EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I came back to myself a few minutes later, my arms burning from the work and my shirt drenched in blood from the bullet cut in my right shoulder. God, the pain of that wound. I know knee shots and gut shots are the most painful, but being grazed and burned by a hard little metal slug is one of the most intense experience of pain you’ll probably ever have. The scar stings to this day when I think about it too much.

The guy was dead, of course. I don’t know if there was a part of his body I hadn’t smashed and whacked with that board. There was blood all over the floor and some cloth from his shirt was stuck to the ragged end of the two-by-four. My hands ached from clenching the board so tightly — I had driven several inch-long splinters deep into my palms and fingers without feeling anything at all — and my arms screamed for me to never raise that board over my head again. I threw it to one side and the clatter it made smacking the floor made me jump. I was breathing hard and feeling pretty light headed.

I hadn’t killed anyone before today. Not personally. Joey had killed a couple on some of our earlier enforcement gigs, and I had watched another of the muscle men interrogate a stool pigeon for hours until the guy collapsed from exhaustion, choking on his own sick. The muscle guy was Tony. He wasn’t one you wanted to be partnered up with, and he didn’t want to be partnered with you anyway. He seemed to be on a mission to rid the world of the human race, one person at a time. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known that enjoyed the smell of someone pissing themselves.

Now I had killed two people with my own hands. Well, one with a gun and one with a board. Either way, I was responsible. I’m a bit ashamed to say I liked the feeling of power that this gave me; the feeling of control.

I stood there, over the dead body, for a minute or so, catching my breath, deciding what to do. I dusted off my clothes and picked up my gun from the corner it had slid into. Then I remembered that Simon was badly hurt on the second floor. I ran down the two flights to where he was still sitting, slouched in a streak of his own blood. He was dead already, so I closed his eyes and folded his hands into his lap. He didn’t look peaceful, but he didn’t look unhappy or worried, either. I think he went out like he wanted to, really.

I went down another floor and out the side door that Simon and I had gone in through. The guy I had shot was still laying there, of course. I kicked him once in the ribs on my way past him, and never gave him another thought until I wrote this down today.

I called over the fence to Lucca that I was coming over — no sense in losing my head, seriously, at this point in the game — and I climbed over. Dropping to the ground on the other side, I saw there had been a fifth guy. He had come out of the back door and Lucca had conked him over the head with the butt of his shotgun. The guy had just regained consciousness and Lucca looked at me, as if asking what to do with him. I thought about telling him just to go ahead and kill the guy, then thought better of it.

“Hey. Hey, dipshit,” I said to the dazed thug. “Hey, look at me. What are you guys doing with our truck?”

“F–” he spat out a mouthful of blood. Lucca must have caught him in the face, too. “Fuck you, man.” He raised his head to look at me and I could see that insane hatred for the victor that burns in the eyes of so many criminals. They hate anyone that gets ahead in this life. “Fuck you and the horse that rode in on your mom.”

I slapped him with the butt of my gun, which I had forgotten I had in my hand. I slapped him twice with it, the second time bringing a groan and more spat blood. “You shouldn’t talk that way,” I said. “What if your mother heard that? I bet she’d roll right over in her grave, wouldn’t she? Your poor mother. Now, look, we’re not bad guys. Really, we’re not. You guys just picked the wrong van to steal. Where’d you get it?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I just work for Ricky! I’m just muscle! Just fucking muscle…” His voice trailed off into a bit of a whimper. Lucca stepped a bit closer to the guy, putting him in deep shadow now that the sun was all the way below the buildings.

“Ricky? Which one’s he? The one upstairs?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s Ricky.”

“Ricky’s dead, amigo. He met the wrong end of a carpenter’s bad day. In fact, you’re all that’s left. And, you know, we don’t like to leave a job undone. We’d hate to forget something and have it come back to bite us in the ass.” His eyes widened and all the blood ran from his face. He started to stammer, but I kept talking, afraid I was going to lose my bluff against this know-nothing musclehead. “You wouldn’t do that, though, would you? You wouldn’t run and get your buddies or, Heaven-forbid, the cops. Would you?”

“N — No, no, sir. I wouldn’t do anything like that.” And he started sobbing in Italian. I looked at Lucca and he nodded at me.

“Alright, we’ll trust you, then. You’re gonna climb in that van there. Go on, get in there.” He slowly stood up, Lucca moved back to let him get to his feet, and took a couple of wobbly steps toward the van. I raised my gun and cocked it. It was loud in the twilight quiet. The beaten thug jumped a little and I saw his back tighten as he prepared for the bullet. “I’m not going to shoot you. I already told you that, remember? I’m just making sure you don’t get stupid on us all of a sudden. Keep walking.”

He made it all the way to van. He tried to open the door, but couldn’t, weak from either the blows on the head from Lucca or just from fear. I motioned toward the van and Lucca lumbered over and wrenched the door open. It groaned against the bashed in frame.

“No, Lucca. Not that door. The back one.” A stroke of genius had come to me. I was planning on just shooting him once he got to the van, or letting Lucca practice some punches. Now I had a different idea. Lucca looked at me, nodded, and walked to the back of the van, which was almost up against the garage door. He could just get the passenger-side back door open enough to squeeze Guido (as I had come to think of him) in. Guido got in and sat down in the back. “Now, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to close this door. You’re going to sit inside like a good little boy, like the slug I think you are. You’re going to sit there in the dark and hope, hope and pray, that the people we send to pick up the van get here before the cops do. I don’t know what our guys will do to you; kill you, break some more bones, I don’t know. But I do have a pretty good idea what the cops’ll do with you. It’s not like they have any love for two bit street thugs.”

His eyes widened again, something I wouldn’t have thought possible, and he began to blubber in Italian again. Then he remembered his tongue and begged to be let out. “Please, sir, you gotta let me out. My wife and kids. What’ll they do? What’ll happen to them? Let me out. I’ll go straight. No more of this for me. No more, never, I swear. Please!”

Lucca slammed the back door shut. He twisted both handles around, they were the claw-looking kind that so many old cars had on them, so they both pointed downward and stuck a billy club through it. The club he pulled out of his pockets, which apparently held hundreds of weapons at a time. I know I never saw him without one.

Once the van was locked, we raised the garage door and went inside the garage. The dark green sedan was still sitting there, of course, and we looked inside. There were a couple of rifles and a shotgun in the back seat. It was a good thing they didn’t decide to take their guns into the building when they came in or we would’ve had a much harder time of it. There was also a briefcase with a few thousand dollars in it. Lucca and I took the guns and case out of the car. We closed the back garage door, opened the front, walked out, and closed the front behind us.

We walked across the street in deepening night, just the glow of the one security light casting faint shadows on the buildings around us. We went back to the building we had been watching from and Manny met us at the door.

“What happened? Where’s Sim�n?”

“Simon’s dead, Manny,” Lucca said. It was the first I had ever heard him say and his voice was very soft. It didn’t fit him at all, just for looks, but it fit his personality perfectly. I’d come to treasure and look forward to the few sentences he’d say in the course of any given job.

I nodded in agreement and Manny’s face dropped. “Oh,” he said, very quietly. Then I heard him start whispering something in Spanish. I think he was praying for Simon.

“Get everything together,” I said. “We have to go. Now.” Lucca, Manny, and I walked up the stairs together in total silence. Manny had stopped praying at the quiet urgency in my voice and remembered we had a job we had to finish doing. We got to the top floor, packed everything up in the trunk we had brought with us, and carried it downstairs. Lucca and I carried it to where Manny and I had stowed his car. The car was too small to carry all of us and the trunk, so Manny and Lucca rode with the trunk and I walked back to a more commercial part of town so I could hail a cab.

That was a very quiet walk for me. I kept thinking about the guy I had killed — Ricky, I guess his name was — and how I didn’t hate myself for it. I had worked and lived with murderers, both professional and amateur, clinical and sadistic, my whole life. I had never counted myself among them. Now I was, wholly and completely. I had killed two men that day, and probably sent a third to a certain death. I was sure our clean-up guys would kill him once they had the van away from the warehouse. If the cops got there first, not that we had heard any sirens or had any reasons to suspect someone had heard the gunshots, they’d almost certainly kill him out of anger at him not knowing enough to help them find us. We were all very careful in those days, what with all the gangland raids and attacks that had been going on, and none of us carried any identification. Not even so much as a matchbook from a favorite club. No, the cops had no reason to show up, but cops have a bad habit of being up where they have no business being.

I walked back quicker than I thought I would, lost in my thoughts, and stopped at a little diner to grab some coffee and a slice of pie. It was a nice enough little place for a greasy spoon; maybe it was a greasy silver spoon. A cute-enough middle-aged waitress asked me what I wanted.

“A cup o’ Joe, black. What kind of pie you hidin’ back there, doll?”

She looked in the pie cooler and said over her shoulder, “We got apple, lemon meringue, cherry, and peach cobbler, hun. Any of that sound good?”

“Sure, gimme a hunk of that apple. I don’t need any frozen moo juice, though. Just straight pie.” I wanted to get out pretty soon, just in case sirens did begin to wail.

She sliced out a piece of pie for me and slid it onto a plate. Then she filled up a white, ceramic mug with some thick, black coffee and set them both down, along with a fork and napkin, in front of me. Then she hurried off to tend to another customer that was standing at the register.

I watched her work the till for a minute, thinking pointless thoughts of family and the “normal life,” then went back to the meal at hand. I ate the pie in a few bites, gulped down the almost-cold coffee, then stood up to go. I walked over the cash register and she rang my snack up. One dollar even. I handed her two and told her to keep the rest. She looked at me like I was crazy, but I leaned over and quietly said, “I’ve had a good day. You have one, too.” Then I left the diner, stopping at the pay phone outside to call Ray, who sent a car to a corner a few blocks away. I got there just as the car did and the driver took me back to my house. I slept fitfully that night, as I don’t rest well after killing is done. But you already knew that.

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The sun was setting as we reached the street. This part of town wasn’t prosperous enough to demand streetlights, so there was only one on every other block. The more well-to-do buildings — relatively speaking, of course — had lights in front of them, but that was only the one beside our watched building. This made approaching the building unseen much easier. We walked across the street in a loose group, Lucca out front with his shotgun held inside his coat. Simon, in his suit, seemed to glow red in the shafts of sunlight that reached between the buildings.

We hurried across the sidewalk on the other side and down the side of the building, into the alley that joined the back of this building to the one next to it, the one with the security light. When we got there, we saw that the van from last night was parked behind the building. They must have had a lot to drink the night before, as both tires were slashed and the windshield had been caved in. I know that a trashed car doesn’t mean they were drunk, but it was still parked in the way of the rear garage door, effectively eliminating any chance they had of leaving that way. We felt a lot safer knowing they couldn’t easily sneak up on us from behind.

“OK, kid, here’s where you prove your worth. Go find us another way in,” Simon was looking at me in a way that said “Don’t fuck up” and promised to eliminate anything that might get him caught or killed. Even a nineteen-year-old kid like me. I swallowed a lump that wasn’t in my throat a moment before and nodded. I ducked back out of the alley and crossed in front of the building, my gun held tightly in my sweating hand on the side away from their building.

I shouldn’t have been so worried about being seen. We’d been watching the building all day and I remember noting that there were no windows on the front of the building. Fear’s funny like that, though. Windows suddenly sprout out of solid brick walls, and those new windows always have men shooting guns at you, the bullets pricking at your skin. Logic has no place in the mind of someone about to kick down the enemy’s door.

I managed to pass the front of the building with no incident and I slipped into the side alley on the opposite side from Simon and Lucca. There was a door on this side with a security light on top of it. It must have been hooked to a switch on the inside, though, or blown out, as it wasn’t on and that side of the building was already very dark. I softly turned the knob and it turned halfway with no resistance. I went further into the alley, hopped the fence into the back alley and sped across it to where the van had been killed.

The back of the building did have windows, though. A second door, too. Luckily the shadow of the van and the deepening gloom of twilight kept me hidden from anyone that might have been peeking out. After whispering to Simon that I was coming over, I climbed over the van’s hood, hopped the fence, and dropped down next to Simon and Lucca.

“Well, find anything?” Simon asked, seeming to know I had.

“Yeah. Door and windows on the back.”

Simon waited a second for me to go on, then asked “Well? Are they open or closed? Locked? What’s up with ‘em, kid?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t check. But there’s a door on the other side, just about opposite of where Lucca’s standing. It’s open. At least, the lock turned halfway ’round. If it’s not open, it’s probably an easy lock to break.” I looked at Simon to see if this news would at least make him smile.

It didn’t. He nodded at me, then tapped Lucca and they started over the fence. “What? Why are we going that way?” I said, a little loudly.

“Shut up, kid. While you were running around, brave as Superman, the garage door opened again. We didn’t hear any engines, but there were people in there talking. It hasn’t closed yet, so we’re not going around that way.” Simon said quietly.

When he said the garage was open, I jumped. If I had been just a bit slower, they might have seen me and the whole thing would have been bust. Luckily I had kept my feet walking and nothing bad had come of it. I started up the fence, too.

Just then, we heard the garage door close and a couple of men’s voices drifted to us over the calm, dusk air. I couldn’t pick out what they were saying, but I scurried over the fence as fast as I could and crouched on top of the van’s hood. I wasn’t ever a religious man, but I held my breath, rubbed the medallion with my free hand and said as many prayers in my head as I could think of. The voices got a bit louder, they were talking about the World Series, the Yankees had beaten the New York Giants. One of ‘em must’ve lost some money on it, ’cause he was cursing the Yankees with every breath.

I looked behind me. Lucca and Simon were already down off the van. Simon was crouched between the front tire and the wall at the back of the little alley and Lucca was standing against the wall on the far side of the garage door. Simon had his pistol out and Lucca had both hands on his shotgun.

I began to ease myself back toward the edge of the van. My foot slipped and the toe of my boot scraped an awful scratch in the hood of the van. The scratch was the least of our worries, for a horrible screetching noise came with it. I heard both men go silent and then I could hear their footsteps in the alley.

“Kid! Get over here!” Simon hissed at me and I jumped off toward him. He pushed me toward the far side of the garage, to where Lucca had been. Lucca was stepping toward the van, shotgun raised and ready. I slammed myself against the brick wall and held my breath. I pulled my gun up and held it next to my face and started praying again.

“Hmm. Nothing back here.” I heard one of the men say. Then the other chimed in.

“Could have been a cat. Maybe it went over the fence. Take a look, Giovanni.”

Giovanni muttered something about cats and pulled himself up to peek over. As soon as his head cleared the fence, Lucca unloaded the barrel of his shotgun at him. Giovanni disappeared into a haze of red and dropped out of sight. I heard the other guy scream “Shit!” and, a few seconds later, fire twice at the fence.

“Get ready, kid!” Simon yelled at me and I remembered the people in the house. I heard a window go up on an upper story and someone yelled out to Giovanni and the other guy, Pete. “What the devil’s going on out there?”

Pete didn’t say anything. Quick as lightning, Simon had jumped on top of the van and shot Pete in the back of the head. Simon looked up at the upper window, but it was too far for his pistol to get an accurate shot. He jumped back off of the van, grabbed me, and ran for the far fence.

Lucca followed us, but only as far as the back door. He waited on the van-side of it, shotgun raised and ready again. Simon jumped and nearly cleared the top of the fence. He pulled himself over, I was on his heels. We ran for the side door and it opened just as we approached it. Simon cracked the guy on the side of the head with the butt of his gun and kept running inside. I followed, scared to be on my own. The guy slumped to the side and slid down the few steps to the ground.

The guy at the door wasn’t completely out of it, though. When he hit the ground, he turned and fired a shot at me. It nicked my right shoulder and I screamed. I turned around and ran back to the door. I shot him three times, standing right above him. Twice in the chest, once in the head. When I turned around, Simon was gone.

I decided to stay where I was and watch the door. That decision lasted a whole thirty seconds. I heard something crashing over in a nearby room and ran towards the noise. The whole room was a mess. A table in the middle had been turned over, spilling several bags of off-white powder onto the floor. I could see foot prints leading toward a staircase on the far side of the room and I followed them.

When I reached the second floor, I found Simon slumped by the staircase. He was bleeding from a hole in his stomach. He pointed up the next flight of stairs and I ran on, telling myself I’d get him help on the way back. The third floor was one big room, completely empty and I ran on up to the fourth floor.

When my head poked up over the landing on the fourth, and last, floor, I saw a blur of black coming at me. I ducked and slipped back a step or two. The billy club that had been aimed at my head missed and smacked the side of the stairwell. I yelled and ran up the last few steps as hard as I could, colliding with the arm and owner of the billy club. It was the man I had seen getting out of the car. I yelled in his face again, grabbed him by his lapels and pushed him down as hard as I could. He toppled over backward but used my momentum to throw me over him and into the room.

He rolled over after I was off of him and scrambled to his feet, his hand going inside his jacket for a gun. When I hit the ground, the gun left my hand and flew into a corner of the room. I got to my feet as fast as I could, but he already had the drop on me.

“Sit down, kid. You don’t have a chance,” he said. His voice was oddly high-pitched, almost feminine. No headlights, though, so I knew he wasn’t a dame. “What are you doing here?” He asked when I was seated on the floor. “I don’t know you. Why are you here?” He repeated the question much more loudly and with his gun pointing at my head.

I just sat there, playing dumb. He was approaching me and a plan was growing in my head. I looked at him, trying my best to look dazed from the fall.

“Don’t give me that. You didn’t hit your head. Answer the goddamn question!” He took a few more steps toward me, he was about five feet away. “Answer” another step “the damn” another step “question!” He was only a foot away; I could feel the spit on my face.

I shot up towards as fast as I could, my shoulder hitting him just below his ribs, my head going into his stomach. He flipped up and over me, landing hard on his back. I could hear the air explode out of his chest.

“I’m here for Joey,” I said, picking up a two-by-four from a broken crate off the floor.

“Joey?” A look of complete confusion crossed his face. I didn’t care. Whether he knew Joey or not, whether he was the one that had done it or not, he was going to pay for Joey. And he was going to pay for Simon, too. I raised the two-by-four over my head….

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Ray personally took me to the meeting place — this was a few days later — and a lot had happened between the council meeting and this meeting. For one thing, I had gotten to talk to Max. Seeing him at the office that day had been a bit of a shock. The following events had knocked that shock from my head, but in the hours and days following I had thought of it again. I caught up to him again and asked what he was doing back in town; he was supposed to be away at school.

“It’s a break. Next week is Thanksgiving, you know.”

“Oh…right.” I had completely forgotten about the holiday. Not having much of a family kind of does that to you; makes you forget all the things other people take for such concrete events. “So, maybe we can get together sometime. I mean, I’m going to be pretty busy for the next few days, but maybe after that. Like for Thanksgiving or something. Have a coffee and some pie or…” Max was shaking his head at me.

“You just don’t get it, do you? You don’t even care about the world that’s out there. You’d be perfectly happy to stay right here in this dump intimidating old ladies and kissing a different girl every night, wouldn’t you?”

“What? Max, what are you talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing. Never mind. Look, just…don’t ever get in my way, OK? I like you well enough, I guess. I don’t want to hurt anyone or anything. I just don’t want to be here — be like this — for the rest of my life.”

He walked away after that. I guess I was too young and naive to see anything in it. God, I wish I hadn’t been. I don’t know that it would have changed anything, though. Max was just that way.

The council meeting had been on a Sunday morning. On Tuesday, Ray called the office of the co-op I lived in and left a message for me. I was to meet him that night a few blocks away; we were going to the meeting. Help had been found.

That was a very nervous day for me. I don’t know why; I should have been excited to know that the people who had taken me didn’t want to throw me out when I fucked up. I should have been satisfied that Joey was going to be revenged. I should have been so many things, but all I remember being was nervous and scared. I think I was a lot smarter then than I thought.

Twilight came, and I left the apartment. I didn’t own a gun or I would have stuck it in a pocket. Instead I just carried a little medallion of some saint. I picked it up at a street carnival in Little Italy; I’m not even sure who it was or what they were supposed to protect me from or help me with. Hell, it could have been a curse on a chain for all I knew. I just felt I should take something with me. So I did.

I probably stood on that corner for two hours. It seemed like forever, with winter coming the temperature was dropping. I had worn a denim jacket which quickly became thin. I danced and stomped in place to keep warm. The action reminded me of the night Joey got iced. That thought warmed me pretty quickly and I didn’t noticed the cold again until my breath started to fog the air in front of me. I’ve always loved that about cold weather.

Just as frostbite began to eat away at my mind, Ray’s car pulled up. It wasn’t the same car as a few nights before. That had a been an older blue sedan, much like the one Joey and I had taken to the job. This was a sleek, new, midnight black coupe. Ray sat in the driver’s seat and he tossed the door open as he pulled up to the corner. I hopped in and closed the door behind me. We both said hello to each other, then rode in silence to the meeting place.

The meeting place turned out to be a dingy jazz club in the Lower East Side. I don’t think it even had a name above the door, but the two bouncers certainly seemed to know who should go in and who shouldn’t. Ray flashed them a smile and they moved aside. We went in and where immediately surrounded by cigarette smoke (not all from tobacco) and the smell of cheap booze. Ray must have spotted the trio we were meeting from the door, ’cause he led me straight to their table.

The three of them couldn’t have been more different. The one on the left end of the table was the largest man I had ever seen. He wasn’t amazingly tall or fat or anything, but his presence was like no other. His name was Lucca and he barely spoke any English. Turns out his Italian was flawless, but I didn’t speak any. He hunkered on the end of the booth, keeping prying ears from endangering their smaller owners.

Next to him, dressed in as spotless cream-colored suit was Simon. Simon was obviously the brains of the trio. He spoke quietly and quickly, almost too softly to hear and if you missed a word, it was gone forever. Simon didn’t relish having to repeat himself, and rarely would. I would come to find that he was a dead-on shot, too. A “Robin Hood of the Rifle” from what I saw.

The final member of the trio was one that I would come to be fast friends with. When I met him this first time, he was a scrawny, dirty Puerto Rican. I think he was all of fifteen years old. Manuel had a thumb in every pie — two if he could manage it — in the underworld. Said his old man was the same way and that he’d learned from the best. He was the one who had found the bastards that had killed Joey and part of his payment was that he got to tag along.

Ray and I sat down, he on the outside, and pleasantries were exchanged. Small talk for a few minutes, then the real business came out.

“So, you want us to help you get revenge. A vendetta, no?” Simon’s eyebrow arched at the question.

“Yeah,” I blurted, an anxious kid ready to be on the way.

Ray put a hand on my shoulder. “As he says, yes, we’d like your help. You’ve worked for us before. We remember those who do well, those who do what they say. We come back. Repeat customers are the best kind, you know.”

Simon looked closely at Ray. “I know,” he said, “more than I care to know about customers and this business. This racket is nothing more than a fight between siblings. An imagined insult here, a deliberate hit there.” Ray started to make signs of getting up and leaving. “But,” Simon put in quickly, “that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help. You guys have always lived up to your end of the bargain, too. There are a lot worse people to work for. Like these bastards you had us track down. Tell ‘em, Manny.”

Manuel — Manny, as Simon called him — began to tell us about the people that we had surprised. Sicilians, in their own “Mafia,” who had decided to interrupt and take over local crime activities. They had deliberately baited us into the sting, wanting to give us a taste of what was to come. That is, if we didn’t go along with them.

“You can’t be serious?” Ray asked.

“Oh, sir, very serious. These guys are…crazy. Loco. Very dangerous, I’ve heard. Very.” Manny looked scared and excited at the same time.

This whole time, Lucca had just sat on the side and watched us in silence. When the talk had finally brought up the fact that they were Sicilian, a pained look had crossed his face, but he seemed composed now. A few more details about the thugs were passed back and forth and Lucca slammed his fist into the table. A few of the glasses tipped and spilled or tumbled to the floor. “How and why are pointless. Let’s go. Kill.” His dense bass voice rumbled across the table. His eyes burned with a fire I feared. I found myself in complete agreement with him; I would have been brain dead to think otherwise.

“Soon, Lucca, soon,” Simon soothed him. He signalled to the bartender to send another round of gins to the table. Manuel and I had ginger ales. When the waitress brought the drinks and left with a slap on the ass from Lucca that sent her skidding across the alcohol-wet floor, barely keeping her feet, talk returned to the job at hand.

“I know where they are,” Manuel told us. The he pulled a map of the city out of his coat and pointed to a little red dot in the of the many warehouse districts. “They’re here most of the time.”

“Well, I think this has been most informative. You’ll each receive five thousand dollars when this is all through. I’ll expect to hear from you then,” Ray finished this sentence and got up, motioning for me to stay with the group. “Good night, gentlemen.”

Ray walked out of the club, leaving me with strangers, hired guns, killers.

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