Gordon’s threadbare heart was speeding like mad. He was standing still, his abused heart pounding a ragged rhythm in his sunken chest. He so wanted some of that methadone that the five zombie junkies were clawing at in Candy Cane Shane’s satchel as he went fetal under their weight on the curb and looked into Gordon’s eyes with a begging light, like some Christian freak praying to his ass kissing hippie god for salvation, and forgetting to mention how much cash he had dumped into the collection plate these many years.
The world raged insanely out of control all around them.
The giant trash truck was dropping a dumpster on the fat man singing to God as he lay there in the street like a suited walrus as an erotic model.
While the words of men were a mere buzz beneath the screaming in his head he could clearly—if dully—hear great sounds as they came to him.
“Boom!” the dumpster roared. Then it was lifted and dropped again, with more of a squishing than booming sound.
Gunshots sounded in the distance, mechanically spaced, like some machine was learning how to shoot a gun.
Gordon was not much of a fighter—more of a runner. But he had taken care of business before. Even so, five zombie stoners was a tall order for a dedicated crack-smoking machine to process.
As Gordon stood frozen in heart palpitating contemplation Shane’s eyes began to tear up, as his satchel was torn away by two sets of hands and two other sets kept clawing at his head and neck, as if there was something inside of him these three wanted. A big mug and his crack whore were now playing tug of war over the satchel. Meanwhile two crackheads and an impossibly ancient parchment-faced black crack ho clawed at Shane like children making mud pies.
Shane turned to the cop beating the bus driver with the pistol—the pistol and hand all drenched in blood now, and the bus driver seemingly dead. As the cop smashed the mangled face one last time, the head rolled to the side and the butt of the pistol hit the street, ejecting the weapon from the bloody pig claw.
Gordon was nothing if not fast—still under 140 pounds at 46 years. He bounced onto that bloody piece and it came to him, that time at Double Rock Park, when he earned a free kilo of crack—smashed to shit with baking powder, but still a kilo—for training the Harford Road Boyz on their new nine millimeter Glocks. Thinking that all white boys naturally knew about guns, these twerps had come to Gordon—who knew nothing about guns. As the lead kid’s 400 pound mother—who blew Gordon behind a trash bin at the park after the deal was done—drove them to the park across the dark city, Gordon said he needed a coffee, and they stopped at the local 7-11.
While he was in there he grabbed a copy of a gun nut magazine, read an ad and an article on hand gunning while pouring and drinking his coffee, and immediately assumed the manner of an expert handgun instructor. A little messing around with the piece—and Gordon, having always been mechanically inclined, but more likely than not to use this aptitude for breaking and entering and car heisting—had hit a tree from ten paces, and the legend of Big Gun Gordon was born in the ghetto, where it would die a week later with those three punks when a BGF hitter sawed them in half with a Tech-9 down on Wilkens and Monroe.
The gun felt right in his hand.
The world was no longer crazy, but made perfect sense.
Seeing the left half of the cop’s face disappear in a spray of globular pink felt even better, made even more sense.
The black crack ho’s entire head disappeared when he caught her high in the throat.
The other two clawing at Shane—in full blown tears now—went away a lot messier, with spatter making Shane look like a butchered pig in his tan leisure suit and fedora.
The two dopefiends that were tugging at the methadone satchel both stopped pulling, as they turned and stared open-mouthed at Death, Destroyer of Words, as he sent them to hell with the muzzle placed in their mouths, one departed fiend after the other.
Gordon had never guessed—had never even had an inkling—that this was the problem, that this was why he was a drug addict, because he was what he was, and that what he was was divine, cast down to earth by some cruel whim of Fate. Nothing had ever felt this good—no high, no upper, no downer—had ever felt so good as extinguishing an unworthy life, as cleansing the unclean world of its sores one ambling canker at a time.
Gordon closed his eyes and let the world sink in.
Death opened his eyes, and saw it clearly and anew in slow motion.
Shane was retrieving his small handbag from a dead hand, hobbling to his feet, and pointing with the other hand at the parked police cruiser, with the door open and the engine still running.
Death nodded, ‘yes’ that they should take it, and pointed with the gun to the driver’s seat so that Shane would do the driving and leave Death in his pristine state.
Death walked slowly toward the passenger seat as the trash truck backed up over a mother and her two toddlers—who screeched horribly under its wheels, and raised the dumpster, to the bottom of which the fat man—or parts there of—were new stuck, and smashed it down on a smart car, turning it and its occupants into a flattened tomato can.
Death soaked up the ambiance of the banquet as he walked on clouds of rage rising from the cold asphalt. As he reached the passenger’s side, which hobbling Shane opened from the inside, he saw him, the state cop with the U-shaped metal pocket baton that had split Gordon’s head open and left him with a screaming soprano in his brain in place of hearing.
Like any conjurer, after witlessly summoning an elder god from his ages old slumber, the cop was marching toward his appointed doom. He came with dark pinpoint eyes, clutching his U-shaped baton in an obsessed state, focusing only on that which had been Gordon, who stood with pistol ready, waiting to dine on a savored soul.
The glorious opportunity never came though, for a bloody gore dripping box of blue steel, as large as a van, was dropped onto the cop’s head by two mechanical arms, breaking him in half in three places as he was pile-driven into the road.
Death slipped into the passenger seat, and pointed with the pistol toward Baynesville.
“Chicken wings Bro, I have a taste for teriyaki wings at that Glory Days joint. Let’s roll.”
Shane nodded ‘yes,’ and tore off past the bus, over the dead driver, breaking the legs of a teen age girl who was doing cheer leading steps and sending her into the air, only to have her head smack on the trunk as she tumbled off into the past.
Before Death and his Driver was a half open road, littered with opportunities for divine sustenance, for the righteous disposal of the long ago dead, at the hands of their new ascendant God, who no more wanted another hit of some drug, than a man who had eaten a $500 Japanese steak wanted another McDonalds cheeseburger.
