A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

TACO MEAT

by John McNee

When the explosives in Pedro Piss-Pants’s colon went off, they blew nearly his entire left ass cheek some 137 yards southwest, to land on the corrugated iron awning of Za’s Tattoo Parlor. It was found and eaten by a stray cat later that same evening and is the only notable piece of Pedro to remain officially unaccounted for.

When Pedro spattered himself across the back lot of the TP Auto Company, showering the rusted scrap metal wig-wam in a toxic rain of blood and effluent, his antagonists did the predictable thing. They ran. Eyes streaming, ears ringing, and mouths screaming (though of course they couldn’t hear themselves) they ran, away from each other, away from the scene of the crime and, they might hope, to safety.

Blake Rawlinson, 14, ran West, to nearby Elmer View and the warmth and comforts of the Rawlinson family trailer.

His younger brother, 12-year-old Kuger, might have been expected to follow, but he didn’t. He ran East, to the dry riverbed, in hopes of finding a ditch to crawl into.

Gary ran furthest of all, clean across town in fact, to Victoria Square, on the South Side, where the newly strung fairy lights had just been lit. The Mariachi band was already in full swing and his cousin, Officer Dabney Tibbs, was busy persuading Hector Nunez to slide him an apple empanada on the house. Perk of the gig, after all.

Dabney’s partner, Tony Hierra, was, as ever, the one who asked all the pertinent questions. “What you mean he exploded?”

“What do you think I mean?” Gary sobbed, snot dripping from his nose. “He blew up, okay? He exploded!”

“Hold up,” Dabney said. “Who’s Pedro Piss-Pants?”

“I heard of this kid,” Tony answered, grimly. “Homeless, messed up in the head, lives out by the freeway. Easy pickings. That it, Gary? That what you and your messed-up little buddies were doing? Nothin’ on TV, so you thought you’d go pick on the local retard wet-back?”

“Why they call him Piss-Pants?” Dabney asked.

“’Cause he’s always pissing his pants,” Gary said.

“Damn it,” Tony said. “What did you do to him?”

Gary squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. “We tied him to the fence and then…we stuck a bunch of fireworks up his ass.”

“Jesus,” Dabney said.

“Momma’s sick little puppies,” Tony said. “He dead?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Gary cried. “He fuckin’ exploded! Everything but his arms and his head blew up into a billion pieces! Looked like…like taco meat.”

“Jesus,” Dabney repeated.

“It was just a joke, okay?” Gary said. “It was meant to be funny! It was just a fuckin’ joke!”

DABNEY DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTAND what the play was. Even when he and Tony had left Gary behind with a warning “not to go far” and taken the patrol car up to 14^th Avenue with the lights off and not a word to anyone who might want to know, even then he didn’t quite get it. But when, as they pulled into the TP Auto forecourt, he turned to Tony and said, “You want I should call this in?” Tony was quick to set him straight.

“Hell you mean call it in?” he barked. “We’re not calling anything in. You nuts? We’re handling this shit. Understand?”

“Clean it up? Aw, no, Tony. Man, I don’t…I don’t know about that…”

“No? Then what? You tell me. Tell me! Never mind making it through the cluster-fuck and managing, somehow, to keep your job. Never mind that. Suppose you do. You really want to stick around for the shit-storm when you’re the cop who was on watch the night a retarded little Mexican got ass-raped with M-80s and blown to hell by a bunch of white kids? One of whom—need I remind you—is your little cousin? Huh? On Cinco defuckin’ Mayo? Huh? You think about that. Even if you’re still alive at the end of it your life won’t be worth living!”

“Yeah, but…” Dabney said. “But…”

“But?”

Dabney shook his head. “But shit.”

Tony nodded, satisfied. “Come on. Let’s make it quick.”

Dusk was falling fast. They grabbed a couple of flashlights and slid around the side of the old building into the broken metal mess of the back lot. They quickly made their way to the far end and found the fence Gary had told them about…but they didn’t find Pedro.

“Gone,” Dabney said. “Where could he go? How could he go?”

“I can barely bring myself to say it,” Tony groaned. “But do you think that the little prick is just screwin’ with us?”

Dabney pursed his lips and squinted real hard—his rarely seen ‘thinking face’. “No,” he answered. “No, I don’t believe it.”

Tony shone a light on the dirt at their feet, illuminating brown stains that might have been dried blood. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s…let’s take a look around. You head over there.”

They split up, scrabbling among the shadows and detritus of half-digested automobile parts.

“Some blood over here,” Dabney called out.

“Here too,” Tony said as he cast his gaze over the scrap-metal wig-wam that, once upon a time when it was new and prettily painted, had held pride of place in the forecourt. Tony could still recall the look of pride on old man Pendleton’s face as he unveiled it. Now just one more reminder of how the whole town was going to shit.

“Ah, Jesus,” Dabney muttered from somewhere in the darkness.

“What is it?” Tony called.

“I think…I think I found a foot.”

Tony winced. “Bag it.”

“Yeah, okay… Shit. He had a lot of hair for just a little kid.”

“Shhh!”

“What?”

“Shut up!” Tony crouched low, turning the flashlight’s beam towards the rear wall of the building. He held his breath, listening to the shadows, so sure he’d heard it. A third voice. The softest whisper. The most pathetic, wilting little cry for…

“…help…”

Officers Hierra and Tibbs quickly regrouped and approached the source of the muted plea. They found a young boy, sprawled out in the dirt, his insides splayed about him, skin a sickly shade of gray, but everything in his vicinity splashed with deep, dark red.

The two men stared down at the boy, he looking back at them, watching as their expressions shifted from disgust to confusion to plain old horror.

As ever, it was left to Dabney to speak the obvious. “That ain’t Pedro.” 12-year-old Kuger Rawlinson, cradling his own intestines in his hands, licked at his lips with his bone-dry tongue and tried to speak. “Help me,” he breathed. “He…hurt me. He hurt me…real bad.”

“No shit,” Tony said, his tone humorless. He lowered himself to his haunches and drew as close to the kid as he dared. “Who did this to you?”

Kuger blinked, failed to focus. “P-Pedro,” he whimpered. “I came back. I came back and I found him and he was still alive… Still…still alive… So… so I cut him down and he…he hurt me.”

“How could he do that?” Dabney said. “How was he even alive?”

Tony waved for his partner to shut up. “Where is he now, Kuger?”

The boy’s watery eyes darted to the left. “That…he ran…that way… He… he hurt me…”

Tony followed the boy’s glance to the narrow alleyway that ran behind the stores, towards the trailer park. “All right, son,” he said. “That’s all right. Try not to talk.”

“I think…” Kuger rasped. “I think I’m gonna die.”

Tony looked the ravaged kid up and down and nodded. “Yeah. Well, that’s all right too.”

“I’m…gonna die…”

Tony nodded. “That’s okay, son. You go right ahead.” He stood, turned, and led Dabney a few paces away, leaving Kuger to the darkness.

“Mom!” he cried. “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

He didn’t say anything else after that.

It was Tony who finally broke the painful silence. “Do me a favor, Dabs,” he said. “Go grab the 12 gauge from the car.”

THEY MOVED QUICKLY, FOLLOWING dappled blood spots along the alley, Dabney with his Glock pistol out in front of him, Tony carrying the shotgun. Elmer View wasn’t a long way, but it was too damn far for someone with no feet, so they were surprised—again—to find the trail led them all the way out the alley, down the street, and through the side gate to the trailer park.

Most of the homes were dark and there were no people around. It was a fair assumption that they’d all gone to join the parade. Tony could hear the distant clatter of a rhythm section and Rick Soto’s incomprehensible chatter blasting out of the loudspeakers in the square.

“Look there,” Dabney said, flicking his head at the trailer up ahead, lit up inside and out—and the screen door hanging off its hinges.

Tony nodded. The two approached in silence and entered unannounced.

Inside, they found Blake Rawlinson, older brother of the recently departed Kuger Rawlinson. They found some of him in the hall, some of him in the bathroom, a few pieces scattered about the living room, and the rest in the kitchen.

On cursory examination of the property, the officers also discovered an upturned bloodstained cardboard box—marked ‘Kuger’s stash’—from which spilled several hundred dollars’ worth of no-doubt illegally obtained Mexican fireworks. These too were scattered around the trailer, and always in the vicinity of smeared bloody hand-prints, which Tony would wager were not made by Blake. These prints trailed from the cardboard box in Blake’s room, across the carpet, through the trailer, into the kitchen, and up onto the countertop. The window over the sink was smashed and, peering through and shining his flashlight onto the ground below, Dabney could make out further tracks leading out the main gate—back towards town.

“ALL RIGHT,” DABNEY SAID when they were back in the patrol car and speeding down 14^th Avenue. “Fine. I’ll say it. I’m not afraid to say it…”

“Say what?” Tony growled from the driver’s seat.

“What the fuck is going? What the Jesus fucking fuck is going on?”

“You asking me?”

“How is it,” Dabney said, near hysteria, “that a little kid, blown in half, no guts, no balls, no legs, nothing left of him but two arms and a head, manages to survive and—more than that—rip two other healthy kids to pieces and take off into the night?”

“You asking me?”

“How the fuck is that possible, Tony? How does that even happen?”

“I don’t know, Dabs. I’ll be sure to ask him.”

GARY TIBBS SAT ON a bench by the Victoria Square bus stop. Behind him people were shouting, laughing, singing. White men in cheap sombreros danced with drunken women in brightly-colored dresses with skirts that swirled about them as Thurman’s Hermanos blasted out the hits of Herb Alpert. Some kids he knew from school were at the banquet table but they’d finally stopped trying to get his attention after the seventeenth attempt and once the tacos had arrived.

Gary wasn’t in the mood. After what he’d seen, he’d never eat tacos again.

He was thinking about the kid he’d helped murder and wondering why, no matter what Blake Rawlinson said, no matter how retarded it truly was, it always sounded like a great idea at the time.

He was thinking about the expression on Pedro’s face—the fear in those eyes. And he was thinking about that last, truly awful, stupid moment when he lit the fuse. The one fact he neglected to mention to Tony and Dabney. “That’s right, fellas. Kuger’s fireworks, Blake’s idea, and my matches.” Those fuckin’ Rawlinson brothers. He swore to himself that if he ever saw those two again, he’d kill ‘em.

And then he saw something that distracted him from such noble thoughts. He was staring across the street, not focusing on anything in particular, but settling into the middle distance between two parked cars on either side of D-Lo’s Bail Bonds and just a little to the left of Albert Ramirez, who sat on the curb with his head in his hands, trying not to puke fourteen frozen margaritas into the gutter. Into that middle distance came something, or someone, loping dangerously along the sidewalk. Gary focused his gaze then, and saw something that, he knew, simply could not be.

NO ONE SEEMED TO notice Tony was carrying a shotgun as he walked down Vista. Or if they did, they didn’t care. They were all too drunk, too involved in their own good times.

When did Cinco de Mayo become such a big deal? he wondered to himself. When he was a kid, there wasn’t a thing about being Latino in a white town that seemed worth celebrating. Not to him and sure as shit not to the town elders, but look at it now. Walking down the street he had to navigate all the spent beer bottles and streamers that littered the sidewalk. He said to himself: This is the kind of shit that happens when no one’s got any jobs to go to in the morning. They focus all their energies on the next big event that offers them the chance to get fed, get loaded, and get laid, while halfway across town their children are committing murder.

“Hey, Tony,” his radio crackled. “Tony, come in!”

“What is it?”

“I’m in Victoria Square.” Dabney’s voice. “I just saw Blake Rawlinson’s mother. She looks pretty drunk. You want me to…?”

“I don’t want you to do anything except find Gary,” Tony said. “And don’t use this frequency.”

He let go of the radio and saw Albert Ramirez approaching. A stumbling kind of gait, but there was purpose in it. Over his shoulder Tony could see the crowds at Victoria, now counting down to the big fireworks display. “DIEZ!” they cheered.

“Hey!” Albert called, above the din. “Hey, Tony!”

“NUEVE!”

“How’re you doing, Mr. Ramirez?”

“OCHO!”

“What? Oh, I’m… I’m fine, I guess, it’s just… Well…”

“SIETE!”

Tony did his best to smile. “Maybe one too many, huh?”

“SEIS!”

“What? I… Well, I guess so. Maybe.”

“CINCO!”

“Listen,” Tony said. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Gary Tibbs around have you? Little kid?”

“CUATRO!”

“Oh, sure, yeah, Gary, yeah,” Albert said. “Running. He was running, over… over that way.” He pointed towards the square.

“TRES!”

“Okay, thanks a lot,” Tony said.

“DOS!”

“I saw… I saw something else,” Albert slurred as Tony strode past. “I saw something really…fucking weird.”

“UNO!”

The crowd hushed as, high over their heads, just two rockets soared into the night and popped. One red, one green. And that was it.

“Some fuckin’ spectacle,” Tony muttered.

DABNEY WAS AT THE banquet table, talking to a couple of kids from Gary’s school, when event coordinator Trica Munoz approached. “Hey, Tibbs,” she called. “Get over here!” Even her walk was furious as she strode through the suddenly subdued crowd, flanked on her right by Joe Floss, pyrotechnic engineer.

“What, uh… What’s the problem, Ms. Munoz?” Dabney asked.

“I’ll tell you what the goddamned problem is,” Tricia said, squinting through square-framed spectacles. “Some son of a bitch has stolen our fireworks!”

“Five hundred rockets!” Floss cried. “They were all rigged to go. I checked them myself just five minutes ago and they were all there. Then… Nothing! Two left! The vicious son of a bitch leaves me two!”

“Where’s your boss?” Tricia said. “Where’s Campbell? I want him down here!”

“Well,” Dabney said, “The Chief’s, um… I don’t think he’s—” “Do you have any idea how much those fireworks cost?” she said. “How much this whole event has cost? And we just lost our centerpiece! It’s ruined! The whole day is ruined!”

“Now just listen…”

Somebody screamed. Just one person, from far behind, to the back of the crowd; one woman—Dabney couldn’t see her—let out a horrified shriek. And while she was screaming, she was joined in chorus by two others. And before anyone was quite sure what was happening, everyone was screaming.

Then they ran, scattering out, scrambling to be away while Dabney stood where he was, and Tricia Munoz and Joe Floss and all the people at the banquet table and around cast confused glances at each other or opened their mouths to ask “What’s going on?” though nobody could hear them and they couldn’t hear themselves over the sound of sheer, desperate panic.

“Get down,” Dabney said, drawing his pistol, jerking his head left and right trying to see. “Everybody get down.”

“What the hell?” Joe Floss said, spinning about as men, women, and children shoved past. “What the hell?”

Then they saw.

“Oh, Jesus,” Floss said.

“Get down!” Dabney said.

And Tricia Munoz screamed.

Pedro Piss-Pants loped towards them on hands steeped in blood. It was true what they’d said. There was almost nothing of him from the neck down except a leaking ribcage and the torn remnants of a yellow t-shirt. His head lolled about on his shoulders, eyes blank, tongue hanging out of his mouth. His face was that of a dead child. No expression, no recognition. If it weren’t for the fact he was hurling himself towards them, Dabney would have sworn the kid was dead. That and the sound he made. Welling up from deep in the back of his throat—a horrible howl like a strangled goose.

Dabney raised his weapon, clicked off the safety, put his finger on the trigger—just as Tricia spun herself into him and knocked them both to the ground.

“Damn it!” he said, scrambling out from under her. He got onto his knees and lined up to take the shot again—but Pedro wasn’t there.

“Look out!” Floss cried.

Dabney looked left and found Pedro looming above him, perched on the edge of the banquet table. He swung the pistol around as Pedro thrust out one blood-stained claw. They touched, briefly, and then Dabney’s Glock was clattering to the floor along with three of his fingers.

He screamed and fell back as Tricia screamed and stood up. Pedro silenced her with a lightning-quick slice of his arm. Her open neck sprayed the table scarlet as her decapitated head bounced away into the gutter.

Dabney rolled onto his stomach, left hand pressed against the ragged stumps on his right. He saw his pistol lying a few feet away. Saw too Floss bending down to pick it up, turning back towards Pedro, nothing but horror in those bulging eyes. Pedro sprung from the table again, arcing across the air as Floss raised the Glock, and landed on his chest, spearing one arm through his guts.

Joe screamed, blood billowing from his stomach, and opened fire. Of the seven rounds he managed to get off, two went into the ground, three into the banquet table, two into the air, and one through Dabney’s eyeball, splattering his brains out the back of his skull.

And that, for Officer Dabney Tibbs, was that.

TONY WAS FACED WITH a wave of terrified people as he neared the square. He ran, plowed through them, dodging their panicky blows, forcing his way into Victoria—to find Pedro, still up to his elbows in Joe Floss.

He racked the shotgun, raised it to his shoulder, and fired—just a moment too late.

Pedro sprang again, as impossibly fast as before, back to the table. Floss took the full blast of the shotgun to his face. He did a graceful spin on his heel, then dropped.

Tony racked the shotgun and let another shell rip, shattering bottles, plates, and bowls with buckshot, sending colorful explosions of salsa and guacamole into the air, chasing Pedro as he thundered up the table.

Pedro dug a claw into the wood and spun back, leaping into the air, jagged arms like swords jutting out from his body, that awful animal sound tearing up out of his throat.

Tony fired again and caught him in mid-air, blasting him apart like a clay pigeon. He sounded like a wet sack of shit when he hit the ground.

Feeling the sweat on his back and the crunch of tortilla chips under his boots, Tony walked slowly towards the corpse, racking the shotgun as he came, his eyes never leaving Pedro, watching what was left of him gurgle and twitch on the ground. When he was close enough, he placed a foot on Pedro’s chest and stared down into his unblinking eyes.

“What are you?” he said.

“Cluuuurrr-ghk-bllllrrrulk…” Pedro said. “Pillkchr-plechrluuuuurck-chkgkhhh…”

Tony shook his head. “Fine,” he said. He dropped the shotgun and walked a few paces away to where a bat stood upright in the remains of broken piñata. He pulled the bat out of its shattered husk and walked back. “Be that way,” he said, before swinging the bat down and pounding Pedro Piss-Pants’s head into paste.

WHEN IT WAS OVER Tony sat down with his back to the banquet table, picked up a discarded bottle of Corona, and took a swig. Some curious souls were milling about on the fringes of the square now and he could hear sirens in the distance. There would be a lot of explaining to do. Looking around, he saw the destruction, the puddles of blood, the trampled bodies… For the first time he saw Dabney, lying dead beside Tricia Munoz with a bullet in his eye.

Immediately he closed his eyes and turned away, for a moment certain he was going to vomit. When he opened them again, he saw Gary.

“Gary?” he said, and rose.

The kid shuffled slowly towards him, weeping black tears from bloodshot eyes. Tony approached, unable to shift his gaze from that pale, pained face. There were black stains around his mouth, his nose, his ears. He clutched quivering hands to his belly as he stepped forward, taking tiny, shuffling steps.

Tony could feel other eyes on them, people crowding around now to get a look. “Gary?” he said. “Gary, what’s wrong?”

The boy finally opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Only black. Black saliva poured from his lips and a cough sent a black cloud into the air, close enough for Tony to smell it.

It smelled of gunpowder. Enough gunpowder to fill five hundred fireworks. More than that. Enough to blow him and everyone within fifty yards to oblivion. All poured down Gary’s throat, forced into every orifice, bursting out of his bulging stomach.

That was when Tony looked down and saw the kid’s pants looped around his ankles. He saw the trail of blood droplets on the ground. He smelled the burning. He heard the crackle of the fuse.

And in his head, the voices of that expectant crowd echoed again: Tres, dos, uno…