Nocturnal

Hector’s Revenge

Aggie James picked up the Tupperware container that had been tossed his way. It hurt to do even that. His body ached. He needed a hit. Something. Anything. Drying out sucked.

He opened the container and smelled it. His trembling stomach rejoiced at the scent of the brown stew filled with carrots, potatoes and thick chunks of some stringy meat.

The old lady had come with her cart again. They hadn’t drawn his chain all the way back this time. He could move enough to reach the food. That made him potentially dangerous, he supposed, but the old lady didn’t seem to worry about him. She came close, leaned in, then sniffed.

This time her scarf was pink with big red spots. She wore a brown skirt instead of gray, but the sweater and shoes were the same.

“This stew looks good,” Aggie said. “What’s in it?”

She stopped sniffing him long enough to look him in the eye. “Is good for you. Eat.”

She had spoken to him. It was the first English he’d heard in days. “Lady, what’s your name?”

“Hillary.”

She reached into her cart and threw a sandwich to the Chinaman wearing the Super Bowl XXI shirt. He caught it and ripped open the brown paper. He said something that sounded like shay-shay, then shoved a big bite into his mouth as he crawled forward on his knees until his chain pulled taut.

“Please,” he said to Hillary as he chewed. “I no talk. I leave. Please. Please.”

His sandwich looked like egg salad. The man was terrified. He had tears in his eyes, yet he still crammed the food into his mouth, chewed and swallowed as fast as he could. Aggie recognized that behavior all too well — if you didn’t know when or where your next meal might come from, or if someone was going to kick your ass and take your food away, you ate as much as you could as fast as you could.

“Please,” the Chinaman said.

Hillary just stared at him.

What a group they were: Aggie the bum, Hector the Mexican and the hungry Chinaman. Hector had two sandwiches lying in front of him. He hadn’t touched them. Hillary had come twice since the masked men had taken his wife. Hector didn’t move a lot anymore, just lay there in a fetal ball. Aggie couldn’t blame the guy — wife and kid, gone.

And you know exactly what that feels like.

“Please-please,” the Chinaman said to Hillary. He shoved the last of the sandwich into his mouth, then pushed his fingers and palms together, like he was praying. “I no talk. Please!”

Hillary rattled off a sharp, short phrase of what sounded like that chinky-chong talk, and the Chinaman shrank away. He fell to his ass, then back-crawled until he hit the white wall.

“Damn, Hillary,” Aggie said. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him I’ll bring egg rolls next time,” Hillary said without looking away from the man.

“You’ve got egg rolls?”

She looked at Aggie again. “You don’t seem as scared as he does. Why?”

Aggie shrugged. “Doesn’t look like I’m going anywhere unless you let me go. Besides, I got nothing to live for. I’m pretty scared, I guess. If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die.”

And maybe you’ve been trying to kill yourself for years, but you don’t have the balls to do it right.

“There are different ways of dying,” she said. “Some worse than others. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you.”

Aggie shrugged again. “What’s gonna happen is what’s gonna happen. Maybe I’m a little” — he paused as a shiver ripped him from toes to nose — “a little preoccupied right now.”

“You’re already feeling better, I can …”

Her voice trailed off, but somehow Aggie knew that she’d been about to say: you’re feeling better, I can smell it. Had the Mexican woman smelled better, too?

Aggie decided to stop thinking about that. He didn’t want to know if he was right.

“I’d be better still if I could get my medicine,” he said. “How about it, lady? Can I get my medicine I had on me when I came in?”

“No.”

“But I need my medicine. I’m sick.”

Hillary shook her head. “You don’t need it, or you won’t soon. We’ve had many like you here before. You’ll be fine in another day or two.”

Aggie had dried out before. Sure, the shakes would be gone, as would the shits and the pukes, but he’d be far from fine. Losing the shakes didn’t help you forget — the smack did.

“I need it,” Aggie said.

Hillary smiled. “Perhaps in a few days, this need will be the least of your problems.”

The white jail-cell door swung open with its grinding, metallic squeak. Six white-robed men came in, hoods pulled up over monster masks — Wolf-Face, Pig-Face, Hello Kitty, a bug and a demon-face. The last one through wore the black-skinned, red-lined face of Darth Maul.

Wolf-Face carried the pole with the hook. Demon-Face held the remote control.

The Chinaman stared and muttered rapid-fire words that Aggie didn’t understand. The guy had been unconscious when they brought him in — this was his first time seeing the freak show.

The white-robed men closed in on Hector.

Hector didn’t move. He remained in a fetal position.

Demon-Face pressed a button on the remote. The chains started to clank. Aggie hustled back to the wall, scooping up his chain as he went. He rested his neck against the hole, letting the chain play through his fingers so it wouldn’t loop his foot or anything like that.

The Chinaman was freaked, but not so freaked he didn’t mimic Aggie’s actions.

Hector’s chain pulled tight, started dragging him, and still he didn’t react. The monster-faced men closed in. Even as he slid, four sets of hands grabbed at his arms and legs. The wooden pole descended, its metal hook reaching for his collar.

Then Hector’s chain rang with a strange new clank.

It stopped retracting.

Aggie looked to the hole that led into the wall. There, his chain was balled into some kind of a knot large enough that it wouldn’t fit through the stainless-steel flange.

The monster-faced men looked too, their black-gloved hands stopping in midmotion around the Mexican’s hands and feet. In the brief, still silence that filled the white room, Hector spoke.

“Ahora es su turno cabrones.”

His hand shot out under a white robe, grabbed a foot and yanked. Pig-Face went down hard, feet pulled out from under him like some cartoon character walking into one of those rope traps, his head thonking audibly off the floor’s white stones.

He tricked ’em. He was just playin’ possum.

Hector moved like a pissed-off street cat fighting a pack of small, slow dogs. He shook off their grip and with the same motion was on his feet. He kicked out, planting his foot hard into the stomach of Bug-Face. Bug-Face let out a grunt, then dropped.

Two men down in less than a second.

“Hit ’em!” Aggie screamed. “Hit ’em!”

Hello Kitty grabbed Hector’s left arm as Darth Maul pulled a lead pipe out of his sleeve and swung it in a low, horizontal arc, aiming for Hector’s knee. The Mexican twisted at the last second, like those guys in that Ultimate Fighting stuff, bending his knee away from the pipe and taking the hit in the crook of his leg. His face wrinkled up — that hit hurt, but not as bad as if it had taken him in the kneecap.

Goddamn but that beaner was fast.

Hector reached out with his free right hand and ripped the wood pole out of Wolf-Face’s hands. Darth Maul brought the pipe back for another knee shot, but the Mexican jabbed the stick’s butt into Maul’s latex mask. Darth Maul let out a scream the likes of which Aggie had never heard — high-pitched and clicky. Black-gloved hands shot inside the hood as Maul fell to the ground, little feet kicking.

The Mexican put the end of the stick on the white floor, then drove his foot through the shaft, snapping it in half and leaving him holding a long, jagged shard of white wood.

Hector snarled. He jammed that shard right under the Hello Kitty mask.

Blood sprayed.

From the floor, Pig-Face grabbed Hector’s feet. Wolf-Face dove in and wrapped his white-robed arms around Hector’s chest. Demon-Face snagged the lead pipe off the floor — it went up fast, then came down faster in a vicious arc ending on the Mexican’s head.

Hector sagged. He disappeared beneath a flurry of white robes, punching black fists, kicking feet and a swinging pipe that did not stop.

Aggie couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop seeing, couldn’t stop hearing. Over and over again, the repeated whiff-gong-crack of the pipe coming down on the Hector’s shins, his knees, his feet, his hands. Each time the metal met flesh and bone, it was answered with a cry of agony.

Hector stopped moving, but the beating continued.

Infinite moments later, Wolf-Face and Pig-Face grabbed the Mexican’s shattered hands and dragged him out of the room. Blood-soaked pajamas left long red smears against the white floor.

Two more white-robed men appeared: the Joker and Jason Voorhees. They helped Pig-Face and Bug-Face drag away the still-twitching Hello Kitty and the unmoving Darth Maul.

Hello Kitty’s blood ran a zigzag curving path between the cobblestones’ low points until it drained into the same hole Aggie and the others used to shit and piss.

Hillary calmly rolled her Safeway shopping cart out the door. The wheels still squeaked, but only a little. She stopped and looked back at Aggie. “An ouvrier will come mop this up soon,” she said.

She shut the cage door behind her. Silence filled the bright room, broken only by the soft whimpers of the Chinaman.

Hector had fought like a motherfucker with nothing to lose. Aggie James also had nothing to lose, but he couldn’t fight for shit.

When the masked men came for him, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop them.