I was having lunch down at the Odious Prick (cucumber sandwich with a tomato slice and light vinaigrette) when I was approached.

A couple of hard cases strode through the front door of the establishment and headed straight for the table at which I was, apparently, the only occupant.  Bully-Boy operatives from Throckmorton’s Wetwork Circus, I recognized them for what they were and knew the type of amoral carnage that typically trailed along their path.

As they slowed to a halt in front of me, I pushed away slightly from the table and leaned back in my chair.  I peered up at them with my most disinterested expression, through half-closed eyes.  Languidly scratching my balls with one hand, I waved the other distractedly in the air.

“And you are?” I asked.

“You know who we are,” hissed the little one through clenched teeth and permanent sneer.

“Say it anyways,” I said.

At a booth along one wall a group of small-time Clowns are trying to delude themselves that they belong in a place like this while one of their members annoys half the joint with an overloud monologue about some previous time they were at some other place.  An old grizzler, sitting alone at a table close to the noisy booth, cracks an ancient Stim-Snif, salts his beer, and glares at the interlopers.  One or two in the company glance nervously around, but the mouthy one seems oblivious to the malevolent stares they are getting from most of the regulars.

“So, we’re sitting around doing cups of Syntho-meth Soup, both the red and the green, when Fabio, you know Fabio?  Thinks he’s a reincarnated Viking Berserker but’s really just a floppy-walked soft-porn dork?  So, Fabio he says to nobody in particular, ‘What?  No croutons?,’ as if every other place he’s ever squatted in front of a bowl of the lip-smack-brain-whack has automatically offered up a side of crunchy bread cubes and it’s like, fuck you man, there’s no croutons, is all I can think to myself.  But BugBug, he’s got other ideas and he acts like BugBug and backhands Fabio a vicious slap across his pink, puckered puss and says, ‘Now ask me if they got them melon balls too, asshole.’  And we all fucking laughed man, ‘cos it was so fucking funny and even Fabio, he laughed, and never did get no fucking croutons neither.”

“We’re from the friendly neighborhood welcome wagon,” he replied.

“Yeah, the neighborhood wagon,” the big one said slowly, his voice half gravel, half mumble, the dull baritone of a moron.  A fingernail puller, a skin-peeler this one.

Professional killers, the kind of hobnailed thugs who would curb-stomp your face with brain-dash finality and then attend a Daddy/Daughter dance without even changing their shoes.  Except these two wouldn’t have daughters, wouldn’t have families.  They were married to their work with every fiber of their twisted souls and had no spare capacity for such trivial concepts as empathy or love.  I understood these men immediately.

“The sound of your friend’s voice makes me want to drive a nail file deep into my own cerebral cortex,” I say to the little one while nodding slightly towards the big dummy.

“Let me do that for you,” is his all too obvious reply.

 On the sidewalk just outside the entrance to the synth-mill an unnatural pod of roaming Therapists begins to set up an inflatable sofa, along with a row of waiting room chairs, a credenza and desk, faux file cabinets and air-filled potted plants.  I think briefly to myself, ‘I wonder if they’ve ever diagnosed a real severe case of exploding head syndrome.’

“He’s tough,” that hiss again, “Nothing phases this guy,” he was talking to his partner, but speaking to me, “Unflappable, that’s what they call it.”

“You’re ruining my day,” I say in response.

“I wonder if he’ll be so unflappable when he’s got a destroyed face, when his mouth is all cracked and splintered, when he’s got optical pulp where his eyes used to be.  I wonder if he’ll be so unflappable then.”

“Will there be anything else?” asks the smarmy, unctuous, greaseball of a waiter, the only thing I don’t like at the O.P.

I don’t reply.

“The cucumber up to standards, I presume?  I’ve never tried it myself, but I hear good things,” his hands clenched, working against each other, fingers intertwining like a nest of copulating snakes.

I don’t reply.

“Excellent.  Delicious, I’m sure,” off to the next table.

I kept an eye on myself from my position behind the bar, one hand slowly working a damp rag back and forth in a small figure eight pattern, a feigned response to a non-existent spill, the other hand resting lightly on the pistol-grip of the short barreled shotgun nestled comfortably in its sling just below the counter top and out of sight of the good citizens of the Prick.

I’ve long known that I’d be killed by Chechens, ever since I was thirteen and had initially entered the Otherwhere of my dual existence.  And since these guys weren’t Chechen I knew this wouldn’t be the time and place of my death, but that didn’t mean things couldn’t get awfully nasty and painful for us, so I kept my vigil.

“The last the world is going to know of you,” I smile at the little killer, “will be the fading screams as you disappear into the black heart of the Abyss and the only memorial to your passing will be the stream of urine I send over the edge in your wake.”

His dark eyes narrowed and he stared, unblinking, at me, the sneer never leaving his face.  The hulking brute beside him breathed loudly through an open mouth, his own eyes flat and dull.

The entranceway door burst suddenly open in a shower of shattered glass and noise and confusion as the sidewalk gang of oddball Therapists poured in through the breach, brandishing all manner of inflatable truncheons, mallets, pipes and pinch-bars.

They came on in a mad scramble, screaming as they did an incoherent gibberish in a language I could not identify and which I hoped was not Chechen.

‘It’s all going down,’ I thought to myselves as we leaped into actions…