You Suck: A Love Story

they’d been chiseled, square shoulders, and narrow hips. They might have been brother and sisters, except one of the women was of African descent, the other looked like she might be Italian or Greek. The man was a head taller than the women and looked Nordic, perhaps German, with close-cropped white hair. All were as pale as bleached bone.
    As they passed him the Emperor pulled the hounds closer and Bummer let out a threatening ruff.
    They stopped. The man turned. “How long have you been here?” he asked.
    “Forever, I think,” said the Emperor.
    The man smiled and nodded, then turned and was on his way. “I know how you feel,” he said without looking back.
    G ustavo and Jeff found Barry hiding in the shelves among the toilet-paper packages. When they got close, Barry burst out of the TP and made a run for the end of the aisle, pulling napkins, aluminum foil, garbage bags, and plastic silverware off the shelves as he went to slow his pursuers. Gustavo went down first, slipping on a package of plastic forks. Jeff high-stepped through the obstacles and was right on Barry’s ass until he was almost to the end of the aisle and Lash stepped out holding one of Barry’s spearguns.
    “Down!” Lash barked, and Barry hit the tile on his chest and slid.
    There was a pneumatic hiss and the heavy stainless spear thudded into Jeff ’s sternum and blew him back off his feet.
    “Ow, goddammit,” said the power forward, clutching at the spear and trying to pull it out of his chest.
    Gustavo climbed to his feet, ran to Jeff, and started yanking on the spear.
    Lash handed Barry a four-foot-long stick with a blunt metal tip on it and fitted another spear into the gun.
    “That the last one?” Barry asked.
    Lash nodded. “Where’s Clint?”
    Just then the tall blond woman appeared at the far end of the aisle, dragging an unconscious Clint by his collar. A wide bloodstain ran from her chin to her crotch and they could see her fangs even from this distance. “Bad boys. Leaving your born-again lying on the floor where people can trip over him.”
    She dropped Clint on his face, and headed up the aisle toward them, in long, slow strides.
    Lash bolted, Barry right behind them, through the canvas doors into the back room, and into the walk-in dairy cooler. It was like a long hallway with plastic milk boxes stacked on one side and the glass dairy cases on the other. They pushed stacks of heavy one-gallon milk boxes in front of the door, then leaned with their backs against the back of the cooler, watching the store through the clear cooler doors in the dairy case, over the cartons of yogurt and cottage cheese.
    “What’s that she’s carrying?” Barry asked.
    “A frying pan,” Lash said.
    “Oh,” Barry said “Sorry I let her in. She was almost naked.”
    “How could you have known?”
    “Well, when she claimed she had a nooky-gram for my birthday, I should have figured something was up.”
    “Your birthday’s like in March, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah.”
    Lash slapped Barry hard once on his bare scalp, then re-aimed the speargun over the yogurts.
    “I deserved that,” Barry said.
    “Think that spear hit Jeff ’s heart?”
    “Had to. It’s a foot through his sternum.”
    “He doesn’t seem dead.”
    “Guess that means head shot.” Barry shook his head. “You want me to try?”
    “Nah, if I miss, you have the bang stick.” Lash nodded at the long stick Barry was holding at port arms.
    Essentially it was a twelve-gauge shotgun shell on the end of a stick, used for killing sharks. You poked them with it and the shotgun shell fired into them at point-blank range.
    “I’ll bet she doesn’t even know what it is.”
    “Get it right,” Lash said. “Blow her fucking brains out.”
    They looked at each other as they heard the refrigeration compressors and fans wind down. Then the lights went out.
    “We’re fucked,” Lash said.
    “Yep,” Barry agreed.

30 – Being the Chronicles of
    AbbyNormal: Dark and Mysterious
    Goddess of Forbidden Love
    Don’t judge me. I have looked death in the face and made him my bitch! I did what I did out of love, and I don’t want to sound conceited, but OMG, we are heroes! And when I say we, I mean us.
    Had I told you before, you would have called me “losah!,” pronounced me perky and cute beyond redemption, but now that I am secure in my own nefarious love lair and whatnot, I can at last confess, that in my naive youth, my favorite literary character was not the