The poison sets into Scavy quickly. His face is the first thing to go numb, mouth dangling wide open. Then his arms go limp, dangling by his sides as he staggers down the hall. When he trips over a piece of debris, he can’t get himself back up again. He kicks his legs around, but without the use of his arms he can’t move.
Domino’s men took turns punching Scavy in the face and stomach, as the others held his arms behind his back. They bloodied his nose and broke his lip. He drooled blood down the front of his shirt, then looked up and scanned the edges of the park for his friends. He couldn’t see them anywhere.
Domino grabbed Scavy by the mohawk and twisted his head up to yell in his face. “Why the fuck did you jump me and my men the other night? Do you have a death wish or something?”
Scavy spit blood. “You started it.”
“What?” Domino kneed him in the face.
“You raped my friend, Gogo. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“All of this is over that worthless fucking whore? Is she your girlfriend or something?”
“She’s a friend,” Scavy said. “You don’t do that to one of my friends and get away with it.”
Domino laughed. “You’re going to die just because I fucked your stupid bitch whore of a friend. You’re the stupidest motherfucker I ever met.”
Heinz laughs when he sees Scavy lying in the middle of the hall, paralyzed. He limps over to the punk and hovers over him, pointing one fist of the sledgehammer at his face.
“You’re a white man,” Heinz says to Scavy. “Why would you sacrifice yourself to save some worthless Japanese cunt? You should be wearing that uniform with pride, as a true Aryan would.”
“Fuck you.” The words are mumbled as they stumble out of Scavy’s dead lips.
“Call her a whore one more time,” Scavy threatened Domino.
Domino laughed at him.
“What?” Domino asked. “You still trying to be a tough guy?”
Scavy spit again. “You don’t fucking call my friend a whore.”
Domino stared him in the eyes and annunciated every word loudly in Scavy’s face. “She is a worthless, filthy, rotten cunt whore and she deserved everything we did to her.”
As Domino raised his fist to punch him again, Scavy clicked the heels of his shoe. Before impact, Domino’s fist went limp as Scavy kicked him in the throat. The blade of Scavy’s boot-knife pierced through the bottom of Domino’s jaw, up through the roof of his mouth, and into his brain.
The Diamonds just stood there, staring at Scavy’s foot in their leader’s neck. Then Scavy’s men attacked. Brick drove a truck into the park, roaring across the littered beach. In the back, the rest of Scavy’s men fired bullets into the Diamonds gang, taking them down before they could get off a single shot. The Diamonds dropped Scavy and took off running. Some of them got away, others didn’t. The ones who stayed behind to fight were the first to fall.
As Scavy pulled his boot-knife out of Domino’s head, Brick came up to him and patted him on the back.
“You’re late,” Scavy said to him.
“We needed to find a vehicle,” Brick said. “They aren’t easy to come by on short notice.”
“One minute longer and I would have been dead.”
“Yeah, but you pulled through, as always,” Brick said.
“I just got lucky,” Scavy said.
“Now it’s time for you to die,” Heinz tells Scavy, gripping the double-fisted sledgehammer. “If you were proud of your Aryan heritage you wouldn’t be dying for that insignificant Japanese cunt right now.”
Scavy spit blood at him. “Call her a cunt one more time.”
“I’ll call that cunt whatever I damn well—”
Scavy clicked his heels together, and the switchblade emerged from his right boot as he kicked the nazi in the chest. But Heinz catches him by the ankle less than an inch away from his uniform. He bends Scavy’s foot back.
“You’re an idiot,” Heinz says to him. “You bring shame to the master race.”
Heinz drops the sledgehammer, puts his hand into his pack, and into a mechjaw’s neck. Although the mechjaw’s minigun is out of ammo, its teeth are still as sharp as ever.
“I don’t think I’ll kill you,” Heinz says. “You deserve much worse.” He brings the snarling head of the mechjaw toward Scavy’s ankle, below the boot-knife. “I’m going to turn you into one of those things out there.” The dog head snaps at Scavy’s flesh. “You’ll spend all eternity as a disgusting, disgraceful living corpse.”
Scavy kicks him in the calf, breaking his spear-wound wider. Heinz releases Scavy’s leg, and the punk kicks his boot-knife through the mechjaw’s face.
Heinz steps back, clenching his wrist below the dog head. He slips his hand out of the mechjaw’s neck and tosses the growling head over his shoulder. Then he pulls off his glove. Examining his hand, he sees his blood mixing with the dog’s green zombie slime. The boot-knife had gone through the mechjaw’s head, through the glove, and into Heinz’s fist, infecting him with the zombie virus.
Looking at Scavy with distress, Heinz holds his hand, shivering in fear.
“You infected me?” Heinz says.
Scavy sneers through his drooping lips. “Checkmate, motherfucker.”
Anger flashes across Heinz’s face. He retrieves the double-fisted sledgehammer from the floor. The poison has now paralyzed all of Scavy’s body, so the bleeding, burnt up punk just laughs up at the nazi. He chuckles at him as loudly as he can, as Heinz lifts the sledgehammer, aiming for Scavy’s head.
Domino was dead. The Diamonds no longer wanted to fight a war against Scavy. Then Tim Lion was found dead in his club one morning, murdered by a lone mysterious assailant.
“Tim Lion’s dead?” Brick said to Scavy. “Are you serious?”
“That’s what they say,” Scavy said, lighting a cigarette.
“You’re the luckiest motherfucker on the planet. I can’t believe you got away with it.”
“I think I’ve got a guardian angel,” Scavy said.
Just before Heinz lowers the sledgehammer into Scavy’s skull, something hits the nazi in the back of the head. His neck breaks, his body goes limp, and then he falls to the floor. Scavy looks up to see a guardian angel standing over him. A golden, glimmering guardian angel named Mr. T.
“You forgot this,” Mr. T says, then tosses the twisted casing of a rocket at Heinz’s chest.
Scavy smiles in a daze as his guardian angel picks him up and carries him down the hall. A particle beam is fired at Scavy, but his guardian angel blocks it with his elbow, then swats the camera ball out of his way.
“Hang in there,” says the guardian angel. “The T-2000 knows how to fix you up. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.”
When Mr. T looks down at Scavy, he sees tears of blissful joy on the punk’s face, as if Scavy is looking at the most beautiful angel in all the heavens.
The three merc punks arrive at their destination: the city’s art museum. A fortified white building covered in brown hop vines.
Xiu says, “Let’s get in, get what we need, and get out.”
Her Arms nod their heads and get to work, prying open the barricaded entrance. Zippo uses his claw-hands to cut through the boards and vegetation. Vine uses his wires to rip open the doors. Clouds of dust billow out of the shadowy interior as the merc punks enter.
“The client wants as many as we can carry,” Xiu says. “But most importantly we need to get the masterpiece. He said we’d recognize it by the red dress.”
Her Arms get straight to work, searching the museum for the works of art they were hired to retrieve. Many of the paintings in the museum have been destroyed by moisture and UV rays entering from the cracks in the
