Molly Hatchet

July 4^th, 2041, 4:48 P.M.

 

Rick reclined in his hard wooden chair, Molly chirped on his shoulder.  He poured three shots of Bacardi Coconut Rum into the amber coffee cup as he held the downward-reaching neck of the gay giraffe before him.

“Yeah, girl, I wish that motherfucker was here too.  Asshole spent fifty years practicing for combat and then curls up and dies on a couch in the middle of nowhere.  What the hell.”

Rick looked at the old picture form a half century ago of that skinny, long-haired fucker he had befriended in middle school when they were alone and hated by one and all, misunderstood and filled with hate for the world against which they both stood, tiny and quiet in its all-devouring shadow.

“You liked your rum, didn’t you, Jim—fuck you wherever you are.  I’m joining you soon.  You’d like that wouldn’t you?  Meeting on some black diamond bridge over Hel’s abyss—sick fuck.”

Molly screeched and alighted on the picture frame and pooed down the back of it as she looked at him, quizzically concerning his getup.

Rick had changed his wife beater and flared jeans for an old Halloween costume of the New York Mets, complete with cleats and tights.  To this he added a blank white hockey mask, the aesthetics of which had always pleased him.  Of course he had that old practice bat, that unbreakable chunk of heavy wood in his left hand, his Mets cap on his head.  His brown face was looking good and his old Spalding backpack was loaded.  He had also his $1,200 skateboard from 1998, which he could still ride.  However, the cleats would have to be exchanged for his climbing boots with the rock guards if he was going to keep the board under control.

Off came the cleats, tossed in the corner of the impeccably neat room.

He now understood—never having been much of a drinker—why a man who hated the world drank—it eased the contours and contrasts in the mind and helped plan its demise.  He lit up a blunt after changing shoes and had a drag with Molly before that picture of his long-dead deserter friend.  Molly took a hit and then fluttered over to the 5-gallon bucket of fun and landed, skittering and off balance on the haft of his old camp axe.

“Molly Hatchet, huh?  Molly want me to have some fun?”

Molly screeched and Rick stood up, put out his blunt and placed it in the mesh side slot of the backpack.

Rick laughed, “Molly, you have to stay here.  My Live Identity just got home from work.  So I have to go to work, Girl.  See you soon.”

He then pulled down his hockey mask and Molly screeched and fluttered frantically away, like a tiny emerald chicken fleeing a towering fox.

Rick emerged from behind the blue tarp energized and driven stoically to his task as he walked nimbly among the pallet stacks, eventually wending his way to the riverside ramp, mounting his skateboard in obscurity and rolling down into the Strip District, where his Live Identity ran his bitches and Pakistani traffickers bought and sold anything that could be humped.

He soon rolled by a gang of Pakis dressing up this little unmasked, redheaded girl like a boy and making her swish back and forth between them.  The crazy thing was the girl kept praying with her hands together, which made the scene doubly obscene.

The two largest waved him over, thinking he was what he seemed to be, and he nimbly veered in their direction, skipped off the board, kicked it up into his left hand and brought his bat to rest on his right shoulder.

“Yo,” he said, unconvincingly from behind his hockey mask as they arranged their sharia hijabs under their fitted caps and the leader said, “Wan’ to fuck, huh—fuck dis bitch?”

The man then held the little girl cruelly with both hands by the base of her skull below her ears and Rick could see that she was perhaps ten years old, not even in puberty yet and he said, “Sho’, I like to fuck,” and as he stepped forward slammed the point of his sixty-pound skateboard into the mouth of the man so that blood and teeth spilled down through his hands into the girls’ pretty red hair.  As that skinny-fat Paki crumbled, Rick brought the practice bat down on the one nearest to his right and crushed that pin-headed skull like a watermelon.  Then he stepped left and backhanded the short fat one across the nose with the back of the skateboard and sent him reeling into the gutter with blood squirting from the shattered bridge of his nose.

One yelled in Arabic and a small one ran for a storefront, where a gun would obviously be.  So Rick took a wide reaching leap at the remaining Pakis, and as they stepped back he dropped the skateboard, snatched up the girl, stepped on, and pushed off, no footsteps sounding behind him.

The girl was shivering in fear in her little boy clothes and clinging to his belt and baseball suspenders as he balanced with his left hand and rested the bat on his shoulder, awaiting the sound of the gunshot, a shot that never came.

A siren sounded in the distance as he turned the corner and he realized, that his violation of grooming gang activity had gotten the PIGs called on him.  So it was a race down the street to his Live Identity’s apartment, where he would certainly not be expected to have fled.

“Hold on Little Girl.  I’m Rick.  I don’t hurt kids.”

“I know,” the girl chirped.  “God told me so.”

A chill played down his spine and Rick pushed harder than he should and somehow saved it in the turn, and before the siren got to the location he had run from, he was at McCloud’s place, an hour behind the PIG’s usual arrival home, according to Mike that is, Mike who seemed to know absolutely everything except how to get the hell out of bed.

The skateboard was now an identifier, so he stopped, stepped into the alley, and tossed it on the roof of the bar across from the apartment building where McCloud lived.  He glanced around and saw no camera angles, then turned to the girl who looked up at him and pulled off his hat and mask, and said, “I’m a good guy, see.”

The girl looked up at him and said, “I know.  But why are you so old, and how come you are painted up like a black man?”

He looked down at her and could not help but smile, “What is your name?”

“Rebecca, I’m Rebecca Dorn, daughter of Joshua and Ellen.”

“Okay, Rebecca, I’m so old because I break the rules about diet and activity so I can help a little girl.”

“God told me that, too.”

Rick was about to be sick with all of the brainwashing and his head spun.  He didn’t come from God.  He was just stubborn and this girl had gotten momentarily lucky back there.

“Okay, Rebecca, we are going into a policeman’s apartment and you will be safe.”

She began to cry, “How can you be a good guy if you are taking me to the police?  The police raid our church services and sell us kids to the Muslims—the guys you took me from.”

“Check that, Rebecca.  I came here to punish the policeman and ran into you.  So you have to stay in the hallway with my teddy bear—his name is Care Bear—until I’m done in the policeman’s apartment.  Then I will find you a place to hide—then I go.”

Rebecca jumped tiny jumps in place while she clapped her hands, “God sent you.  I know it, Rick!”

He snarled under his breath, tossed his cap and mask up on the roof, took the little holy roller by the hand, walked up to the UPC reader, opened his palm to scan the UPC for Officer McCloud, and the glass panel door to the lobby of the small apartment building with its back facing the strip district docks opened.  In he went with little Rebecca Dorn held by his devil-marked hand.

Stepping off into the staircase, Rick shucked his backpack, put it on her little back where it hung down past her butt, took out the bear and handed it to her, slid out the camp axe and hurried back to the lobby door and used it to jam the slide.  Returning to the doorway he extended that hand again so the little girl would feel safe, and, hand-in-hand they went, up the stairs he went, to apartment 3-C for a reckoning with his Live Identity.