MURDER FIGHT: Part 5 (251 hits)
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Submitted by awj002 (View user info) at 2007-05-31 03:25:52 EDT
Part 4: http://www.ubersite.com/m/108760
**
In the kitchen, a baking pan clattered to the floor. A chef lit a cigarette, took a long drag, threw the butt into a pan of soup. Three janitors took mops to the slaughter. They worked without expression and were careful with their footing. They righted tables. "I'm gonna see if I can't just be principal," one of them said. "I'll take superintendent," said another. "And I'm gonna be the goddamn President," said the third, adding, "of the United States." That was the end of conversation. There was the wet swishing of mops, removing gore like bloody reverse-paintbrushes.
Outside the school, some kid with a dirty face smoked half a cigarette and flicked the rest away. Ricky saw it and spent a moment hating the kid. Fuckin' waste. Fuckin' self-sacrifice. Tom stood next to him. "Where you livin?" he asked.
"Under a footbridge."
"With your family?"
"No."
"Shit. Well hey, I didn't mean it about cutting your head off earlier. Why don't you crash at my place?"
"With your family?"
"No."
The bus arrived late and with a new driver. Ricky and Tom were first aboard but didn't risk the back seat; better to be toward the center, where stray bullets had to look harder. They settled into row eight, one across from the other. Ricky cracked his window and as they rode toward the suburbs he watched the homeless Americans in their faded American Eagle t-shirts. They lazily played checkers, ducked in and out of tents, waved their arms in conversation. They looked as if they'd been tread upon.
"Hey Ricky," Tom said, "Your parents get the fuckin' Jihad?"
Ricky turned around. "Yeah."
From row 7, someone burst into a Blink-182 song: "Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd and twat. I fucked your mom and I wanna suck my dad, and my momma too..." Something like that, anyway. Ricky wondered who this kid was singing to, and how somebody hadn't shot his ass yet. He turned to Tom.
"The most shitty thing is, some people never get killed," he said.
"Yeah, well. A lot of people do," Tom answered. "I get killed just about every goddamn time I play this game, and that's just about enough killing for me." Tom was concentrating on his graphing calculator. He flashed the screen at Ricky. "You play this Drugwar shit? They start you out with some decent cash, so I buy some cocaine in Tijuana and sell it in you're-a-gay or somewhere like that and make more money than Jesus God fuck-Christ. Then I get raped in the ass and shot in the head by a dealer in the bathroom of a subway station—they even got an animation for that shit. It's a crock. I can't win the shit."
Ricky pushed his finger knuckle-deep into a deep foamy hole in the green leather seat. "Yeah, I tried it. I get killed all the time, too. But some people who deserve to die just don't die. In real life. Don't you think that's strange?" Tom looked up and shrugged.
"Naw," Tom said. "I ain't gonna say that. Whether or not somebody's gonna kill somebody else is up to them. It's only random who gets killed as long as you aren't doing the killing. Are you thinking of killing somebody? Try it out and tell me what you think." Ricky looked out the window again as the bus crossed an overpass. At a distance, the demolished city was a half-spectacle to his tired eyes and he imagined the bodies of Muslims not yet recovered from collapsed livingrooms where they'd been cut down during terrorist siege. The panorama passed as the driver entered Tom's neighborhood, which was weeks from the frontlines by any conservative estimate.
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Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2007-05-31 23:35:16 EDT (#)
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Submitted by thorpe (user info) at 2007-05-31 05:20:57 EDT (#)
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"MURDER FIGHT"