splat chapter six

The wheel wouldn't turn when she tried to pull out of her parking space. Sighing, she turned off the engine, then popped the trunk, and fished out a bottle of power steering fluid to top up the reservoir. Fluid had been leaking out of it for some time, and the leak was getting worse. Suzie had to refill it every few days now. Nelson had promised to fix it, but Suzie knew that he wouldn't get around to it until it was well and truly broken and she couldn't drive. And then he would fuss at her for waiting so long. He'd given her half a dozen bottles from the garage's stores instead, to tide her over, and she'd already gone through two of them and was beginning to think about the chances that the unit would suddenly fail while she was on the road.

Everything worked smoothly once she topped up the fluid level, and she drove south on Moreland Avenue for several miles past steadily poorer neighborhoods, abandoned businesses and industrial areas. Suzie was traveling through some of the very worst neighborhoods Atlanta had to offer, like Thomasville Heights, where children get arrested for murder, where grandmothers sell crack to feed their grandbabies, where nobody graduates from high school.

Suzie should know. She had attended that high school - Alonzo A. Crim. She was one of only four white kids that went there, and it had been very difficult for her until she started dating one of the lead gang members in school, which granted her a kind of immunity from being beaten up, but meant that there were always a couple of other peoples' guns in her locker. The romance hadn't lasted long; the guy had gotten a rather stiff prison sentence for a minor, and was away somewhere in southern Georgia for the duration.

Back when she was just turning thirteen, her dad decided she should have more of a life than he could offer her in the passenger seat of his Peterbilt. So he spoke to Uncle Daddy, who spoke to Auntie Mae, and Suzie found herself in a spare bedroom in Auntie Mae's house in Southeast Atlanta, going to high school.

She'd never really been stationary before, and it took her many months of adjustment before she stopped feeling the road vibrating beneath her at night. She'd never gone to school before, either. Her dad had home-schooled her, or road-schooled her as it happened, giving her lessons while they traveled up and down the east coast, quizzing her over dinner at a hundred truck stops, making her read aloud to him from the top bunk before turning out the lights in the sleeper. So she was well read, and actually knew a lot more than any of the public school kids her age. There were several holes in her education, however, home-school curricula being mostly geared toward Christians who wanted their personal Lord and Savior teaching their kids. Home-schooled kids were taught that God created the world in seven days 6,000 years ago, and made humans out of dust, and that was about it for science.

Suzie's major problem with public high school was that she knew a lot of the material already, and got bored, but wasn't allowed to move on to something more challenging. She had to sit in a classroom full of noisy, surly, ignorant, rowdy black teenagers talking on their cellphones for six hours a day, an environment where the teacher's first priority was to keep control, and only way down the list was anything ever taught.

Suzie learned almost nothing academic in high school, but she did learn her place as a minority in the black community, and she learned to get along with blacks and Latinos who would as soon beat her up as look at her. High school sucked, but she graduated, and moved on, and never looked back except whenever she went to Auntie Mae's house.

Auntie Mae and Uncle Daddy lived in a small framed house tucked in between the Federal Penitentiary at the end of Boulevard, the Atlanta Corrections Center, the Atlanta Police Academy, a capacious landfill, and the Intrenchment Creek sewage treatment plant. It was known historically as Thomasville, now with the highest rate of adolescent pregnancy, and vying with Metropolitan Avenue for the highest crime rates in Atlanta.

Go down Moreland until you get to the Starlight Drive-in on the left, the last remaining outdoor movie theater in Atlanta. Don't turn right because that's Thomasville Heights, and you don't want to get shot. Keep going past the drive-in until you get to an old cemetery, Chestnut Hill. It's not a very inviting place, for a cemetery. It's old and poor, and past the few graves near the road, it's completely unkempt. There are trees growing up out of the middle of graves back toward the back, and worn stone markers that have fallen over into sinkholes.

The road through the cemetery gets narrower and fills with potholes as you drive back, until you can't get any further, and then it disappears into the woods. There's a trail down to her hideout from there, but Suzie only used it now and then, and the cemetery is really spooky, so don't even turn in at the gate. Instead, go ahead down another block and take a left on Hillcrest Drive. Find Auntie Mae's house halfway down on the left, and cut through the back yard down the hill into the woods, where there's another little trail through the poison ivy into a ravine.

Be sure to watch out for the neighborhood dogs, which run free down in those woods, might or might not have had their rabies shots, and for sure carry poison ivy and ticks on their fur. And be real sure to watch out for the old white guy who lives next to Auntie Mae and sits on his front porch all day with a shotgun in his lap, protecting his property.

If you go far enough down the path, you'll come to a small clearing where Suzie's had a hideout for years. It's on cemetery property, sort of, maybe, but it could also belong to the old corrections center, or the police academy, or even the sewage treatment plant. Suzie never knew exactly whose property she was on, because it was deep woods, and nobody ever went down there but her.

She established her hideout when she was living there with Auntie Mae. High school made her pretty unhappy, and she didn't have a lot of friends. Auntie Mae was getting old and didn't use many sentences without Jesus in them. Especially after her dad died, silence and solitude were about the only things Suzie could stand, so she'd taken to slipping down the track behind Auntie Mae's house every afternoon, even when it was raining, even in the middle of winter when you could almost see her hideout through the trees if you knew were to look.

This morning she parked her car out front, said a quick hello to Auntie Mae, a slight black woman getting past middle age, her hair steely gray. They had grown kids who lived in a bunch of places. Suzie accepted her offer of something to eat, and wandered down the track with her bag of stuff and a sandwich, feeling pretty positive. She'd beem thinking hard about the innovations she wanted to make to her paintgun, and was anxious to get to it.

The trail crossed a little streamlet and bottomed out, turning a corner and opening out into a small clearing. Dogwoods filled the walls of her clearing, still showing their white bracts. Suzie kept the place clear by hacking down seedlings, and she'd just gotten around to that task for the spring, so there were thin stumps everywhere and she had to keep her shoes on to avoid impaling herself.

Wooden pallets leaned up against the trees on one side of the clearing, for target practice. There was a lean-to she'd made from an old tarp; an old tackle box with duct tape, scissors, various screwdrivers and wrenches and a hacksaw; a wobbly stool she'd rescued from the trash; a small fire pit; milk jugs filled with water; a stack of old paintgun and survivalist magazines; red circular Target signs Alex had swiped from his job; a box of paintballs stored in a gallon sized ziplock; a battery powered radio; and a bag full of spare parts for her costume.

It wasn't much, but it was where Suzie came to relax and get away from the hustle and bustle of daily life, a place to work on the various aspects of her crime fighting activities, a place to dream of glory and a better world.

Her costume had taken her a long time to figure out. What would a road vigilante wear to work? What symbolism was appropriate to an unsung righter of wrongs? Most superheroes wore spandex and boots, and had masks over their heads, or at least wore sunglasses. But the costumes she saw in party stores were silly and impractical. Maybe someone with super powers can afford to wear a suit that binds and chafes, but ordinary mortals have to use common sense.

She'd scratched off one costume after another from her list. Spaghetti-strap evening-gown costumes. Head-to-toe spandex. And forget capes. A bathing suit, some go-go boots and a Burger King crown might do, but the headgear would be conspicuous.

Suzie realized it was a bad idea to be seen actually wearing her costume when she was making a hit. She needed something she could hide under her regular clothes, like Clark Kent, and not too hot, or too expensive, or too hard to get in and out of. So she made the rounds of Atlanta's many thrift stores and came up with this:

Ankle-length blue faux leather booties that were a little too small; white tights with blue sparkles, that itched; a pair of white leatherette shorts that made her sweat; and from over in the kids' section, a faded Superman t-shirt way too small for her, with holes in it. And the finishing touch - a pair of beige driving gloves. The overall effect wasn't bad. But the sparkly bits in the tights chafed something awful, and the t-shirt rode up over her belly button. But she loved the gloves.

After her debut run yesterday, she knew she was going to have to rework her costume, because she was rubbed raw from the tights and already hated the shorts. But it was no big deal, because she had a bunch of spare bits and pieces, most of which fit. She thought she might eventually go with a white t-shirt, put faux bullet holes in it, and stencil a big Q on the front. For now, the Superman t-shirt was kind of cute. And anyway, the idea for the costume was to help her concentrate on her mission, not for show, and she was never willing to spend much time on considerations of mere fashion.

Her main priority was her weapon, which needed work. She just couldn't shoot straight while driving down the highway, and this was a big huge problem. Out here in the woods, she had no trouble hitting stationary targets at twenty paces, but it turned out to be a lot harder to hit a sixty mile-an-hour pick-up at twelve feet. Maybe the problem was the angle of attack. She was trying to hit the windshield. It should be a simple thing to cover it with paint so that whoever it was couldn't see in front of them, and would then swerve off the road and stop. Preferably upside down. In flames.

But she hadn't even come close to hitting the guy. There was going to be a particular angle she was going to have to shoot at, some distance out in front of the windshield, and let the wind carry it in. So she rigged up a water jug on a rope she'd tied to a branch for a swing, back when she was a kid and the branch was much lower, and set it moving.

Leading the movement of the jug with her gun, she pumped off a shot. And it flew past, yards away, the jug swinging, and swinging back, chuckling at her. There was no point leading the swing, because there was no wind to push the paintball back toward the jug. She put the gun down. Damn, she thought. How am I going to simulate gale force winds in a clearing in the woods?

Maybe questioning her aim was going in the wrong direction. Maybe the problem had to do with the gun's power. It would send a paintball about a hundred feet at about 180 miles an hour, in a little over half a second. That's 270 feet per second. She read that in a paintgun mag. She was driving at sixty, about ninety feet per second, and that was...Her brain stopped being able to calculate.

She remembered that the whole thing happened so fast that she couldn't keep up. There was no time to calculate anything. She had felt panic when she was trying to get that redneck; out of control, right on the edge of losing it altogether. She felt so much pressure when it came time for action that she thought she was going to die. It paralyzed her, it frightened her. It left her feeling drunk.

One might wonder if Suzie was sane. She wasn't doing anything with her life. Just wasting time in everything she did. She was being a loser, steaming with anger and accomplishing nothing. She had this fantasy dreamworld where she was a do-gooder of saintly proportions, but she was actually going around trying to kill people. She was obsessed with her dad's death, and channeling all her energies into revenge. She just wasn't doing anything positive right then. Did she aspire to kitchen work? Was she going to make a career of killing traffic offenders? Was she ever going to settle down and be normal?

It was her dad's death that fucked her up. He was a brave trucker, and he died in the line of duty. A hero's death. Needless, stupid. And she wasn't even there at the time and so she couldn't do anything to help. She's been lost ever since. And angry. At her dad for sending her away to live with Auntie Mae. At her dad for dying. At the driver for killing him. A driver on a cellphone. Driving in the passing lane.

And so she flings herself into a sudden full-blown rage whenever she sees someone behaving thoughtlessly on the road. A condemning, punishing, murderous rage. And it's all she can do to make it a cold rage. Because to run hot with that much anger would be to run some idiot's car into a ditch. Daily.

She needs to anger-manage the feelings away, to turn them into sweetness and light, use that Care Bear magic. But, you know, fuck that. Suzie has chosen to harbor her rage, to channel it. To use it as energy; to achieve something with it. She really needs to avoid taking it out on random people. Instead, she could carefully select the assholes who really deserve to die.

Maybe she really is crazy. Every sane person will tell you that you can't go taking the law into your own hands. It's such a clich that it's obviously true, and she should really just lighten up and get a prescription for it.

But maybe, because it's obviously true, it might just be false. Maybe Suzie is seeing clearly, and her idea of rough and ready justice is justifiable. Except, not to a judge, and that presents a small little problem, commonly known as 10-20.

Who's to know her mind? Suzie's young, she doesn't know her own mind yet, and by the time she's old she'll have changed it on a number of absolute certainties. If it were legal to advocate illegal acts, then one might side with her and argue for taking out the really bad drivers by summary judgment. Except one probably wouldn't want to give the privilege to Suzie, because she's operating out of anger, loss, and panic, and doesn't make good judgments. And because she was such a bad shot.

It wasn't just her aim. One of the problems with the current weapons configuration was that the paintball came out of the barrel with too much force. You don't need a projectile that goes 120 feet when you are trying to hit something at a tenth the distance. Suzie had read about sawing off shotgun barrels to shorten the range, and figured it might could help. With a higher-end paintgun, she would have been able to simply unscrew the barrel, but here she was actually going to have to saw it off. So she rummaged in the tackle box for the hacksaw she'd used on the treelets in the clearing, and got to work.

The cut was crooked and ragged when she was finished, but she was happy with the result. The paintball came out of the gun with a Blop now, and merely lobbed through the air, landing about twenty feet away, unexploded. Could this be a problem? Not if it was aimed at something going sixty. The whole thing might work. She held it up and examined her workmanship. Sawing the barrel off made the gun less conspicuous, and she could hold it closer to the door and shield it with her arms. Now she was anxious to test it.

But first things first, she had to do her superhero ritual. She grabbed her bag, the bag she'd had since she was a little girl, that had held all her worldly possessions, that she took with her on every trip with her dad, a big zip-up black canvas travel bag that had a worn See Rock City patch on the side. Inside she found her costume, rolled up and rubber-banded; a small framed picture of her dad wrapped up in a torn section of gray-purple curtain, shiny on one side and velvety on the other; a tube of ammunition, a pocket mirror, and a blue Care Bear keychain ornament.

She put the Care Bear on the stool, and set her dad's picture beside it, looking at his face for a few moments. Then she turned her back and pulled off her jeans and t-shirt and struggled into her costume, fiddling with the seams of the tights. She felt the blue booties pinch her toes together as she zipped them up, and wriggled into the awful, too tight plastic pants. Then she donned the parts of the costume she really liked, her Superman t-shirt and her driving gloves.

She slipped on her flesh-colored fishnet driving gloves and looked at herself in the pocket mirror, tilting it to show a panorama of herself, head to feet and back. She was stunning. Unsmiling, resolute. She put the mirror down. Suzie Q, Queen of the Road. Freeway Punisher, Highway Avenger, Interstate Enforcer. Vigilante superhero.

She stood facing the sun, arms loose by her sides, her hands forming into fists, a purposeful look on her serious face. A raven-haired beauty, athletic, tall, with long thick hair flowing behind her like a cape as she prepared to go forth and do justice. Except that the sun wasn't remotely visible through the trees so she was guessing at the direction. Her hair was short and raggedy and hand-cut with scissors, and was copper red, not blue-black. And she wasn't all that pretty, having her dad's face. She actually looked waiflike and determined, like a child actor facing down bad reviews.

Suzie picked up her paintgun, turned the same way her dad was facing, brought the gun up and shook it in front of her three times, and uttered a stream of cheap sayings. 'I swear on the ashes of my father, the evildoers shall be destroyed. Vengeance is mine, so says the victim. Nobody paid for your death, Daddy. They're still out there, and if I have to kill every bad driver in Atlanta, I'm going to do it just so you can rest in peace.' She fired her paintgun into the branches. 'This one's for you, Dad.'

She breathed deeply and focused on her mission, then stood, gathered the ritual objects back into her bag, put the loaded paintgun in with them, turned, and left the clearing. She repeated her mantra, 'This one's for you,' all the way up Moreland Avenue and down Ponce to Krispy Kreme, where the red doughnut light was on, and ordered two original glazed and a small cup of coffee with plenty of cream, no sugar.

She sat in her car and silently demolished one Krispy Kreme while it was still hot enough to burn her mouth, in memory of her dad, and when they used to sit and do the very same thing before leaving town to go on a run. She decided to leave the other Krispy Kreme until she got on the road good and proper, and it had time to cool off.

It felt like church to Suzie. She ate the host and drunk the wine, and now she could go in peace to love and serve the Lord. She licked her fingers with little smacks, put her gloves back on, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot, ready to fight injustice and discourteous asshole behavior wherever she found it.

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next chapter, strange shit at the club.