“What…this your kid, Scratch? You got a thing for crackwhores?”
“Shut the fuck up and pop this bitch!”
“I’m just fuckin’ with you, dog. Move the kid and I’ll do this hooker for you.”
“Naw, you pop ’em both.”
“Fuck dat shit! I ain’t doin’ no kid!” I started to turn and leave.
“Fine then, you pussy ass mutherfucker!”
Scratch reached over and snatched the child from the whore’s arms. She tried to hold on to her baby but Scratch drew back and pimp slapped her. The back of his hand collided with her jaw with the sound of a gunshot. Snot flew from her nose as her head whipped around damned near three-hundred and sixty degrees and her chapped lips split and ran with blood. She fell to the ground sending up a cloud of dust.
“Now, Nig-uh- I mean, Snap, cap this pipe smokin’ hooker!”
“No sweat, my man.” I pointed the gun at the woman’s head…
“Pleeeeeease!”
…And pumped three rounds into her skull, tearing it to pieces. The top of her head went first and then the left side of her face. She laid there with her left eye staring at me in the dark from across the room and her right eye closing slowly.
I stood in the darkness, stunned by my own cruelty. Scratch began to laugh. His huge flashlight was still trained on the woman’s brutalized corpse.
“Oooooh shit! That was vicious, dog!”
“Get that flashlight off her face, man! I don’t want to look at that shit!”
“Okay, but we got to get rid of this kid though. I know how you feel, but we can’t just leave him here. It’s a mercy killing now. Would you rather leave him down here with these fiends? Yo, I don’t believe this shit! I know you ain’t cryin’ over this little crack baby?”
But I was. I couldn’t believe it myself, but tears were streaming down my face. I was overcome with such a profound remorse that I was almost paralyzed by it. This killing raised my personal death toll to an even two dozen, but this was the first time I could recall feeling anything for the marks I took out.
“Give me the kid.”
“You gonna do him?”
“Just give me the muthafucka!” I barked and Scratch obliged.
“Forgive me,” I said, looking into the brown-skinned baby’s warm trusting eyes. The child’s eyes sucked me into them like a whirlpool, swallowing me whole and dragging me under. I drowned in them and died. I saw my whole life play out like pictures in a ViewMaster. It was all anger and pain, hatred for myself and others. I didn’t like anything I saw.
“Forgive me,” I begged as the tears continued to fall.
“Kill that little bastard!” Scratch bellowed. His flashlight was turned upwards to illuminate his face. His blue eyes narrowed into serpentine slits. His gold capped teeth looked like a mouthful of fangs and his white skin was the pale bloodless pallor of a corpse. In my heart, I knew that it was the face of Satan.
I looked down at the child in my arms and it all made sense. Scratch was Satan and I was the whore of Babylon, this child, my last hope for salvation, perhaps even everyone’s last hope. Maybe this was the reborn baby Christ, and if Christ died this time then the world would belong to Scratch, and drugs, and greed, and murder. The idea sounded absurd even as I thought it, but like the chimerical voices and hallucinations of a schizophrenic or chronic drug addict, telling myself that it was all an illusion did little to dispel it. The more I stared at the pallid fright mask that danced and raged, glowing in the darkness, the stronger the idea became. I decided not to wait for him to grow horns and a tail. I pointed the gun at Scratch and pulled the trigger.
The flashlight fell from his hands and spun off into the darkness casting shadows in every direction as he flew backwards crying out in pain. The flashlight hit the ground and continued to spin illuminating the basement in brief flashes like a strobelight. I watched as each flash of light revealed Scratch’s laborious rise from the ground clutching his bleeding chest. His muscles seemed to be reshaping, elongating and hypertrophying into something massive and powerful. Scratch’s jaw appeared to come unhinged and his gold teeth seemed to grow into long tusks. His hands curled into huge claws and his arms grew until they touched the ground even as his head touched the ceiling. Each turn of the flashlight revealed an even more horrible change. It could have been the adrenalin coursing through my veins, a trick of the light, my own guilt and fear feeding some sort of schizophrenic episode. But as far as I was concerned, Scratch had just turned into a demon before my very eyes. When Scratch charged toward me he did not look even remotely human. The roar that erupted from his throat was like the sound of an oncoming train.
“Snap!!!”
I took the stairs two at a time as I ran holding the tiny infant tight against me. Scratch’s voice boomed in the darkness below.
“You’re dead, motherfucker! You hear me, fool? I’m going to kill you and everyone you ever knew!”
I flew from the house, down the front steps, and flung open the door to my Impala with my heart beating against my chest as if it was trying to break free and run. I was hyperventilating, trying to suck oxygen into my cramped lungs as panic and shock crushed down on me threatening to stop my heart in my chest.
“What the hell did I just see down there? What tha fuck was that?”
The child was still silent as I buckled him up as best I could and struggled to fit the keys into the ignition with a hand shaking violently with an overdose of adrenalin and a blood pressure that must have been in the one eighties. A bullet smashed through the driver’s side window and whistled past my nose. Scratch stood in the doorway aiming that big shiny .45 at my head. He looked normal again and he looked pissed. I ducked down and finally managed to fit the key into the ignition. More bullets whistled by over head as I started the engine and raced away from the withered crack-house with the raging white demon slumped in the doorway, his chest stained crimson, firing carelessly into the night.
««—»»
A deluge of gunfire thundered down upon the tank-like ’72 Impala as it rocked and swerved up G-town Avenue at heart-stopping speeds. It kicked up trash and garbage as it barreled through the somber deserted streets pursued by the gold-encrusted red Beemer. The entire time I couldn’t help but to doubt my sanity.
Why on earth was I trying to save this child? Why hadn’t I just blown him away along with his crackhead mother? It wouldn’t have been the first kid I’d killed. Why was I risking my life for this little crackbaby? Had all that talk from Mom and Yolanda started to get me? Was I developing a conscience? Was I getting soft? Was I looking for forgiveness? Redemption? If so it was too little too late. I had too much blood on my hands to ever be forgiven. Not by myself and not by God.
But then darker questions, more terrifying questions invaded my head making me want to cry out in terror.
Did I really just see Scratch turn into a monster down there? Is this mutherfucker really goddamned Satan? What the hell have I gotten myself into?
I tried to shut those thoughts out. What I thought I saw couldn’t have been real. It couldn’t have.
A cascade of glass rained down upon my head as bullets ripped through the Impala like a stinging swarm of angry bees. I ducked, closed my eyes, and moaned like a bitch. I was scared to death, confused, and lost without that cocky, ignorant, madness that usually protected me from fear and doubt. It had been a long time since I had run from anything outside myself and I didn’t like it. It was funny, just hours ago I would have never doubted that I could take Scratch out with ease, yet here I was fleeing for my life as he chased my black ass all over creation. Under normal circumstances I would have just turned and capped this punk. But these were not normal circumstances. There was no way I could have missed Scratch at that range, even in the dark, yet there he was ten seconds off my ass. And then there was that bizarre transformation. It might have just been the shadows. It was pretty dark down there.