Annie of the Undead (4 page)

I knew of only one thing that could dull the
pain. Drugs? No. Hot sex? No. Nickelback? God no. A gerbil up the…?
Okay, now you’re just being sick.

No, fighting. I had to get back into the ring
and out of this heinous pod-body I’d developed in jail. I had to
get back to the one place where things made sense –or at least kept
me so goddamn busy and beat up I didn’t have time to think about
how I was miserable. The ring is the one place where it doesn’t
matter that your mom’s a glorified whore, or that your pseudo step
daddy thought your being eight years old no significant barrier to
his sexual desires for you, or your brother’s head got blown off by
some faceless insurgent, or that you can’t get a real job because
you’ve been incarcerated, and you never had any white friends
because you were half black, and you never had any black friends
because you were half white, or maybe you never had any friends
because you inherited bitch genes from your whore mother, the way
you inherited bad hair genes that made a bush so massive on your
head that you couldn’t beat it down with a Bush Hog. The ring is
the one place where none of that has to hold you back. Maybe it
even helps you a little.

Problem was, I had gotten my ass kicked out of
my old training facility –that little business about not sleeping
with the owner. There was another guy in town who was good. He had
produced some winners. He’d been professional once, and he’d
trained professionals. He lived above the gym he owned and managed.
I decided right that moment that I needed –nay,
had
to talk
to him. It would be another two or three hour walk, especially with
this –what was it, snow? sleet? sneet? –kicking in, but I didn’t
see that I had a choice. The alternative was to start thinking
about life, the universe, and everything. Ick.

I set out again through the intestines of
Detroit.

By the time I reached the gym, the sneet had
turned to rain, then drizzle, then sneet again several times over.
As I was never a fan of sneet, I did not greet the locked door with
much patience. I laid into it solidly with my fist.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

…Nothing.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

…Nothing.

BAMBAM! BAMBAM! BAMBAM! ...BAM!

A little noise inside.

BAM! …BAM! …BAM! …

Some cursing. Feet on stairs.

BAMMITYBAMMITYBAMMITYBAM!!

“Okay! Goddamnit! I’m coming. It’d better be the
friggin’ Rapture out there, ‘cause I am not comin’ out for some
asshole bleedin’ in the street. And if you’re looking to rob me,
you’ve come to the wrong place. I’ve got a whole commemorative box
of twelve-gauge shells with your name on ‘em, whoever you are!”

He reached the door and must have looked through
the fisheye, because he opened the inner door a crack and stared
through the iron outer door. Rand Furlough’s old face was grizzled
with nighttime beard growth. He had a knit cap on that nearly hid
his cauliflower ears. He squinted into the intermittent light of
the streetlamp dying over my head. The mentioned twelve gauge was
in his hand.

“Angry Annie Eastwood? Didn’t they put you away?
What in hell are you doing standing out there, freezing your ass
off in this Michigan piss? You walkin’ on Queer Street? Get on home
before you get froze or get arrested, whichever gets you
first.”

“I want you to train me. I want to fight for
you.”

“What? Do you have any idea what time it is? I
don’t have any idea what time it is. You know why? Because it’s
just not natural to be out at whatever time this is.”

“I want you to train me. Just tell me that you
will, and I’ll go.”

He rubbed his head as though the action would
warm up his brain.

“Try Calhoun’s or The Champs. One of them’ll
take you. I’m not looking for fighters right now.”

“That’s cat shit. They’re no good, and you’re
always looking for new fighters. I’m good. Tenacious. You said so
yourself in that interview-“

“Yes, yes,” he snapped, “After you beat Alvarez
and Washington –two of mine. You don’t have to remind me.”

“Apparently I do.”

“You know what, Annie –Goddamnit, it’s cold! How
are you standing out there? I’m not talking about this now with
you. You go home, or wherever it is that you go, and come back
during decent daylight hours, and we’ll talk –or, you know what,
don’t bother. Don’t come back at all. You’re not my kind of
fighter, Eastwood.”

He started to close the door.

“Wait, what are you talking about? You don’t
have a type! You take slow ones, fast ones, fat ones –you even take
stupid ones.”

“But I don’t take dangerous ones.”

He paused in closing the door.

“You’re dangerous. You want to hurt people –not
just inside the ropes. Your resume is half rap-sheet. You’ve been
convicted of burglary, assault on one of your opponents at a bar
two hours after you totaled her in the ring, and God knows what
else, and you’ve got an armed kidnapping charge that you’re
probably guilty of that you wheedled your way out of somehow.”

“Hey, it was Short John who kidnapped me. I just
turned the tables and took him for a joyride when he was too
chicken to shoot me. He put a gun to my head while I was driving
–so the heat showed up right after the crash, and I took his
weapon–”

Furlough waved his hand in my face.

“It doesn’t matter. You run with a bad crowd.
You make trouble. You attract trouble. I run a clean operation
here. I do pretty well. I don’t need someone like you comin’ in
here, stirrin’ things up –next thing I know you’ve got my janitor’s
arm busted, or one of my fighters crippled over some dumb argument,
or some nutjob coming in here tearin’ up the place lookin’ for you,
or the cops showing up at my door. I let you in, and I’ve got
complications. I don’t need complications. I’ve got a double bypass
and a busted eardrum and a leg with enough titanium in it to set
off every metal detector in the airport. I might not survive taking
you on, and to tell you the truth, you’re past your prime anyway.
You’re twenty-seven. You’ve spent a good piece of your fighting
years so far in lockup. I don’t think you’re worth rehabilitating.
You don’t pull punches, you rabbit punch, and I don’t think I’ve
ever heard of you finishing a bout with less than two warnings from
the ref. You’re one hair away from killing somebody and ending up
in the slam for the rest of your life. You’re bad, Eastwood. Plain
bad. Now get out of here before I call the cops.”

He started to close the door. I saw my chance
slipping away in that sneet sputtering light. There was something
else dying with it too, something that Furlough couldn’t have known
he was killing. I reached out for it desperately.

“I can change, Mister Furlough.”

Then he laughed. It was a short, cynical laugh,
and it stabbed.

“People like you don’t change, Eastwood. You
just say you’re gonna. I don’t know if you were born mean, but
you’re gonna die that way.”

He closed and locked the door in my face.

“Yeah?” I called. “Well maybe one of these days
I’ll beat your ass! I’ll put some god damned titanium in that other
leg! I’d be happy to do a little time for that, you wrinkled old
cocksucker!”

But there came no answer. I stood there alone
while the Michigan skies shit on my head, and the street lamp
overhead flickered out.

I stalked along the disheveled street pockmarked
like the moon or like a crack whore’s face. Damn city government
didn’t care about these back streets. They were forgotten, like the
people who lived, worked, and squabbled for society’s crumbs down
here at the bottom of the drain. There just wasn’t the revenue to
take care of them. Businesses were falling like dominos, the
well-off flying like snowbirds to places like Ann Arbor and Grand
Rapids. The auto industry was a bust, and the tech one too. A lot
more folks were unemployed these days than had been when I was a
kid. A lot more people were turning to crime. More power to ‘em.
Detroit was becoming Gotham. And Batman? That narcissistic, OCD,
PTSD, martyr-syndrome, warmongering head case was nowhere to be
seen. Maybe he was in Chicago.

Me? I was still right here. Detroit, my home, my
adoptive mother, who had suckled me at her teats of Faygo pop,
breathed her CO-poisoned breath into my lungs, crooned me a lullaby
with the clashing discordance of the Insane Clown Posse, and tucked
me away in a crib of concrete, steel, and razor wire, could kiss my
jail-fattened ass. I hated the bitch.

In an expression of my love for old Detroit, and
for Michigan, and for the world in general and all the delightful
things all of them had done to me, I picked up a beer bottle that
had been laying in the center of the road and threw it as hard as I
could into the Badd Burger sign that sat dark up on its pole above
the abandoned restaurant. I wanted to put that asinine Badd Burger
bulldog’s eye out. I hated him just laughing up there, eating his
burger with his obscenely oversized mouth, eating forever when I
didn’t have a dime to spend to calm the monster in my stomach.
That’s why I had gotten so fat in jail, damn it, because I’d spent
my first years of life scrounging for food at the neighbors’ houses
because the refrigerator at home was empty. My mom never liked to
cook, and she always had boyfriends to take her out, and it just
never crossed her mind that her kids might be hungry –and god damn
that dog for laughing like that, with his eyes crossed and his big
chain, and that huge, greasy Badd Burger. God damn him!

But the beer bottle bounced off the sign like
the dog was made of stainless steel. The bottle shattered into ten
zillion pieces on the pavement.

God damn that dog!

I found something else –a can, to throw. I threw
it. It did less than the bottle, bouncing off with a pitiful
“clink”.

I lobbed a rock, then a hubcap. Nothing. Not so
much as a chipped tooth in that gloating, wrinkly face. Jail had
weakened my arm so much.

Finally, I picked up a piece of the curb that
had been busted off by some tight-turning truck and hurled it. I
didn’t aim. I was too furious. I just threw wild, and it went past
the Badd Bulldog and arched through the air, and smashed through
the glass front of the empty restaurant.

Crash!

Ooooh, now that was satisfying.

I looked around for another projectile and found
something even better. I found a tailpipe.

I had picked it up and started forward with
murderous intent, when a vehicle turned out from a nearby side
street, and its single headlight blinded me with its radiance.

I paused momentarily, half expecting the vehicle
to pass on by. Its one headlight and sans-muffler growl told me it
wasn’t a cop, and most anybody else will stay out of the way when
they see you wielding a tailpipe in the middle of the street. They
just figure you’ve got business to take care of, and as long as it
doesn’t involve them, they’re usually happy to keep it so.

But as the big old sedan ground to a halt, and
the doors on either side swung open, I realized that this situation
was about to be the exception to the rule. As two men emerged from
the glare of the headlights, I recognized them as Short John’s
boys.

One of them was carrying a crowbar. I threw the
tailpipe at him as another man emerged from the driver’s door. It
was Short John.

He yelled, “You fuckin’ stand right there,
bitch! Don’t you fuckin’ run, you fuckin’ cunt!”

And of course run was exactly what I fuckin’
did. Like a hellhound.

Like a fat hellhound. Like a fat out-of-shape
hellhound with nothing but a buffalo jerky to eat and no sleep in
twenty-four hours. I was breathing hard before I’d taken thirty
steps. At least I was wearing a sport bra.

I knew immediately I was going to have to lose
the duffel, and with it everything from Chris that wasn’t on my
body. I did not hesitate. I threw it to the side of the road as I
ran. I still had the Ka-Bar and his Zippo with the smiley skull and
crossbones of his military company scratched into it. Maybe I could
stab myself or set myself on fire.

I veered off the road between Badd Burger and
another building, eliminating the advantages of speed and light
that the car gave my pursuers. I cut back through the parking lot
and past a pocket-sized church that simply said “Jesus House” on
the side in big block letters. I was headed for cover –any kind of
cover. I knew I couldn’t outrun these guys. They were fitter and
faster than I was. If they were who I thought they were –the thugs
who usually rolled with Short John –I was finished.

There was a neighborhood across the next street.
If I could get to it, I might be able to lose them among the houses
and numerous side streets. I jumped down from the cement embankment
at the back of the church into the road, going for broke.

But I wasn’t fast enough. I felt a hand grab at
Chris’s jacket, slide off, and try again. I couldn’t push it any
harder. My pursuer got hold of my arm.

I was spun around like a lashing whip. I made
one play for freedom, but he was gripping too tight, and he was
too, too strong. This was Candyman, a middleweight fighter with a
shit career shot by lack of talent and rape and sexual battery
charges. But he was still mean enough to be an enforcer and maybe
take that attempted rape charge to the next level.

I pulled so hard against his grip that all the
buttons tore off the front of Chris’s jacket.

“Hold the fuck still, bitch!” Candyman
commanded.

I wasn’t ready to take a hot hanger in the face
like the whore Short John said I was. I loosened my shoulders and
slunk out of the jacket like a greased pig, spinning around and
running with renewed enthusiasm. Their angry shouts ringing behind
me, I bolted between two dumpsters at the end of a strip mall and
into the residential area behind.