The others laughed.
Their conversation only pissed Scavy off more. He gripped his crowbar tightly, fantasizing about how it will feel to bash Domino’s face in with it.
When the first of them stepped out of the van to take a leak, Scavy broke his kneecap with the crowbar. The guy fell face-first into the street.
“What the fuck?” Domino said.
Scavy jumped in the back of the van and smashed the closest asshole in the mouth. Blood and teeth splashed across the backseat. Then he lowered the crowbar into another’s forehead, knocking him out with a loud metal
Domino pulled out his switchblade and came out of the van after him. As the knife darted toward his throat, Scavy swung the crowbar. It made contact with Domino’s knife-hand, breaking three of his knuckles. The switchblade flew across the street.
The other punk grabbed Scavy from behind, but quickly found a crowbar in his eye. Scavy turned around and beat him repeatedly, smashing the crowbar against his face, his chest, and his arms that waved out for mercy. When Scavy looked back, Domino was running away. His four men were either out cold or writhing in pain.
“You’re dead, asshole,” Domino yelled back at Scavy from the far end of the street. “Your whole crew is dead.”
The punk lying in the street with a dislocated kneecap went for a gun in his coat. When Scavy saw the gun pointed at him, he clicked his heels together, triggering a switchblade that emerged from the toe of his right boot. With his boot-knife, he kicked the punk in the stomach five times, stabbing him in his guts, until the bloody piece of shit dropped his gun.
Then Scavy picked up the pistol and shot the other three until they stopped moving.
Heinz’ rocket hits the wall below Scavy’s window, taking out the front of the building. The blast knocks Scavy back across the room. When he gets to his feet, Scavy can hardly balance himself. There’s a piercing ring in his ear and the taste of blood leaking from the roof of his mouth. He retrieves his rifle and staggers back to the window. He doesn’t realize his face is charred black, nor does he realize a piece of debris has impaled his side.
The flames in the burning window cover his view of Heinz, but Scavy aims the rifle through the smoke and fires again. The bullet is several feet off target.
Out of rockets, Heinz tosses the dog head and pulls out his flame thrower. He approaches the entrance to Scavy’s building. Riding the adrenalin of being blown off of his feet, Scavy keeps firing. He gets off two more rounds, but shooting vertically at a moving target isn’t a manageable task for a poor shot with a mortal wound. Heinz enters the building unscathed.
The camera ball filming Heinz floats in the doorway below Scavy, hovering in one place as it zooms in on the nazi’s back. Scavy’s bloody teeth open in a smile as he puts his eye in the scope. He aims directly at the center of the camera ball, holds his breath, then fires.
The explosion takes out the entire block, blowing out the first floor of the apartment building, as well as the first floors of every building on the block. Scavy jumps back and dives over a bed, as the flames rise into the air and engulf room. When the air is clear, Scavy lifts his head and laughs.
“Checkmate, motherfucker!” he cries.
Most people assume Scavy is as dumb as a rock, but he’s actually a lot smarter than he looks. Although uneducated, he’s got a natural intelligence. He’s quick-thinking, clever, and a born strategist. Chess was a game he loved to play, and he never lost a game in his life.
When Brick met up with Scavy and saw the four dead bodies of Domino’s men lying in the back of the van, Scavy was already working on a plan.
“Oh, shit,” Brick said, checking for a pulse on any of the fallen gang members. “Why the hell did you have to kill them?”
“I got a little carried away,” Scavy said. “They pissed me off.”
“Do you know what that means? Domino isn’t just going to let you get away with this.” Brick looked around, making sure the street was clear. “We have to go to war now. With the fucking Diamonds of all gangs!”
“They asked for it. If they would have left Gogo alone this never would have happened.”
“Gogo would have been fine,” Brick said. “She’s a fucking whore.”
Scavy got into Brick’s face. “How can you say that? She’s your girlfriend.”
“I know it’s bullshit what happened to her,” Brick said. “But you’re going to end up getting all of us killed.”
“Not if we get them before they get us,” Scavy said.
“Are you kidding? They outnumber us twenty to one
“It doesn’t matter how big their gang is,” Scavy said. “We just have to get clever. Outsmart them.”
Brick shook his head. Scavy had never seen the big guy so worried. The reason Scavy became friends with him in the first place was because the guy never backed down even when the odds were against him.
“Trust me,” Scavy told Brick, placing a hand on his shoulder. Then Brick grunted and gave him a nod. “Help me take their jackets off. I have a plan.”
The plan was simple. Although the Diamonds were the biggest street gang in Copper, they were not the top dogs in the quadrant. The local drug lord, Tim Lion, had a much more powerful crew behind him. Domino was a mere cockroach in comparison to Tim Lion. So Scavy, Brick, and a couple of their friends decided to dress up as members of the Diamonds gang using the jackets they took off of the dead bodies of Domino’s friends. Then they robbed a drug shipment that was headed into Silver. Let everyone see the Diamonds jackets they wore. Then they dropped off the drugs on the porch of one of the Diamonds’ hangouts.
When Tim Lion got wind of what the Diamonds had done, he sent his men after Domino. With the drugs in his backyard and all of the witnesses of the robbery, Domino had little chance of proving his innocence to the drug lord. Scavy had fucked him good.
As the smoke clears in the room, Scavy stands up and feels the tightness in his hip. He looks down to see the piece of shrapnel in his side and all the blood soaking his clothing. Because he can’t feel any pain, he realizes that the wound must be even worse than it looks.
“Fuck me,” Scavy says, then wheezes out a laugh.
Something shoots him in the back. A fiery pain at the base of his spine. He rubs the wound and lifts up his fingers to reveal a layer burnt skin. He turns around to the camera ball floating in the room with him. It shoots another laser at him. He jumps over the bed, but the blast gets him in the thigh.
He knew it was against the rules to fuck with the cameras, but he thought the punishment for that was the self-destruction of the cameras. Having other camera balls attack him with lasers was not something he had anticipated.
Scavy tosses a blanket over the camera, grabs his naginata spear, and runs out of the room. The camera ball blasts blindly through the sheet as Scavy closes the door on it. Out in the hall, he sees that all the movement is causing his wound to rip open even more. He needs to pull out the metal but worries that it’s the only thing keeping the blood in his body.
As he steps carefully down the stairs of the apartment complex, Scavy comes face-to-face with Heinz. Not only did the nazi survive the blast, he had come out of it without a single scratch on him. Scavy nearly topples over in shock at the sight of the guy, standing there with his flame thrower pointed at him.
Scavy freezes. His sniper rifle is aimed at the ground. He’s not sure if he can raise it up in time to shoot the nazi before he’s eaten alive by flames. But Heinz doesn’t fire. He too is frozen in his place as he examines what Scavy has on.
“You are a member of the Fifth Reich?” Heinz asks him.
Scavy looks down at the clothes he wears. The uniform he had gotten off of the sculpture of Adolf Hitler in the wax museum is similar to that of Heinz. They have matching swastika armbands. Scavy decides his best course of action would be to play along.
“Yeah,” Scavy says.
