Suckers - Jack Kilborn [59]
He raised the knife again, I wondered what hell would be like and if they gave you time off for sucking up, and then his chest became instant Spaghetti-Os to coincide the another shotgun blast from Vlad.
Crazy Knife Goon folded like a lawn chair, his knife falling from his hand and landing, point-first, between my toes, where it stuck in the floor with a thwak.
Someone grabbed my ankle, but I had enough adrenaline in my system to kill a mastadon, and I pulled free and sprinted down the hall and tried to remember if I should go left or right so I went right and then another right and then I pulled open the door and there was Vlad with the shotgun.
Apparently this house only had one goddamn room in it.
I ducked. He fired. The drywall lost. When he racked another cartridge in I managed to find another door and even though I fully expected him to be behind this one as well I tugged it open and slammed it shut behind me.
The room was pitch black, and I was breathing like a locomotive, but I swear I heard feminine giggling.
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Hee hee! Ow!” I said, as the ladies clawed and bit into my arms, legs, torso, and an extremely ticklish spot under my right knee.
“Zesty, tangy blood…”
You wouldn’t expect chained-up elderly women to be so freakin’ strong. For the first few moments I wasn’t fighting back as hard as I could, simply because it still felt like I was engaged in combat with my grandma, but once the biting and clawing started to really hurt I punched and kicked with no regard to brittle bones or fragile dentures.
I couldn’t get away. I kept straining to get out of chain-range so I could at least cower in a corner, but there was simply no escape from these women. They’d been slurping steroid-laden blood or something.
They were in no hurry to kill me. Though I tried to protect my throat, it was unnecessary—they obviously planned to eat me alive, one tiny bite at a time.
I was definitely bleeding in several different places.
“Foamy, frothy blood…”
Was my blood really foamy and frothy? Or had they just run out of good adjectives?
I couldn’t believe that I was going to die from being slowly eaten alive by chained-up elderly ladies who thought they were vampires. I’d always kind of figured that I would go peacefully in my sleep, after my wife dropped an anvil on my head.
One of the ladies bit my arm hard. This one actually took some flesh with it. I screamed. (Not that I hadn’t been screaming before, but I screamed a little louder at that one.)
They both stopped biting me at the sound of the shotgun.
The three of us listened.
Chaos outside.
Hopefully it was good chaos. Maybe the cops had burst in to save the day. They’d blow away Vlad and his goons, and—oops, sorry, we bad—accidentally shoot down McGlade in the crossfire. He’d lay on the floor, blood seeping from the hundred and seventy-eight bullet holes in his chest, wondering why he’d been such a loathsome prick.
I could imagine his eulogy: “Fucker’s dead. Throw some dirt on him. Let’s go play some poker.”
More shotgun blasts. More chaos.
It occurred to me that I should be trying to use the distraction as a tool for escape, rather than fantasizing about Harry McGlade’s tragic demise.
I fantasized about it a little bit more, just because it was so pleasant, and then sprung to my feet.
Since my legs were all bitten-up, I promptly dropped back down to the floor. Falling on my legs hurt about as much as getting them bit in the first place.
One of the ladies dove at me. I threw an instinctive punch. It was not a mighty punch, but the momentum of her face moving toward my fist, combined with the momentum of my fist moving toward her face, combined with the fact that I got her right in the middle of the nose, made for one splattery smack. I couldn’t quite see the results, but I could feel them on my knuckles.
She let out a howl and began to flail around on the floor. Positive descriptions of my blood’s flavor and consistency