Posted on January 19, 2009

Karaoke Quintessence: Chapter 7: Africans

Jimmy rolled over.  His head hurt like hell.  He reached back, felt along the line of his hair and touched wet, sticky pain.  Jimmy groaned and tried to sit up, but the van bounced over some feature of the road and slammed him back to the floor.

Shit, he thought.  Jesus shit.  He remembered little after the lights of the van and the realization that it was coming for him.  There’d been a sound of tires sliding and stopping on pavement and a door (two doors?) slamming.  He vaguely recalled footsteps, too, and the shapes of men.  But all this was blurry and it wavered in his memory, indistinct and quickly vanishing.

He’d been grabbed and stuffed in a van.  That he could reason from his current predicament without any need to go back to memory at all.

Jimmy looked around but it was still dark out—he hadn’t been taken too long ago, at least—and the overhead lights in the back were turned off.  He could make out only the walls around him and squares of pale light where the windows let in the moon.  He pushed himself back with his feet until he felt the metal and plastic of the side of the van.  Then, carefully, Jimmy nudged his body in a sitting position.  His left arm was numb and throbbing, but an examination of it yielded no evidence of serious injury.

“Hey,” he shouted in the direction of the driver’s area.  There was a partition cutting off his view.  “Hey, fuck all of you!”

A small opening slid an inch wide in the middle of the partition, at eye level.  Light streamed through.  The light vanished as someone moved to look through, but then it was there again before the opening slid shut.

Jimmy had their attention.  He pushed across the floor, the pain in his head terrible, until his face was near the sliding peephole.  He shouted again.  “Yeah, you stupid fucks, you know who I am?  What I can do?”

Jimmy had no idea what he could do.  As far as he knew, he could sing a mean karaoke and throw a reasonable punch and not much else.  But that shit didn’t matter right now.  He was pissed.  He wanted to sleep, to be back in the hotel maybe watching a little TV before calling it a night.

The little sliding door didn’t budge.  Jimmy couldn’t hear anything from the front.

The van lunged and banged again and then began to vibrate.  They’d left pavement and were now on a dirt road.  They’re mutants, Jimmy thought.  Fucking backwoods mutant freaks, gonna cook me and carve me and eat me like goddamn Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

He crawled across the floor to the back doors of the van and was unsurprised to find them locked.  Mutants, but not stupid ones, he thought.  At least not real stupid.

Jimmy tried to think if there was anyone who’d want to hurt him.  He knew he was the kind of guy who pissed people off sometimes, but never bad—never bad enough to do something like this.  You don’t go around kidnapping a guy because he gathers up some tips at the bar, tips that might otherwise go to the staff.  And you don’t stuff a guy in the back of a van and drive him off along a dirt road just because you think his singing sucks.

No, Jimmy didn’t have enemies.

Then he remembered the crazy black guy in the alley.  Quickly, he checked his pockets and was relieved to find the tuna can still there.  That had to be why they’d come for him.  Ellison caused it by singling Jimmy out somehow.  Fuck him.  I was happy before.  Why’d he pick me?

The truck slowed.  Jimmy stuffed the can back in his pocket and slid until he was against the back wall, sitting up and facing the van’s back doors.  He felt the van turn right, then left, and then right again.  It bounced once and stopped.  Jimmy got into a crouch, ready to jump out of the van, either running past or tackling whoever came for him.

He didn’t get the chance.  The opening to the driver’s compartment opened, light came through, and then a heavily accented voice (was it African of some sort) said, “You, stay where you are.”  Then the light was gone again.

Jimmy heard the driver’s and passenger’s doors open and slam shut.  Footsteps, sounding like they were on gravel, came around both sides.  There was a key going into a lock and then the van doors swung wide and, before he could lunge, Jimmy found himself facing down one pistol held by the man on the left and a huge and twisted stick held by the other.  In the van’s overhead light, which had come on when the doors opened, Jimmy could see that both men were extraordinarily tall, but thin, and the deep blue/black of a central African.  Jesus Christ, Jimmy thought.  They are going to eat me.

The one with the gun motioned Jimmy out.  Jimmy did what he asked, crawling forward until he was close to the door, then swinging his legs out and standing up.  The one with the stick took a step backwards and raised his weapon.  The one with the gun said, “You, come with us.”

“Do I owe you money?” Jimmy said.  He wasn’t going to ask them about Ellison.

“This way,” the one with the gun said.

Jimmy looked around.  He was in the mountains, and the sun was just coming up.  The dirt road they’d driven along snaked down and disappeared into trees.  Further along, in the direction they’d been headed, was a house: a mountain cabin made of genuine logs, with a thatched roof.  It was small, quaint, and, from the perspective of someone driven there against his will, terrifying.

“You aren’t getting me to go in there.  No way in hell,” Jimmy said.

The African with the stick waved it at him.  “You go,” he said.

“No,” Jimmy said.

“You go,” the African said again.

The one with the gun grabbed Jimmy by the arm and pushed the pistol into his back.  “Yes, you go,” he said.  Jimmy stumbled and the man hit him.  He fell to the dirt, the heels of his palms tearing against the rocks and the twigs.  He tried to get up but the man used his foot to hold him down.

“God—” Jimmy started.

The African with the stick thumped it in the dirt in front of Jimmy’s face.  “Don’t talk,” he said.  “Go.”

The foot was lifted from Jimmy’s back.  He stood, brushing his hands against his pants.

“There,” the one with the stick said, pointing toward the house.

And so Jimmy went.  He let them lead him to the cabin and up its three wooden steps to the tiny porch.  He stood silently as the African with the pistol took a key out of his pocket turned it in the front lock.  Jimmy felt sick when the door opened onto blackness, but he allowed the African with the stick to tap him inside.

The cabin smelled of wood soap and ash.  Jimmy couldn’t see anything.  He stumbled forward a step, then another, and was half way through a third when his shin collided with something hard.  He called out in pain—and was answered.

“Hello?” a voice from directly in front of him said.  “Oh, Jesus, hello?”

Behind him, the door closed and Jimmy heard the key turn in the lock.