Made in China Chapter 21

“Hold tight,” the Priest says telepathically from behind the rusty bars. His face is striped by the iron.  

“Ok,” I think. Though I’m not sure if he hears me. He disappears and the sun is back, peering in with one eye shut. The four goons stand there laughing but for the sake of a laugh—the forced sort of laughter that crawls out of the throat like a drunk out of bed. There certainly wasn’t anything funny. It is strange how evil people often laugh more than good people. A popular saying these days is that laughter is the best medicine; Marty Martian used to say that laughter is the only medicine, followed by saying indifference is the mortal enemy of mankind. Indifference leads to murder and holocausts and firebombing peaceful cities and dropping nuclear weapons on them from planes named after someone’s mother. Never in your life would hear Marty Martian say, “ho hum.” But it is certainly obvious Marty Martian wasn’t speaking of this brand of cackling. I have no time or desire to explicate the many distinctions of a laugh, particularly not in the throes of my present predicament.

“You’re one dumb sonofabitch,” one of the goons in the back crows pompously. He is old and fat with a dumb-looking expression on a face that looks brilliantly like a cat’s ass, somehow. He has a sandpaper beard that extends down over a crumpled chicken neck. I was right. They have blowtorches and machetes in hand. “Not gunna lie, Captain Bowie, this is gonna hurt ya much more than it’s gunna hurt me.” I recognized the voice immediately. It was the soldier in the Boston coffee shop, but I couldn’t remember his name. “You don’t remember me, do ya? Dumb sonofabitch.” Everyone laughed again.

“Sure I do. How could I forget a douche like you?” He might have killed me then had he known the meaning of a douche, but being the way things are and the futility of feminine hygiene products these days, he hadn't a clue.

“Spider! Private Spider Bean,” he slithered. He looked like a starved animal with scurvy covered in scabs and dirt, much worse than he appeared in Boston. Looking up at him I realized my eyes were swollen and blood began trickling down my forehead intermixed with sweat from the intense stifling heat. I felt as though I were inside a microwave oven. The four men smelled horrifically, the way one might expect Scum of the Earth to actually smell. Like a sewage dump, manure and untreated body odor that has come back from the dead. The down part of the zombies, they say, is the persistent odor of death that simply doesn’t go away. I didn’t get close enough to Kurt Vonnegut to know this for fact.

“I thought you had a woman to look forward to?”

He swallowed like it was a mouthful of moonshine. “Dad did her in before I got there.”

“Thought so,” I groaned.

He kicked me hard in the sternum. The air left me and I gasped like a deflated bag. Another rib probably broken, crushed in half inside, jabbing an internal organ. Devil's pitchfork, they'd call it. “Shut yer goddamn mouth, coward!”

“Coward?” I grunted. “Well, that is new.” I coughed and spit up a mouthful of blood. A rat scurried for a drink like a wary animal on the Serengeti.

“There ain’t no way in Hell ya survived the Turk fer four years not bein’ no coward. Yer a goddamn liar, Bowie!” I looked up and realized the audacious turd was wearing my Blue Eagle. I didn’t give a damn. He could have it. I wondered what the Priest was waiting for—Christmas? Then I realized that there were only four goons here because the room was too small and only four would fit. I could see the entryway clearly, a parted plywood cellar door, and the boots of many more goons trying to get a peak, or offering their moral support for whatever depraved act would soon take place. I wondered if I would come back as a zombie after they murdered me. Dread! Murder is such a dramatic word—after they kill me. And if I do, is there any way that I wouldn’t stink?

Ho hum.

Incidentally, for the most part, there is no Christmas anymore. It’s a Wonderful Life is only watched by cheery stalwarts like my parents who despite of everything are still blissfully optimistic like Rudolph’s red nose. Their hearts are decked in tinsel and wrapped in garland and strung with flashing colorful lights. The goons began smashing me with fists and boots. Lucky for me they didn’t use their tools. It was too soon for those implements. I had yet to suffer enough for the relief of the hacking of a hacksaw, the flame of a blowtorch, or a swift and sharp machete beheading me in one fell swoop. I had no idea why Spider Bean wanted to kill me or how long he had been determined to do so. I imagined it was because I earned some veneer of celebrity since Death Race 666 began and everything went to shit for him. Jealousy is a deadly sin. It isn’t something I would ever know or sit down and talk about with him over another cup of coffee. I thought of Mary Antoinette. I heard that before her execution she was raped by anyone in France who wanted to rape her. There was a very long line. Sex is rarely about love, sadly.

“Open his goddamn mouth!” Bean screams. It is apparent in the other men’s hesitation that they are not used to this particular brand of wickedness.

....

I began to lose consciousness and I was back in Kentucky at the Pussy Hut, just after leaving Honey, or Helen, in 1930. I was walking out through a dark hallway but there were no "Exit" signs, as I was sure there would be in Hell to deride the dwellers. The door to the glory hole was open and I could see the head of a Bettie propped up by an assembly of parts, braced to the wall by a queer structure of brackets and wires resembling some vulgar orthodontic torturous nightmare. There was a small spooky-looking man sitting in a chair reading a magazine, not quite trollish. There was a soldier on the cover. His job, apparently, was to flip a switch on the back of the head to make it work but he seemingly never took his watery eyes off the magazine. I walked on. But before I could find the exit there was a passionate explosion that knocked me across the dim-lit hall on to my rear. I had heard plenty of explosions in the Turk, but this one felt far more violent and less contained than any I had heard in those four years, even when in desperation Alexi Olavstrauss let everything he had fly, and when we prisoners of war (POWS to some) were watching them light up the night sky that was forever black in Eurasia. When I came out of the hallway there was no longer an entrance. The hostess stand where the fat black armed gorilla sat was no longer. Nor was the wooden pedestal sign, the framed picture of my dad, or the plastic plant. There was a gaping hole and standing in the absence of what was there stood an attractive, slim woman in a black vinyl suit strapped with bullets and carrying what appeared to be an M60, or similar—some antiquated relic from days gone. Then as she held the strap and bit her bottom lip, she opened fire and sprayed everything around me with bullets as casually as a housewife watering petunias with a garden hose. Men screamed, women screamed, some were torn in half, some riddled or clipped, falling to the ground. You could hear them cry only when the firing stopped and it only stopped for her to reload. The only people who didn’t scream were me and the Betties. They had not been programmed to react to gunfire or terrorism, and I was indifferent.

Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder.

Jocko tried his best to escape but the woman dropped her gun, tracked him down, and seemingly for the pleasure in it, grabbed his scalp and slit his throat slowly. Jocko screamed until he hadn’t the ability to scream, but he still tried which resulted in a pitiful gurgling sound, and blood erupted from his filleted throat like a cheap Halloween fountain. Be gracious in death, they told us in the Turk. Die like you have died before. I stood there and thought about it. Those of us who weren’t religious and didn’t go to the pre-war prayer meetings where they would feed soldiers rehashed servings of the Old Testament, went to the agnostic meetings where they would tell us to imagine we were some kind of animal. The last one, I remember, was them telling us we were bees and our duty was to protect the hive at all costs. Our gun was our stinger. I sometimes went and got the religious bit, when I could stomach it, and other times I favored hearing what animal some artsy flake was comparing us to today.

The woman, who I would call a girl had she not been carrying so many deadly weapons and killing and destroying everything that walked being that she was small and petite with a doe-like expression on a very simple but pretty face, stood on the gurgling corpse of Jocko the Pimp and looked at me watching her. I was stunned. “You can call me, Frances Fucking Fury,” she said plainly. Then she aimed the gun at me and gave me a look, dissecting me with her eyes. “Why shouldn’t I kill you?”

“I don’t know,” I replied politely. No one has ever asked me that question. The Pussy Hut was on fire, pieces flaked from the walls and ceiling, wires sizzled. With the dead and writhing lying about it looked like a page from Revelations and real women scrambled from those ruins like crazed-naked ants. She didn’t shoot any of them. She was their liberator. The men who tried to sneak out between them were marked with red dots from the scope of her beautiful silver .45, picked off, and dropped with a finger squeeze that was somehow erotic. She was expressionless, stoic. And I believe, once more, I fell in love immediately.

“That is a terrible answer,” she replied.

I thought of it and shook my head. It was.

“Did you come here to fuck a woman?”

“No.”

“A robot woman?”

“No.”

“Why should I believe you?”

 “I don’t know that either.”

“Well, what are you doing here?”

“Writing about life.” I held up a pad and pen in my defense. She looked at them strangely. Her finger caressed the trigger. She had beautiful knuckles. What’s one more or less? She might have thought. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw one of those black gorillas on the ground leveling his 9mm at her with what little life he had left in his lumpy body. “Behind you!” I shouted. I raised my Colt Dragoon and shot the dying gorilla between the eyes from fifty feet, give or take. Frances Fucking Fury just seemed like something worth saving.

She turned coolly and reaffirmed his death and seconds later the man’s face was torn to hamburger by an M60 that probably once did the same thing to Vietnamese fighting for their country who have no memorial built for them, or who no one feels sorry for. “Gooks” they used to call them. Some still do. They used to litter them with Ace of Spades and cut off parts of their bodies because they didn't believe they could go to Heaven with assembly required, or at least, they wanted to traumatize those that were living. For some reason I could only think of how many people that gun had killed. Not that it matters anymore. As Zombie Yogi Berra says, “When you’re dead; you’re dead.”

“Thank you,” she says begrudgingly. I could almost hear her teeth grit. I could tell she hadn’t said those words in a long time. “Well,” she went on, “get the fuck lost."

“Okay.” The heat from the flames felt like they singed my back as I walked away, briskly. It was cloudy, big rolling clouds—the kinds that make animals and faces if you look at them long enough. When I got to my car I turned to see that Frances Fucking Fury was gone. The women she had liberated were gone too. A black van angrily sped off into the distance. Who knows what she does with those women. But thinking of her I thought of that dead deer along the road when I was a kid. If that deer were to come back to life with black-vinyl, an M60, and a silver .45, it would be Frances. All that was left of that Pussy Hut was the glory hole wall, which stood almost defiantly. The only difference being there were many more holes along with it. Frances destroyed many more Pussy Huts the same way and she killed several thousand Casanovas who are always easily identifiable by their snazzy black Unicorn jackets, or their snapping fingers to Dion and the Belmonts, “The Wanderer.”

In that van Frances Fucking Fury was renaming all the women she saved, liberating their minds, and she was telling them that men are like bees that have turned on the hive. Clairvoyance 101.

....

It is common knowledge that The Ray Purefaces rape faces in such a manner that my face was about to be violated by Scum of the Earth. It was documented. I was the glory hole, that head with a switch. One of the goons stood beside the approaching trouser-less Spider Bean with a split open car battery, which I imagined to be filled with acid. A dousing of it would be my punishment if I chose to bite, or to refuse. I closed my eyes and hung there. My arms felt attached to the wall. My mouth was a cave and his penis was a bear. I didn’t look at it. It’s best not to look when you are being raped, I read somewhere. It’s best to dampen it with silly metaphors or to recall a fairy tale to tell yourself when it is happening. I don't know if that is truly helpful but I was trying to remember Hansel and Gretel. But before the bear had time to explore the cave for its hibernation there was a massive explosion. The goon beside of Bean dropped the battery on his foot and fell backwards. My chains rattled from the explosion and parts of the ceiling crumbled. Bean pulled up his pants and headed up the steps with the rest of the morons and out into the sunlight. He muttered something at me as he did. Shortly thereafter I could hear a twelve-gauge pumping and firing and I knew it was the Priest. Then I could hear the beautiful sound of machine guns.

After the chaos settled, the Priest came barreling down the basement steps. “Blatz! Blatz!” he called. He was blinded from going too quickly from sunlight to darkness and held his hand over his long horse-like face. “Am I too late...?”

I opened my mouth, finally. “No. Right on time.”

“Good Lord! They fucked you up, Blatz!” He grabbed a pair of bolt cutters that probably would have been used on my testicles had he not fortuitously came when he did. In a few snips I was free, fell to the ground, and lied in a pool of my own blood somewhere on the Serengeti. 

All I could think of were bees.

Honey is bee vomit...