Perspective 3
Jenny bobbled her head in an extreme state of nausea due to the stabbing out of her own ear drums. She found herself wondering if she had pierced her brain, if she would die in Burreese’s sick audio plague after all. Then it came to her, a hand of strength—the strongest hand that had ever touched her still young body, the hand of the insane God-possessed septuagenarian , in the black hat and cowboy boots, and too tight jeans, tattooed with heavy metal Jesus spitting on a Roman soldier from the cross…
He was chanting a mantra she could not make out as she reeled drunkenly in the seat, holding her hand, as if to give her strength, looking into her yes—not with the lust that so many men had—but with a fatherly concern she had never experienced.
Is this what it’s like to have a father?
A great vibration then shocked her and sent her face into the dashboard as the world went scarlet and her head bounced back—into the palm of a kind calloused hand. She was then wrapped in one strong tattooed arm and held tightly, so tightly that her head stopped spinning, though the world did not.
As her eyes cleared she saw that they had made it to Towson, to the round about that had always irritated her so, only to be stopped, not be the insane mobs of chanting people living out their worst impulse in a spasm of fury narrated by their own insane mantra, but by that which had killed them.
A great big trash truck—one of the dumpster hooking trucks with the mechanical arms on the front—blocked their way. The driver looked at them crazily as he hammered a dumpster down on the cab of their truck again. The sound she could not hear but she felt thunder. It occurred to her then that in any other vehicle they would be crushed, but this dump truck had a steel bed that extended over the cab.
Wake up atheist bitch! It’s time to get biblical. The old man is holding you tight trying to protect you with his mantra about lending you his strength. That won’t cut it. Rewire his crazy brain!
Then horror washed over her, as the intelligent eyes of the trash truck driver locked on her, as he backed up over some half-dead people, squishing the rest of the life out of them. He then dropped the dumpster—which was painted red with gore, and backed up, showing his mechanical arms like bull’s horns.
Jenney then spied it, the pack of Big Red chewing gum sticks, taped to the dashboard. Jenny grabbed two pieces of gum and shoved them in her mouth without taking off the wrappers. She chomped and chewed, spitting pieces of wrapper out as fast as she could as the trash hauling truck backed up over a minivan—turning it into a flattened can—and rumbled forward toward them, sending vibrations up into the cockpit where she cowered.
The man she had come to know as ‘the Hammer of God’ held her tightly in the crock of his hard right arm as he brandished his black bible in his callused left hand, as if that were going to save them. The vehicles smashed together and the forks came crashing through the windshield. No, one mechanical steel arm sheared off the passenger’s side mirror and the other came right for her face as she chewed her gum, which she felt was expelling blood from her punctured ears.
All was still, as the blackness pressed against her vision, clouding out the life she had left behind—no, it was a cold leather thing of blackness that pressed against her face, blocking out her vision. The truck lurched forward as the mechanical arm, that had stopped inches from her face, was withdrawn with a world rocking shudder, and the bible was pulled away by the holy roller, who grinned as if his God-book would save her again—for the trash truck driver had no quit in his eyes.
The old holy roller was in the mist of chanting his mantra—which she could not hear and had forgotten—but had something to do with not quitting and trusting in God’s ‘heavy strength.’
Jenny had warmed up to God just a smidge over the last half hour. But she was still into more practical solutions to what ails a gold digging genius bitch when the world tries to fuck her to death. She spat out the gum into her hand, tore it in half, and popped both pieces in the man’s ears, with a wet kiss to seal the bargain in his hard heart.
He looked at her stunned as he stammered to senseless silence. Recalling the importance of the word ‘should’ in Burreese’s formula, she popped out the gum and screamed, as she pointed to the trash struck, which was angling for a broadside, “You ought to kick his ass, for God!”
The man’s eyes took on an unholy light, as he grabbed the hammer and bible, and crashed through the remnants of the windshield and leapt to the top of the cab as if he were a teenager.
Jenny felt the rumble of the oncoming mechanical beast and scooted all the way over against the driver’s side door—and just in time, as the mechanical arm pierced the passenger’s side door and knifed into the space she had just vacated. She looked out the side window above the buckled and burst door and saw the demonic look in the eyes of the chanting trash truck operator as he tried to back away and come for another attack, only to discover that the vehicles were now bound together somehow.
The flat face of the trash truck was pressed against the right fender of the dump truck. The man had calculated killing Jenny with the mechanical arm, and was enraged that it had not happened. With a look of rage burrowing into her eyes he climbed out through the shattered remnants of his own windshield, onto the hood of the still idling dump truck, picked up a long shard of glass and stalked across the hood toward her.
Jenny opened the door and dropped to the ground, her severely sprained ankle folding under her once again, with a hideous stabbing pain that pierced to her hip. Still, somehow, she held onto the gum in each hand as she crawled on wrist and knees toward the greater safety of a pair of red-smeared pointy-toed black cowboy boots, curtained by straight jeans. She reached for those pitiless ankles only to have her own bad ankle seized in a hand she felt was slick with grease and God only knew what else.
“Oh God, no!” she screamed as she looked up at the seventy-fiver year old barrel chest tattooed with the defiantly crucified heavy metal Jesus, the black hat above the hard craggy and once round face, and the muscular arms covered with faded ink and wrinkled skin, each terminating in a big callused hand, one holding a bible, the other a ball peen hammer.
The fanatic fixed her with icy eyes on fire and then chanted something as he dove –bible and hammer in hand—over her at the owner of the greasy hand that assailed her unseen from behind.
Jenny scrambled forward, knees burning, and then rolled over on her back, her foot flopping uselessly on a broken ankle, and saw what seemed to her, on the wrecked and littered and body-smeared ground, to be a battle of two titans. The trash truck operator was twice the size and half the age of her elderly savior. The Jesus tattoo took a terrible glassy slash across the nipples, to which the large hairy, bearded man with grease blackened hands, in glass-sparkled coveralls, grinned evilly—a grin that was to paint his face forever, as the Hammer of God buried itself to the haft in the top of that hairy head, causing the insane eyes to bug out as if at eternity.
“Thank God!" she moaned, no longer possessed of the energy to curse herself for a hypocrite.
These words seemed to summon her septuagenarian savior. He pried his hammer from the shuddering skull and walked toward her with bible and bloody hammer in hand.
Jenny Jorgenson, you have one more seduction to go if you’re to find that twit Burreese and ring his neck for unleashing this hell on us.
The man stopped above her, absent a chant, reached down, picked her up, and then, seeming to hear something, looked skyward. At that moment Jenny popped the gum back in his ears as she hugged his head and kissed his stubbly jaw.
The thanatos imperative will lapse without stimuli in aberrant individuals—or so Wonder Boy said?
Were you even paying attention? Did you ever think it was more than that twit genius’ fantasy that you were selling with a wink and a nod to The Agency?
She had been carried through the roundabout and to the crest of the hill above Towson Town Center, looking north into Delany Valley. She was draped over the hooked arms whose hands still held the hammer and the bible that had both saved her in the hands of this ancient truck driver—who must have been quite a man in his youth.
She looked up to her savior’s face only to see him looking skyward like some primitive watching one of von Daniken’s UFOs buzz the local ziggurat. She followed his eyes, and saw above that a pair of A-10 Warthog ground attack craft strafing the intersection below, turning an already hellish rush hour into what seemed like a veritable highway to hell. Some idiot was maneuvering a dirt bike beneath the antitank firestorm being turned on the insane remnants of the citizens of Baltimore County by the insane airmen of the Maryland National Guard. And for some reason, the man that carried her seemed calmed by this; looking down at her with a wry grin, and then skipping down the road, with her dangling like a broken puppet over his tireless arms.
The world flipped on its axis again as her pierced ears filled with something—perhaps her death—and Jenny Jorgensen, one of only three people that might possibly understand the Genesis of the rest of human history, slid off into oblivion not carrying if she woke, but hopping that if she did, that this grandfatherly maniac with the hammer and bible would be there when she returned.
This Concludes The Hammer of God: Retro Genesis, Day 1, Part 1
The print book will contain an Epilogue and additional material.
