38. Karmik Retribution Chris Butler

Everything aches. My muscles make me a thousand promises of pain to come. I’m still a bit drunk, enough to dull the pain. I whip out the good book and, to my horror, the book is wet. I open her up and find a bullet lodged in the moonshine canister. I know I should be thankful but I can’t help feeling a bit glum. I hold up my arm and I thumb out a cluster of stars.

I’m sitting on the corpse of Vincente, another link in the chain of the Nuevo Mafioso clan Al Imposto, the culprits of the burglary of my sister, who hired me, in the deformed ruins of Old Manhattan.

It never used to be like this. Ironically, we won the war. The most destructive war in human history. And it lasted four hours. No-one knows who landed the first blow. America says China, China says America, but either way we’re all paying for it, dragging a dying country in our wake.

But I digress. After I showed Vincente all those bits of him and holstered my knife, telling him I’d do the rest by hand, he spat out some words and a tooth. He told me that a guy called Marley knew something about who orchestrated the burglaries. Marley’s a mean bastard, and I mean flay-your-enemies-alive-and-make-a-tent-out-of-their-skin mean. He’s in Times Square, guarded by a dozen of the toughest musclemen in Old Manhattan.

But if he’s the one who knows who robbed my sister, he’s going to get a lot worse.

I get up off the remains of Vincente and stumble over his limbs and out of the garbage-lined alleyway. As I peek out, looking for any more goons, I take a moment to admire the only thing on the street with paint on it. My baby. My darling, sweetheart and mistress. My 1954 Vincent Black Lightning. My father bought it straight off the production line, right after the second American civil war. It served him well and, when I was 21, he gave it to me. One of the happiest days of my life. I spent every waking hour working on that beautiful machine.
So I hop on and start the bio-fuel engine. It makes me shudder every time. Some of the newer models use hydrogen as fuel; I prefer to use the blood of my enemies. Literally.

It’s late and I should be heading for a safe, high place, but it’ll be easier to sneak into his hideout in Times Square. He’s holed up like a tick on a dog, due to a recent assassination attempt. By me.

As I ride down the street I notice a blockade of cars, three cars high, with three men on top. The cars separate in the middle of the street, like the front teeth of a smiling five year old. I slow to a halt and ask the men on top what this is.
“A new toll on this road, partner. That’ll be $50, a pack of smokes, or a gun,” the first one monotonously recites. They must be having a lot of “business”.

I hop off my baby and pull out my favourite gun on hand, my cold Diamondback revolver. Before they have time to realise what’s going on I’ve pulled off three shots, and two of the three are disarmed, thumbs broken and hands bleeding. I ask the last punk-in-training if he feels lucky, still fumbling to get out his rifle. He obviously doesn’t get the reference, or the fact that he’s hopelessly outclassed. I fire a shot that takes off half his ear. He collapses, holding his red, dripping half-ear. I tell him how to stop the bleeding as the other two wave me through.

It isn’t for another five blocks that I see a sign of life, in the form of a woman being mugged by two men. I start to wonder if life will ever be back to normal. Then I realise that I can’t even remember what normal is. I have to keep moving. It’s getting close to three in the morning and I only have a few hours of darkness left. I keep riding. Thirty seconds later I hear a feint gunshot. I pray for her soul.

I see Times Square and turn off Bessie’s engine, freewheeling for half a kilometre. While I stash the bike 250 metres from the square and make for the building opposite, I scan Marley’s place. Eleven stories high, most windows blown in, and the Jumbotron spray painted to read “PIS OF”. I won’t be able to talk my way around these aristocratic fellows.

After eleven flights of stairs, a forty-something who inhales a lungful of irradiated air every day can get very tired. So I stop, look out the window and pick a landing spot on Marley’s place.

I back up, take a deep breath and try not to think about the terrifying fall to my possible death. My heavy boots clop against the dusty concrete and suddenly stop, replaced by whooshing air and a horrible feeling in my gut. I fall short, but not short enough to splatter my most precious innards all over the pavement. I’m grabbing on by four fingernails. I manage to scrabble my heavy body up and over the window, crunching on its glass remnants. I make my way through the maze of cubicles to find a stairwell leading to the big man’s office. I unholster my .45 Magnum and whip around the corner. I see a shadow walking away. It must be him. I take off my boots and continue up the stairs.

I wheel around the corner and what I see horrifies me. My sister, the Lawman, consorting with Marley, the mob boss. I yell to her “get down!” and shove her aside, putting my revolver at his face. He steps back towards a window and I follow with him, pulling back the hammer as I go.

Samantha pulls back on my shoulder. “John, stop. Don’t shoot him.”
“Why? The penalty for robbing a Lawmen is death.” I strain. My throat is hoarse, but permissible, since I’ve had nothing to drink but irradiated water for two weeks.
“Ay, muchacho! Listen to what the girl is saying, pendejo! You don’t want to kill me, my higher-ups will rip the tongue from your mouth and make you eat it!” Marley quips, in an almost cartoon-like Mexican accent.
“Quiet, before I plug you”, I retort.
“John…”. I recognise that voice. I squeeze the trigger. He gets pulled back and, while spurting ink red blood, falls out of the window.
“John, I need to talk to you.”
Thud.
“Shoot”.
“John, in this day and age, life demands action. And like most countries after the war, we cannot afford the drain on ourselves to keep men like Marley in jail. But we can’t kill just anybody we like. So we pick and choose who lives and who dies. It is a horrible profession, but someone has to do it. John, I was never robbed.”
I’m puzzled.
“What do you mean? What’s going on?”
“It was just a lure, to get you here. I knew Marley was a horrible person, but I couldn’t prove it, and they sent me to kill a different man. I couldn’t take my higher-ups delaying me for another second, so I used you to kill Marley.”
“Because…” she starts to tear up, and I know what’s going on. “The other man, was you.”
We both raise our guns, but she was always the fastest draw. The kickback from her pistol wipes a tear from her cheek. I start to cough up blood from the wound on my neck. I fall, hitting my head on the windowsill, but catching my leather sleeve on a shard of glass from the window. She sombrely walks over.
“I love you”, she whispers, pressing her lips against my grimy forehead.
She walks off, illuminated by the morning sun.
As the world seeps from my view, I barely have enough strength to think how screwed-up this all was. My sister is a two-faced harpy and I’m sitting here, inhaling my own blood in a pool of more blood.
Karma’s a bitch, aint’ it?