“Where do you think we are, high school or something? Your problem, you take care of it.”
She pouted until it was clear he wouldn’t give in. Then her face went hard and she made for the pool table. Rolled the dead shitkicker slumped half across it off onto the floor and snatched that monster ten-millimeter she favored, next to his shotgun, and went stomping behind the bar. Through the doorway he watched her point the pistol down, out of sight.
Two shots. Then, after a long pause, another. Joker. Trying to throw off his aim. She danced back all smiles.
“You know, good thing you’re better with that than you are these darts.” He inspected her three, then set them aside. “Here, why don’t you try mine?”
“Look, green may be your lucky color, but it was never mine. I’ve always been more of a fuchsia girl, myself.”
“Forget color, look at the tips of those things.” He pointed at the rejects. “Look how bent they are. You been smacking fat boy in the forehead too long. Can’t keep hitting bone and expect these to stay pristine. Now, no sass — try mine.”
She gave in. Turned back to the guy lashed to the post near the dartboard, long past caring. Her first two throws went high, while the third drilled home with a sureness she found thrilling.
“Hah! Doesn’t get more bull’s-eye than that!”
He inspected more closely. “I do believe you nailed pupil that time.”
“Can we go now? I was getting bored with this anyway.”
He was about to agree when he stepped over another shotgunned redneck for a peek at the hogtied mess behind the bar. “Can’t say as I’m thrilled with what you done to our plans for later.” A sigh. “Your problem, your solution.”
She cleared his Mossberg twelve-gauge from the pool table. “Then start racking. Stick and balls, that’s more my game anyway.”
He chunked in quarters while she danced to the front window, glanced out at the night. Turned the sign from CLOSED back around to OPEN.
The crack of the break shot beckoned to all comers.
Naked Lunchmeat
The trains don’t run on time anymore. It gives us a sense of gambling, we stand on the platform at the 14th Street Station and play the odds whether the train will come before any meatfolk catch wind of us on the stale ozone breeze in the tunnels of the underbelly, and come shambling out to investigate.
The train is late again, and here we are sharing the platform with the usual suspects, and we all look at each other like we don’t really trust our eyes to tell between the living and the dead. Only the old Hasidic stands there with a sense of peace in his rheumy eyes. I figure it’s because his faith forbids a belief in an afterlife and so he doesn’t believe this shit is actually happening. Evidently we must be his idea of hallucinations. In black he already looks like an undertaker.
Today we lose, and people start to scatter with the practiced panic of retreats that leave their dignity intact after the first of them notices the meatboy lurching out of the mouth of the tunnel. When winos and bag ladies still slept down here, meatfolk bred like blue rats. He shows his saggy ashen face and the warmbloods run for the stairs and the streets, forgetting about their spent tokens. No thought to economic sacrifice. The solitary meatboy crawls from track level up onto the emptying platform, and I can hear his slobbering grunts and it still makes me wonder what all the fuss is about. The meatfolk all sound like asthmatics to me.
“Time for toasties,” says Frazzle, and he takes the meatboy by one shoulder while I take the other and before he can snap at us we pitch him down below again. He lands on the third rail and starts to smoke and pop and flop like somebody’s gray steak and a gas buildup blows out the back of the meatboy’s pants and shoots him off the rail, between regular tracks. Everything’s quiet and we’re looking at each other through the charbroiled haze. The old Hasidic views it all without judgment, turns away.
Frazzle’s got the works in his hand even before he jumps down off the platform. Clears the rails like a kid playing hopscotch, and I think I start to sweat when he kneels by the moaning meatboy who’s sluggishly waving a pair of burnt matchstick arms in the air. Frazzle sinks the heavy bore needle into the meatboy’s skull, better than a doctor. He hits the pituitary every time, like an old junkie finding final life in a bruised and flaccid vein. The syringe fills and he leaves the cripped-up meatboy for the next train, whenever it decides to show, and I can already hear the squeal of brakes and the shear of meat from bone and bone from socket.
“It’s already cooked for us, even,” says Frazzle.
“Fuck the tokens, we bail,” then I turn to the old Hasidic’s back. “Shalom.”
We hide the works like couriers like spies like jesters of greed and take the stairs three at a time and the afternoon sun slams us bright in the face. We almost can’t wait until we get back to the hotel room before tying off and nailing up. After transfer, we slide the smaller needle home, staring at that beautiful plumage of bloody backwash in the syringe, its second of blown-crystal perfection before it thins out, dilutes, drains back into the arm. Always the last aesthetic we appreciate.
Death’s a bitch, and then you live.
*
The H dealers are out of business now, most of them, because dealers sell a product they don’t make. Dealers are smart but not particularly creative, so they can’t figure out how to make any profit off selling a fix that anyone can go out and find for free, or if not, and they have no moral objection to murder, manufacture for themselves. Meatfolk everywhere, for the taking or the making. Dealers have to shut down in an economy like this, but the way I see it, they just don’t try hard enough to find the really stupid, lazy, rich junkies, if there are such things, the kind can be convinced of anything, my meatboy is better than your meatboy and it’ll cost you, you know what I’m saying?
Some new kind of kick: pituitary extract drawn from recently reanimated corpses, then treated with heat; cooled fluid medium bears attenuated form of virus known among scientific quarters as Quayle-Beta Syndrome, otherwise known informally as Pitchback Fever, the Resurrection Rag, Cancelled Ticket, Highway to Limbo, God’s Little Joke, the Indiscretion of a Lifetime, Rotten Johnny, etc etc etc. Attenuation renders virus incapable of cannibalizing host cells. Intravenous injection results in purgatorial death trance, is metabolized out after six to ten hours.
“The times, they be a-changing,” said the East Village’s Twitching Kalvin Khrist before he shot himself through the eye with a nail gun. Here was a man who truly lived for his work. He was still sitting on a half-kilo of junk at the time. When we find him we have a shooting match and it just like the old days, all the old familiar addictions in all the old familiar veins.
The city’s now filling with meatfolk and we suppose it really is possible to have too much of a good thing because they don’t surrender their pituitaries without a fight, then there’s their own habit to support. More of the slow groaning stinkers every day. In a sense I figure there’s a karmic balance at work here, we two species each feeding off the other, the last cannibal couple each trying to sink the teeth while slow-dancing in the gray hungover morning.
So we hot-wire a Lexus, stock the trunk with fresh meatfolk heads, and start west.
*
We come out of the northeast looking for the last free town in Amerika, because it’s the way we feel ourselves. For the first time in our memories uneaten by the fluid charcoal reclamation, we’re not tethered to our connections. We score in cornfields as easy as Bleecker Street now. You know what it’s like when God pukes manna, you don’t ask questions, just stoop for the harvest.