterated.”
“He’s working, ain’t he?”
There was a long silence.
What could Ambience possibly say now to this man, she said to herself, that both of them could find even minimally interesting enough to sustain a conversational thread that might help kill another few minutes of this excruciatingly long afternoon? It was her turn. She hadn’t a clue.
“I like your tree,” she said, nodding toward the Xmas in the back.
“Put it up myself,” Roulette said, as though the thoughtless placement of that unconvincing stick of wire and plastic were an achievement of which he could be justifiably proud.
“Been there since I was in preschool,” said Graveyard.
“It’s never come down?”
“I like to think,” Roulette said, “that wherever I am, every day is Christmas.”
“Saw the Kemosabe in the lot when we drove in,” said Graveyard. “Looked to be taking up at least two spaces. Didn’t they have a bigger model?”
“Well, you told me, bud, get what you want, and it was even a couple grand below the sticker, too. That’s CosmicEye’s place over on Flatpoint. You remember CosmicEye?”
“The guy who kept snakes in his bedroom until he woke up one night with a Red Barn Strangulator wrapped around his neck? That CosmicEye?”
“The very one.”
On the screen above Roulette’s head appeared a succession of images of the gorge. Standing in front of the actual rock wonder itself was a reporter talking into a microphone. Roulette picked up the remote and turned up the volume. “Randomburg authorities have identified the man who fell to his death last week from the western slope of the Randomburg Gorge,” the reporter was intoning, “as one BlisterPac of Mammoth City. What he was doing on the other side of the guard fence and how he happened to fall are mysteries still being investigated. Any witnesses to this tragic event are asked to please contact the Randomburg police department. This is EpicBlowout reporting for Channel 6 Action News, Randomburg.”
“Can you believe it?” said Roulette. “Imagine dying like that. Probably wasn’t even conscious by the time he hit bottom. Body probably all tore up. People. They’re all such idiots.”
“How old was he?” Graveyard said.
“Old enough to know better. Say, weren’t you out there that day?”
“I don’t know. What day was it?”
“Don’t recall, exactly. Last Thursday or Friday, I think. Tied up half the police and fire departments for most of the day.”
“We saw nothing,” Ambience said.
Graveyard assumed his time-tested concerned face. “Maybe we’d already left by the time he fell.”
“No doubt the big event of our stay.” Ambience matched her husband’s furrowed expression. “And we missed it.”
“We’re always either too early or too late.”
“Our luck.”
“Not like it hasn’t happened before,” said Roulette. “Had some tourist from BadPortage go off the bridge couple months ago. But he was probably a suicide.”
“Maybe this guy was, too,” said Graveyard.
“Sheriff doubts it. They think if he was serious he would’ve taken a dive from a better spot, one with a clear path straight to the ground. All those trees from where he took the plunge, one of ’em could’ve broken the fall. No guarantee he’d be dead.”
“What a disappointment,” Ambience said.
“Such is life,” Roulette said.
Ambience felt like laughing, but she didn’t. Frankly, she often enjoyed being rude, but not now, not at this particular moment. The man was, after all, her father-in-law, and her feelings about him were far more complicated than could be handily untangled with an easy laugh. Almost from the first minute she’d laid eyes on him she had him pegged as a standardized parental dolt (male variation) and had seen or heard nothing since then to alter that original assessment. And, of course, she was not unaware of vestiges of that history woven into the fabric of his son’s life, too. Sometimes she wished humans could recover from their families as easily as animals appeared to. Nippers, she knew, had been employed largely as an emotional garbage can by his previous owners during most of his harrowing kittenhood. He’d come into their life as a hard-used bundle of badly matted fur with a nasty open sore on his right side, a “weepy” eye, and a pronounced limp, also on his right side. But after just three months of tender care in their protective home, all the symptoms vanished. The medicine of a tranquil voice and a soothing touch. Too bad you couldn’t bottle that.
“Where’s the champion of the small businessman?” Roulette was saying. “That’s what I’d like to know. Backbone of the country. What everything’s all about. We’ve become society’s trash heap. Where hope goes to rot. Try to make a decent living today for yourself and your family and watch your dream, along with a ton of cash, get flushed down the poop pipe.”
“You don’t seem to be in want of much,” Graveyard said.
“How do you know what I want?”
“I don’t. Course it does appear to me you got pretty much everything you need.”
“Oh, listen up, boy, don’t assume. I need a lot of stuff.”
“Name one stuff.”
“A Techno Vibrating Chair and Viewing Platform.”
“What the hell is that?”
“The small businessman’s instant staycation and nerve remedy.”
Behind the conversation Ambience heard the ominous approach of a large rumbling bike. It sounded like an oncoming storm trying to work itself up into a single satisfying clap of thunder. A couple of minutes later the front door opened and in walked SideEffects in full rider-boy regalia. On the ever-present Fuck-O-Meter he had today moved up a notch or two since the initial evaluation at dinner. His skin had lost its vaguely jaundiced look and his features seemed sharper, more honed, and, consequently, older. At least that was how her memory was now replaying the difference. But maybe memory was wrong. In fact maybe nothing physical had changed at all except the mood and the lighting and the fact that they were all a couple of weeks older. In the same light Roulette was looking considerably more aged than he probably was. Lessons for today on the relentless grinding of time and the importance of proper lighting, not just on stage but in real life, too.
“Well, surprise, surprise,” SideEffects said, dramatically extending his arms. “Look who’s here.” He came over and granted his brother a large theatrical hug. Then he proceeded to hug Ambience especially warmly before taking a step back and devoting himself to a full appraisal. Up and down he looked at her. Then he exposed a slight smile. “So,” he said, as though he were actually thinking of something else entirely, “refugees from the urban inferno.”
“Easy on the insults,” said Graveyard. “We know you secretly love the nasty place.”
“Never set foot in Mammoth City in my life. Never plan to, actually.”
“You’re just afraid if you ever did visit even once, you’d never be able to leave.”
“I hear the real estate market is totally gangsta.”
“Everything you love. Plus, money flows through the business like water.”
“Polluted water.”
“At least something is flowing.”
“Oh, Dad,” SideEffects said, “before I forget, I got something for you.” He slipped off his backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out a thin blue plastic bag, which he handed with no small ceremony to his father.
