HELLz BELLz (7 page)

Josh shrugged. “Did we…?”

The nine-one-one operator answered. James said, “I want to report an accident. An ice cream truck was driving on the wrong side of the road and I ran into it.”

The operator told him he was breaking up and asked him to repeat what he’d just said. “Goddamn,” he said. “Piece-of-shit phone. Can you hear me now?” he shouted.

The ice cream man stepped out of his truck, looked around as though he had just landed on some alien landscape, then came toward James. A trickle of blood rolled down his nose. He had a tire iron in his fist.

James heard the distant church bell tolling and wondered if it had stopped and then started in again or if he’d become so used to it that he’d stopped hearing it for a while—or if the collision with the Moo Goo truck had affected his hearing. Then he wondered why he was doing all this stupid wondering when a crazy ice cream man was bearing down on him with a tire iron. James switched on the ignition and tried to start the Honda’s engine. It whined and coughed, but didn’t turn over. The Moo Goo man was only three feet away now, raising the tire iron over his shoulder.

“Fuck!” shouted James. “Get out! Get out!” he shouted at Josh, then moved away from the door, hopped over the floor stick and almost into Josh’s lap. “Out, goddammit!”

The man in the white suit banged the tire iron against the Honda’s driver’s door. “C’mon, kid,” he said with a maniacal grin. “What’ll it be?”

Josh finally got the message and threw open his door and bailed out. He tried to run, stumbled and took an awkward tumble to the grass of someone’s front lawn. James dove out right behind him, hit the street and rolled to his feet.

A couple of pre-teens stood on the sidewalk with ice-cream money in their fists, watching the bizarre scene unfold on their tree-lined street. A porch light came on and someone stepped out the front door to see what was going on.

The man with the tire iron was coming around the rear end of the Honda, smacking the iron against his empty palm, grinning like a cat that just ate Tweety Pie. “Got your ice cream on a stick,” the man said. “Right here. Ring-a-ding-ding.”
Smack
went the iron against his palm.

“Oh fuck,” said James, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach. “Call the cops!” he yelled to anyone who might be within hearing. “The guy’s fuckin’ nuts!”

The Moo Goo man said, “Ring-a-ding-ding. I got your ice creeeeeeamm.”

“They won’t come,” a woman wailed. “They’re all—”

Gunshots cracked somewhere in the neighborhood:
Crack. Crack-crack.

“What do we do?” Josh whined.

The knot of kids had grown to half a dozen or more and they were looting the ice cream truck, only shoving each other at first, but then they began to fight fiercely over the frozen treats.

A naked woman with a towel turbaned around her head walked across the lawn, her baggy breasts quivering against her upper abdomen. “Coma coma do down down,” she sang softly.

“Ring-a-ding-dong, yo skull gonna bong.” The ice cream man followed James across the grass, swinging the tire iron left to right, right to left.

“Get away from me!” James shouted over his shoulder. His nausea mushroomed and he bent over and spewed a gush of sour puke. Hands on his knees, he looked up, coughing and sputtering, to see the tire iron swinging toward his head. He pushed against his knees for leverage and juked to his left. The iron rod swooshed past his left ear and glanced off his shoulder.

Run!” yelled Josh. “This way!”

Ignoring the dull ache in his left shoulder, James started running toward Josh but his feet slipped on the freshly watered lawn and he fell to his hands and knees.

A woman’s shrill voice bellowed: “Johnny, you stop that this minute, you little heathen!”

The Moo Goo man glanced back toward the street and saw the gang of kids looting his truck. He broke into a shambling jog back to his wrecked vehicle.

Josh was tugging on James’s arm, trying to pull him to his feet, but James remained on all fours, with his head craned so he could watch the insane ice cream man.

“Oh, my God,” a man bellowed, “he’s gonna kill them. Hey!”

The tire iron connected with the top of a little girl’s head. The hollow sound it made sickened James and he vomited on the backs of his hands. The little girl crumpled to the street. The Moo Goo man swung again and pulped the face of a chubby little boy in a Washington Redskins jersey.

“Ring-a-ding-ding, I got your ice cream right here.”

A big man in boxer shorts and a white T-shirt loped across the yard with a shotgun in his fleshy mitts. He ran right up to the ice cream man, pointed the shotgun at the man’s chest and fired.
Boom!
The ice cream man flew backward and landed on the asphalt, his arms akimbo, the white of his shirt blasted dark and wet. The man with the shotgun stood over him and
(Boom!)
blew his face away.

“C’mon, man, we gotta boogie,” Josh urged. “They’re killin’ everybody.”

“My car…” James sputtered and blew a mushy chunk of vomitus off his lower lip.

“Fuck it. It won’t start. C’mon. They’re all buggin’.”

More gunshots rang out somewhere close by. The man with the shotgun started blasting the Moo Goo truck, scattering the marauding kids.

“Fuckin’ combat zone,” James said, his voice hoarse with awed wonder and foul-tasting phlegm. He got to his feet, and he and Josh ran toward the street.

“The bell,” he said as they ran side by side down the centerline. “That fuckin’ church bell. Runnin’ people crazy.”

* * *

Candace drifted through dimensionless darkness. The pain was there, lurking just below the oily surface. She didn’t want to wake up because she knew the pain would be more than she could bear. Better to stay here in the dark, hidden from the demons and the torment of pain. Hidden from the world’s evil. The goodness had to survive. Had to be protected. Had to be nurtured. Evil would abort the good before it could be born. The demons were everywhere, sniffing out innocent prey, intent on murder and degradation.

Abomination.

Voices seeped into the darkness, opening dirty channels of distortion, filthy light.

“…’s dead.”

“…sh’ain’t dead.”

“…lotza blood.”

“…cuntz.”

“…titty…”

“Sheeit…”

“…mama…”

Crack.

She felt the sting on her cheek.

Light flooded the darkness.

She opened her eyes and the pain rushed in with infected light. Fierce inflammation suffused her flesh and bone and palpated the inner core of her being with rude fingers.

The demons hovered above her, leering down with wicked teeth and scum-dripping eyes. A blade flashed steel lightning. The copper scent of fevered blood misted her nostrils and coated the back of her raw throat.

She had no mouth with which to scream.

So she screamed with her entire body. Blood shrilled from her pores. The fine hairs in her flesh sent signals of agony. Her dislocated spirit called out in desperation to God.

Hell’s bell shuddered the whole world.

Something broke loose deep within her engorged belly.

My baby. God help me.

* * *

Daisy Winter downed the last of the vodka, worked up a belch that pleasantly burned the inside of her nose, then pulled her elastic slacks over her wide hips and stepped into her sandals. She didn’t bother to run a brush through her hair or to check her make-up in the mirror (she didn’t think she was even wearing make-up but she couldn’t remember for sure).

She was sure of only one thing: She had to walk across the street and go to the place where the great iron bell was still ringing.

The train of rolling orgasms had left her legs weak and wobbly, but they had also energized her in some strange way. She surmised that by releasing all that pent-up sexual energy through manual stimulation she had recharged her psychic batteries in ways only sexperts could explain. Like the guy she’d seen on Oprah last week who talked about “orgone” or some such. Said it was this invisible sexual energy that flowed around the body and sometimes got blocked, and when it was blocked, you were fucked—not literally—and you needed a good fucking to get the stuff flowing again. Otherwise, you would stay frustrated and bitchy as hell. It made sense to her. Masturbation had its place, but it was a poor substitute for fucking your ass off. And Daisy knew that what she needed (and wanted) now was some serious fucking. Someone to lay the pipe to her and drill her eyeballs out.

She touched her injured eye as she mounted the steps and headed upstairs to check on her vicious bitch-mother. The crazy old lady had scratched her eye pretty good, and she couldn’t keep it open because every time she blinked, it felt like sandpaper was raking her eyeball. The vodka had dulled the pain only a little, so she was going to take one of her mother’s pain pills and then she would go across the street to the church and find out exactly what was going on. Though it didn’t make rational sense, she felt that the bell was calling her and that something wonderful waited for her there. Something sexual. Someone to lay the pipe to her? Didn’t make sense, but that was what she felt. It was a feeling too strong to ignore. And though she had just masturbated till her clit was sore, every baritone bong of that church bell rang her clit-clapper and sent a maddening tingle through her cunt.

She crept into her mother’s room, realized there was no reason to creep, and said, “How’s it hanging, Ma? How’re things in La-la Land?”

The old woman didn’t respond at all. She just lay there with her eyes now closed and a blank expression on her wrinkled face. Her breathing was slow and shallow.

Daisy rummaged through the dozen or so pill bottles on the bedside table and found the Percodan, then popped two into her mouth and dry-swallowed them. “That ought to do it,” she said. “You won’t be needing them anymore. Hell, you’re probably brain dead anyhow. Feeling no pain. Best thing ever happened to you, you old shit. Finally out of your misery. And mine. You know how tired I was of your constant complaining and belly-aching? Your preoccupation with your bowels? You never thought of anyone but yourself. You were just a bitter useless old woman. Harping, harping, harping. Well, your harping days are over, you old harpy. Ain’t no harping in hell.”

She bent down and kissed her mother’s cool forehead. “Sweet dreams, Mother,” Daisy said with a giggle. The smell of urine mingled with the old-lady smell, and Daisy turned up her nose. “Aw, you pissed yourself. If you think
I’m
gonna clean you up, you’re sadly mistaken. Tah-tah, now. I’m going out for a while. Don’t wait up.”

Leaving her mother to stew in her own stinking juices, she shut the door, went down to the kitchen for a flashlight, and then went out the front door and across the street to the abandoned church. The closer she got to the ringing bell, the wetter she went between her legs. The night was hot and humid. By the time she reached the front door of the stone church, her entire body was glazed with sweat, but in her frame of mind, it seemed that all that wetness had spread from her cunt and that if she didn’t find someone to fuck her, she would suffocate in her own orgone and die of sexual frustration.

There was an official notice tacked to the door stating that the building had been condemned by the city. Daisy tried the door. It was unlocked. So much for the efficiency of the city fathers.

She went in.

* * *

Joe took another sip of his second scotch. Suzie was on her third or fourth cigarette since they’d first found refuge, of sorts, in Bill’s Bar, and she was noisily munching ice from her glass and exhaling smoke through her slightly upturned nostrils. Joe shook a smoke from their shared pack and lit it with a match that seemed to flare too brightly. “I better try her again,” he said.

“Okay.” Suzie gave him a look of concern, as if she really was worried about a woman she’d never met.

No, she’s concerned for me,
Joe thought.
Sweet girl. Sweet but not too smart, getting involved with that bozo Gary.

He walked back to the pay phone and fed it more change, then punched his home number again. He could barely hear the buzz of each ring because of the blaring jukebox. Now it was thumping out a rockabilly tune by a woman with a nasty nasal condition.

He started to hang up after the thirteenth ring, but then he let it ring once more because he thought it might be bad luck to hang up on an unlucky number. A silly superstition, sure, but on a crazy night like this, anything seemed possible. Whatever
could
go wrong, probably
would
go wrong.

As he made his way back to the table, he tried in vain to come up with a reasonable explanation for why Sara wasn’t answering the phone. Worry was turning to raw fear, and the scotch in his stomach was turning sour and giving him a bad case of heartburn. He belched and the burning in the back of his throat backed off a little.

Suzie looked up at him. The worry lines in her forehead deepened. “No answer?”

“No. I’ve got to go home and see what’s wrong.
Something’s
wrong. Nothing else makes sense.” Swaying with a wave of dizziness, he rested his hands on the back of his chair and leaned forward.

Suzie stubbed out her smoke and stood. “I’ll go with you.”

“That’s not…”

She held up the palm of her hand, angled her head and cut her eyes at him. “It’s not open for discussion. You stuck by me, now it’s my turn. If something
is
wrong, I’ll be there to help.”

“I…okay. Thanks. But you might as well sit down. I’ve got to call a cab, so we’ll be here a while longer.”

“Or we could go back and get your car. The cops probably won’t even notice us.”

“I don’t know. I parked right in front of the store. That psycho cop could recognize me and come after us. The last thing we need is a high-speed chase.”

“But if something’s wrong at home, shouldn’t you get there as soon as possible?”

Joe massaged his forehead. “Yeah. Shit. I don’t know what the hell to do.”

“Give me your keys,” she said. “I’ll get the car and pick you up a block away. They didn’t get that good a look at me. Those cops were looking at my tits, not my face.”