APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (6 page)

             
“Got any salve? They itch some,” he answered, goading him on.

             
“One hundred and fifteen rounds, Dunlap. Eight dead employees…” said the lead detective, jockeying for position in front of the other suit. Dunlap shook his head in disgust. It was always the same. Someone always had to try to usurp the power from the hands of another.

             
Dunlap said nothing but gave a smirk instead.

             
The lead suit looked like he was going to snap. A vein bulged and ran down the middle of his forehead. He shoved a well-manicured finger in Dunlap’s face. It smelled like Vaseline and ass, and it seemed to Dunlap, like his breath smelled the same, but he could be mistaken.

             
“Tomato…tom
a
to…” Dunlap said, maintaining control. He forced himself to breathe.

             
One of the uniformed officers put a hand on the detectives shoulder and told him to go easy. Dunlap could see that the uniform cop understood his plight. He may not have agreed with his actions, but he knew how it was to be a dick in the dirt.

             
“Get this
creep
outa my face and read him his rights,” said the detective before storming out of the office himself.

             
The uniform grabbed Dunlap by the collar and assisted him to his feet. Dunlap unclasped his hands and heard the chain between the handcuffs jingle.

             
He was sure that his boss would have liked the new adornments, if only they had been made of gold.              

             
But, at least, he had gotten his honest.

                                      
Prologue Part 8 – Won’t you be my neighbor

Whispering Willows Apartments

Waynesburg
, Pennsylvania 

             
Whispering Willows sounded like it should be a peaceful place to call home. The name of the complex brought to mind visions of tranquil ponds surrounded by trees with hanging wisteria blowing gently in the breeze. It would, of course, have children that looked like innocent cherubs playing on tire swings and housewives hanging laundry on clothes lines while papa toiled hard all day long at work only to be revived by the mere presence of being with his family just like Ward Clever being greeted by the Beaver, or by June's.

Whispering Willows was nothing like the peaceful vista the moniker claimed it to be, not even in the spring and summer. The truth was that
papa
most often didn’t go to work at all, unless you counted selling meth out of his roach ridden living room, and
mama
didn’t hang up the laundry or cook dinner or do much of anything but get fatter and fatter and let her enormous litter of government sponging mutants run through the neighborhood like the heathens that they were. When winter blew its icy breath it was even less so an accurate moniker. On came the multi-colored Christmas lights that would hang in no particular pattern until June or July, if they came down at all and the blinking bulbs did little to grace the dump with any Christmas cheer.

He gave the panorama a furtive glance and saw that one of the leafless limbs of a Japanese maple tree draped low from the weight of a plastic baby Jesus that hung from a noose made of bailing twine. There was nothing sacred anymore; at least not in this high-brow neighborhood. The idea that Whispering Willows was in all actuality, a cluster of three story cinder block, low income housing units, where every welfare recipient and drug addict in the county seemed to congregate, never ceased to infuriate Jerry Sims.

              Low income housing should in reality be just that; reserved for those with
jobs
of low income, unfortunately that was not the case. Jerry drove his 1990 Honda Civic for two different pizza joints and relied on the tips from those aforementioned drug addicts and welfare bums. They were a demographic of notoriously bad tippers, if they even tipped him at all. He felt fortunate when they didn’t rob him as he delivered the pies.

             
There were a few folks in the complex that actually did work for a living, but they were the minority. Pride was not an issue or even an afterthought at Whispering Willows. Jerry could think of only one other person in the whole damn place that paid taxes and didn’t mooch off the government as another entitled, worthless baby factory. He had only talked to the man a couple of times in passing. Hito was an Asian fellow that had seemed nice enough. Hito was young, and although Jerry usually felt envious of younger people for their good looks, he hadn’t held it against Hito. Hito was built like an action hero and had a smile that made all the girls swoon. The Japanese guy was married to a white chick, not that it mattered to Jerry. These days everyone seemed to marry outside their race; not Jerry though. Marriage was for idiots. He didn’t have much, but at least he had some freedom. Jerry had seen Hito take a verbal beat down from his pretty little wife that seemed to inflict worse damage than Steven Seagal at an all you can eat buffet full of ninjas. Jerry thought that the dude ought to have her locked up for domestic violence. No one deserved to be treated like that.

             
The only good thing about living in Vagrantville, Pennsylvania was that the commute to work was easy enough. He never had to navigate through rush hour traffic because no one was in that big a rush, they just waited around for the tax payers to give them their every desire.

             
Jerry didn’t notice the gray-black form that swooped from the sky and wrapped its shrouded arms and legs around him when he came home from work. There was no physical manifestation just a feeling that consumed him. Anger; no, not quite anger. That was too small a word. Wrath best described the emotion that swept over him, and filled Jerry completely that day. He seemed to breathe it in through his nostrils, but never exhaled it, and with every breath he grew more and more furious.

             
He entered his basement apartment, slumped into the worn side of the couch and thumbed the remote to watch TV. Breaking news was all over the networks. It seemed to him that the whole world was going to hell.

             
Boom…Boom…Boom…

             
His jaw clenched. He felt his stomach seize into a knot and his heart began to pound harder. He looked up at the ceiling. The neighbors upstairs ran on heavy heels creating an amphitheater in his apartment, with no regard for the noise they made.

             
All he had ever expected from anyone was respect, that and maybe some common courtesy. Jerry really didn’t think that was too much to ask.

             
For Jerry Sims there were a few simple rules to apartment dwelling, rules of etiquette that should never be overlooked. 1.) Thou shall not take your neighbor’s parking space. 2.) Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife. 3.) Thou shall not stomp around like an elephant with polio when there is a person living in the apartment beneath you and finally 4.)Thou shall not crank the bass up on your stereo until the walls breathe with the rap beats and techno rhythms that your neighbor truly despises at three o'clock in the morning.

             
Now these are simply the rules. He didn’t make them up. He believed they were common knowledge. They have been passed down from generation to generation since that first apartment building called Petra. Jerry thought that, more than likely, that was why it was abandoned and full of holes.

             
As if on cue his neighbor’s upstairs cranked up their stereo. Rap beats pounded down upon his apartment, the bass vibrating his windows in their frames.

             
“Ahh... damn it all to hell!" he screamed up at the ceiling with a voice full of hatred.

             
At that, the booming footfalls began in force.

             
The rules of apartment dwelling were also common sense. Jerry had given it a lot of thought. Every time you stomp a heal to the floor, you tell the maniac that lived and was seething below you, exactly where to aim his .357.

             
He reloaded twice.

He was sleeping peacefully and dreaming about kittens when the cops arrived.

              They rousted him from his slumber, wrestled him to the floor and slapped the cuffs on his wrists. The cops led him outside to the waiting cruiser, reading him his rights but Jerry was nonplussed; the thirty-five minute power nap had done wonders for his nerves and Jerry was smiling when they manually ducked his head for him, as they placed him in the back seat of the cruiser.

             
“I think you might need some psychological help,” said the officer riding shotgun, looking back over his shoulder. Jerry knew they thought he was crazy because he shot his neighbors.

             
That was not the reason to call him crazy.

             
If you asked Jerry, he was crazy because of all the freakin’ disrespect. That’s why he was crazy. Shooting the inconsiderate sonsabitches was only a result of that insanity. They could call him crazy if they wanted to, but they would be just as crazy for thinking that he was crazy for the same things that they had probably fantasized about doing their own damn selves.

             
But really he was not technically ‘crazy’, more concise, he was simply stressed out.

             
That is what living in an apartment complex built with under-code, paper thin walls does to a man.

             
“It was the acoustics, man,” he told the cops as they drove to the station.

             
The cop in the passenger seat shook his head in disbelief. “Look, Mr. Sims, I understand that this place is full of low lives. Hell, we’re out here all the time, and we know how tempting it is to take the law into our own hands, but you should have called us, your reaction was just plain
crazy
,” he said trying his best to be sympathetic. All the locals knew that Whispering Willows had an enormous, per capita crime rate.             

             
“Yeah, call it crazy; call it overkill…just don’t call it bad marksmanship.”

The lead investigator told Jerry that he should probably not represent himself in court at that last comment but Jerry continued.

              “I loved the sounds of those bodies hitting the carpeted floors above me…and the screams that came from above… well, OK; I thought that was pretty damn annoying too, so I shot them again, if nothing else, so they would quit whining. I even managed to take out their stupid boom box. It felt very liberating to bust a cap in Tupac…
Ha ha West-side mutha fucka
,” Jerry said making a very un-gangsta sign with his right hand.

             
The two uniformed cops glanced at each other with looks of incredulity and eyes wide in astonishment. Maybe they could understand why the man had become a vigilante, after all, the people he had killed had a long and varied criminal record and they probably had it coming, but Sims was raving like a loon. Jerry’s face was still taut with pressure and red with anger and he was very nearly yelling. They thought if they didn’t get him to the station pretty soon and get him some medical help he might possibly have a stroke.

             
“Do you guys think that it bothers me to go to prison? Hell, no it doesn’t. They have a curfew where everyone shuts their cake holes and I’ll be able to sleep. I’ll never have to worry about some punk with a sound system, which cost more than my car, taking my parking space. I won't have to deliver pizzas to those shit birds anymore. Do you know how much it sucks to kiss those filthy asses to get a one dollar tip?

             
“It sounds like a pretty peaceful scenario, if you ask me, the prison, I mean. I suppose you think I’m crazy for all that carnage, don’t you? I really don’t care. I know that I’m not crazy…I’m just really stressed out, man.”

At the police station Jerry was as good as his word and he settled into his cell without any protest. Officer Kypers shivered and although he never told anyone, he was sure that he had seen a gray-black form like smoke emerge from Sims and shoot through the wall out of sight.

Sims asked for an extra pillow and he thought that the guards were respectful, even pleasant as he slipped peacefully to sleep in his new smaller apartment.

From the next hold
ing cell he could hear someone groaning, but the soft sounds didn’t disturb him, they soothed him and lulled him back to sleep.