Page 41 of The Triangle

They’re not wearing body armor or anything, which seems ill advised, but they are all wearing masks that cover their faces. Nothing extraordinary, just ski masks. To me this suggests a hastily thrown together operation. No faceplates or tactical gear. Just big, lumbering okes, identities clumsily shrouded with hackneyed disguises, making their way oafishly up the stairs to confront our motley little band like they was in some second-rate gangster picture.

They fail to reach us where we stand, however. Christine’s shotgun puts a rugby-ball-sized-hole in the chest of the daft fucker who presumed to be the tip of the spear. The blast echoes loudly off the metal steps.

Danny and I had squared off to face down the invading horde, but Christine pushed past us, edging us out of the way with the gun’s barrel, and sent the first oke tumbling back down the stairs far quicker than he came up. She immediately racks another round into the chamber and blasts again. This time sending two more falling.

The shot must hit an artery on at least one of them, because arterial spray paints the stairwell wine red. And I suddenly realize that I’m going to have to accept... I’m simply not going to be able to escape without mucking up my lekker crocodile shoes. Shame.

The three remaining muscle are firing indiscriminately in our direction. One of the bullets catches the fabric of my topcoat, cutting through the lining and puncturing the cashmere shell. My mouth contorts on its own and I twist my neck sideways as I shove my own gun back inside my newly blemished finery and march in their direction.

“Alec!” shouts Christine. But it sounds a long way off because of the inharmonic duet being sung by the battling alarm systems, and because my limbs are now getting hot and growing in size. Inflating. Pulsing. The blood in my body pumping wildly but methodically, making me bigger than I am.

I don’t know who these hol naaiers are, or who sent them, but I suspect they must be part of the same group who tried to harm Christine; who did, in fact, harm her, even if they failed to kill her, because my girl is hard to kill; who disrupted a beautiful moment that I was enjoying with her and Danny; who splashed blood everywhere, making my lekker shoes slick and wet with their cunting blood; and who have now ruined a perfectly beautiful topcoat.

And I’m gatvol with their fokken bullshit.

I wrench the handgun from the shaking grip of the masked naaier standing in front of me, shove it directly under his chin, and pull the trigger twice. A single pull of the trigger would have gotten the job done, but I’m frustrated right now.

It is, perhaps, the cloudiness that accompanies my frustration that disallows me awareness of the gun pointed at my temple. I’m so fixated on blowing this poepol’s head off his shoulders that I neglect to see the barrel that’s about to take mine own head from me.

But—in what I choose to think of as an act of love in spite of himself—Danny does see the pistol and comes flying down from one of the steps above me, tackling the would-be assassin to the ground. Why he didn’t simply shoot him, I don’t know.

Perhaps, like me, he’s taking this all somewhat personally and wanted the feeling of taking a life from close range. There is something uniquely satisfying and intimate about it. I heard a rumor once that eating a bit of chocolate will rid one of blue balls. In the event that one experiences coitus interruptus, the legend goes that eating a bit of chocolate will trigger the same chemicals in the body and mitigate the throbbing ache in one’s groin. Perhaps looking someone in the eye before you extinguish their candle triggers the same wave of chemicals.

Whether that is true or not, Danny is flooded with some type of energy from somewhere, because he lands on the oke with force, strips him of his gun, and begins whipping him with what can only be described as a sanguinary relentlessness.

It is beautiful to watch.

He pulverizes the poor bastard’s face with the butt of his own bloomin’ pistol until the ski mask he wears darkens further with blood. That’s unfortunate. It must be embarrassing to be ferried to another dimension of consciousness by the ass end of your own weapon. Shame indeed.

The alarms continue to blare, mingled with the sound of continuing gunfire. I’ve been so distracted by watching Danny pistol-whip a person to death that I almost completely forget there’s still another masked assailant inside our perimeter. It’s not his gun that I hear now, however. It’s the booming blast of Christine’s shotgun once again, as she nearly removes the lower half of his legs just below the knees, and he sprawls onto the ground, pulling himself along the cold, concrete floor of Danny’s garage.

Christine descends to stand beside me now, and we watch, for a brief moment, as Danny, almost mechanically at this point, continues thrashing the ever-softening brains of the oke on the ground beneath him. I suspect he feels us staring at him because he glances over his shoulder, sees us watching this grotesquerie unfold, and shouts, “What?”

At that, he stands, having dispatched the fellow to Hell or wherever he’s gone, and the three of us walk in the direction of the near-half-legless fokker dragging himself along the floor of Fortnight’s Custom Bike Shop.

Christine pokes him in the ass with the barrel of the shotgun and he stops struggling along. He rolls over to face us, pulling the ski-mask up above his eyes, I presume because it’s likely now hard for him to breathe and also because at this point, honestly, who fokken gives a shit?

I don’t recognize him. By the non-looks on their faces, neither do Danny nor Christine. Christine puts the barrel of the shotgun against his throat and over the still-blaring siren says, “Who are you?”

He strains to speak, but no words come out. Or if they do, they’re impossible to hear over the wailing tocsin that blasts all about.

She follows up her own question with, “Who sent you? What’s this about?”

I can’t imagine that if he’ll not answer a simple, “who are you?” that peppering him with more questions is likely to garner a different result, but to my surprise, he manages to sputter out, in a voice just loud enough for us to hear, “Fuck you, bitch.”

American. Both in accent and in the almost cartoonish way he clings to his misogynistic machismo as he faces down his last moment. Eish, man. Have the decency to die with a little grace.

Christine pulls the trigger and relieves him of the burden of his brains.

We recognize, collectively, that there’s no time to assess the situation further, although my eyes do pass over the carnage that surrounds us. It’s really quite something. Even in our most daring and active moments in our shared past, we never left behind a scene like this. A wave of worry rumbles through me. A feeling that I do not care for and to which I am generally unaccustomed.

“Do you think there’s any more?” Christine shouts.

Danny looks around. “Outside?” he yells.

She nods.

He shrugs.