Free Automatic Woman by Nathan L. Yocum Page B

orchestral pit and seating. My new friend, Mr. Safari, stood center in audience rows, black suit, elephant mask, pistol clutched in hands crossed low over his hips, still as a corpse. Left to right Safari had friends. Mr. Lion, Mr. Ape, Mr. Goat, Mr. Tiger, all masked and suited and hefting nickel-plated long pistols.
    “Come down, Mr. Fellows. We have a proposition for you,” Safari called up to me. He punctuated his sentence by cocking the hammer of his pistol. I backed into the workshop and shut the door. For a second I thought I’d imagined the whole thing. That somewhere in my sick, drug addled mind I’d hallucinated the maskers. Then a bullet punched through the door and ripped the skin off the edge of my ear. That brought me back real quick. Boots stomped, men ran. My time slowed. I tried to swallow again, was met with sticky filth again. I was dizzy, sweating. I reached into my pocket for the Engholm, but instead found Dr. Doyle’s syringe. Why not? I popped the cap with my teeth and jabbed the needle in my leg. I pressed the plunger to the end before remembering the doctor’s warning about double dosing. Too late. Bollocks.
    Another bullet tore through the door. There was no lock, but the door was a single, small entrance. One man at a time was coming through and I liked the odds of myself against any one man.
    Blood rushed into my face, my sweat turned from cold to hot. I was hyperventilating, like my body couldn’t get enough air. I gritted my teeth and ground them in a low crackling sound, masked wholly by the blood pounding in my ears. Cheers to Dr. Doyle.
    The door opened. I roared and charged. Goat mask leveled his gun. I like to think he looked surprised under the mask. That maybe he was expecting a cowering man, or a rational man. What he got was the holy living shite kicked out of him. Literally, one kick square in the chest with every bit of weight I could shift into it. Goat mask fell back, hit the guardrail, flipped over it and went crashing to the stage below.
    I don’t remember ripping Saxon’s hotplate off its gas pipe, but zoom, there it was. The blood pounding in my ears turned into a pulsing hum. Tiger mask took Goat’s place in the doorway and I flung the hotplate at him like a discus. The bulky appliance bounced off the beast man’s shoulder and I swear I heard a crunch. Tiger shot once into the ground, then shifted his gun to the arm that wasn’t broken and shot wild into the room. His bullet struck metal and fanned sparks that ignited the natural gas filling the room from the open appliance line. I got my hands on him, wrapped my arms around his body and dragged him into the burning room, into the mouth of hell. I might have been screaming at this point. I know he was.
    I lifted the Tiger mask over my head and drove him into the ground. Shots were firing from somewhere, to somewhere. My vision doubled, but this was a moot point in that all I could see was walls and walls of flames. Flame, coating the world. I crossed my arms over my face; the sleeves of my jacket were set ablaze. I turned to what might have been the window side of the room and leapt.
    By God or Fortuna, I was right. My fat body burst through the office window and I dropped like a flaming comet in the early evening sky. I remember hitting a slanted roof, sliding, falling, landing on my feet in the street, jacket still ablaze. Some thick bodied masker, Mr. Gazelle, Safari and company’s outside lookout, stared at me with mouth agape. Too late he reached for his holstered fire arm and I was on him. I grabbed his gun wrist and put two Engholm rounds in his chest with my free hand. The Gazelle slumped onto the pavement. I’d never killed a man before this. Sure I’ve seen war, maybe I’d shot a man, but the skirmishes I encountered were distant things, rifle rounds across fields to faraway strangers. This was different. My hand was on this man when I laid him low. This occupies my thoughts now, though it didn’t then.