Nick was overcome with remorse for bringing Malcolm to his death, and for failing to save him. A good surgeon could have done it. But they were all dead. He was just an orthopedic tech; a cast builder. He still applied pressure to the femoral laceration even though the blood just dripped now with no more heart beating to pump it.

He heard himself groan, “Doc Landon would have saved him. I just want to die!”

Kendra touched him gently, “You did your best and he appreciated it Jackie. God is sending angels for us all it seems.”

He turned to look at her and realized that they should have been friends all along. The BeeBee gun kid, what-ever-the-hell his name was, spoke up, “True, he was the biggest target on the bus. He did his job Commander, soaking up lead while I put rounds down range and you flanked in. He’ll be missed but we have to move on.”

He stayed on his knees as Kendra began saying payer words over Malcolm’s still draining body, and the psycho-kid stood at attention with his air rifle held like the Marine honor guard at his Uncle Bill’s funeral. He could not hear her words, only the tone of her quivering voice. When her voice stopped he rose and looked down at the kid who was stringing two ears onto a shoelace and tying it around his neck, as if he had done this before—“What the hell?”

The kid looked up at him, “I’m special ed. with math commander. This will help me keep track. My Pop Pop used to do it in Nam. The General will want a body count.”

Kendra groaned.

A vehicle could be heard pulling up on the lot. He sprung into action as if he had never doubted himself before, just like he had when he was coming out for that third and final round against Salazar in Chicago, “On the bus Kendra! Tell Old Man to pull off to a safe distance and keep an eye on us—do a pickup when it seems right. Move girl!”

He felt no need to give orders to the maniac kid and just charged for the sound of the vehicle as the door of the bus opened to admit Kendra and he heard a bumper bottom out on the lot on the other side of the bus.

‘This can’t be good!’

“Come on kid!” and he charged around the rear of the bus head down with nothing to protect himself but two surgical masks and bubble gum in his ears.

Nick sprinted around the back of the bus just as it pulled off leaving him face-to-face with two cops who were not cops any more. These were City Cops climbing robotically from their vehicles with clustered creepy crawlers for eyes and yawning mouths with spiked tongues. The cops were going for their weapons like two sleep walkers so he ‘kiad’ and did a flying side-kick to the neck of the driver’s side cop. He actually leaped over the car door and could feel the window rim bruising his ribs as his sneaker knifed into the neck, which seemed unnaturally pliant. He was skidding over a body as his elbow smacked the asphalt and a weird hissing filled the air.

‘Oh shit I’m blind!’

‘No the mask!’

Jackie pulled his masks tight back down over his nose so he could see even as he did a spinning scramble and came to his feet in a low crouching cat stance.

The report of a hand gun booming to his left punched through his ear as he advanced through a pink mist—‘A pink mist? What the hell?’

At his feet were two uniformed legs and a spinal column and ribs from which dripped a deep red goo. A mass of intestines draped the lower portion of the spine. What faced him had emerged grotesquely from the ruins of what had once been a Baltimore City Police Officer: a long spiked tentacle danced from the asphalt, with two whippy pale arms streaked with blood attached to the tentacle by a thick tongue-like tendon. These arms whirled out to the side, the fingers having fussed into a single hook-like talon on each. The ‘head’ was too grotesque to consider.

‘What the hell—run, run!’

‘No, the kid needs me.’

Various sounds like incision making and sawing came from his left—‘No, the kid!’

Nick skipped forward into a hopping side-kick and buried his heel into the tentacle, which felt like a bad idea as soon as it happened. He was now on his right foot with his left foot caught in the middle of the folding tentacle.

‘Oh shit!’

An arm whirled in from the right and he shell-blocked with his right hand and forearm, his flexors being slashed open and his ulna bone impacted so hard he felt it crack.

The tentacle would not let go of his foot and he hopped on his right foot trying desperately not to go down. Then the other arm whirled, spinning on the tongue-like tendon at his left neck and he managed somehow to do a pass parry so he did not also loose that arm like he had the right—which was being hooked and held.

He was standing on his right foot.

His left foot was enfolded in the spiked tentacle.

His right arm was lacerated and broken and hooked.

His left hand was pinning the other monstrous whip-like talon of an arm across the top of the spiked tentacle—which was trying to undulate over its own appendage to get at his hand.

He heard something tear sickeningly off to the left—‘Oh they got the kid!’

He now gathered the courage to look the monstrosity in the—whatever it had for a face—and at least spit in an eye, or ten, or one hundred—before he died. The ‘head’ that seemed to hover in a ghastly liquid grace atop the spiked tentacle consisted of a human brain and cervical stem, with the retinas linked to a cluster of creepy crawlers, eight to each optical center, which came together to make its own horrific eight-faced eyeball; a cluster of claw-locked skittering freak bugs; part spider, part mosquito, part cricket, all viewing him with penetrating detachment. Below the tongue continued to fold in upon itself and drag him closer to the hypnotic ‘face’.

‘Mother, I hope I did well in your eyes.’

With that Nick, or as he now liked to think of himself in the light of his new ghetto apocalypse identity, ‘Jackie Spam’, hopped off his rear foot and cranked a hurricane kick at the hijacked human brain. The tentacle though seemed to have a mind of its own and locked up his foot, knee and left hand, causing him to fall flat on his back with the terrible thing looking down at him.

‘Fuck me!’

Only his right foot was free and he was trying to pull it in for a front thrust kick—no it was pinned now somehow. The hideous hovering head regarded him like a colony of demons with one mind. Then a single insect like crawler emerged from the fold where the hemispheres of the brain met and it seemed more cricket then the rest. The insect seemed to undergo some kind of metamorphosis and grew a tail, which maintained contact with the brain like an astronaut’s tether to a space craft. The thing then leaped halfway to Nick’s face and hovered there on the end of the pink tether as it’s many-faceted eyes gleamed in the clear Sunday afternoon sun of late autumn and a scaly drill-bit of an appendage grew from its abdomen and began to spin even as it floated closer.

With one last defiant gesture he spit on the little bastard before it jumped onto his proud Greco-American nose, never broken in the ring, not once.

Continued with Jube the Lube: First Contact #14