The Sickle Vixen Read online


Jamie Grefe

  THE SICKLE VIXEN

  A Mondo Vixen Massacre Pocket Novelette 001

  Copyright Jamie Grefe 2013

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  THE MONDO VIXEN MASSACRE, please visit:

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  Officer Bob Felch steps out to have a smoke. It’s been a slow night.

  Through the glass door behind him, we catch a few cops and a detective slouching around the station drinking coffee, playing poker—the night shift. Bob steps to the right, leans against the station’s brick facade, takes a drag. A mosquito flits by. “Look at this place,” he mutters. The parking lot is dark and empty save a few battered cruisers and a ragged tumbleweed. “Everything’s going to pieces.”

  Inside, a police radio crackles, can’t make out the garbled voice. Probably just Jim checking in. At least, he thinks, someone’s doing their job.

  He studies his wristwatch. The second hand creeps closer to one a.m. Three seconds to go. He counts down along with the tick.

  The watch freezes on the hour. Just like that.

  “Shit,” he says to himself. “Some retirement present.” He taps it hard, shakes his head. “Swiss craftsmanship, my—”

  A spinning saw blade slams into his face, splats apart Bob’s forehead and pins him to the brick wall. His fingers twitch, legs shake. A vixen in chopper shades and army fatigues steps up and rips the blade from his split open face. She slams her boot into his chest, yanks hard. “Stay down,” she says. His body slides to the ground, dead.

  “Nice shot,” a Japanese vixen says, blowing on her freshly painted nails. “Never saw it coming.”

  “I never miss,” she says.

  Like apparitions from shadows, we see a handful of gnarly vixens: bikini bottoms, cowboy boots, short shorts, and green glow sticks galore, emerge from the back of the parking lot. They are slashing tires, snarling bad.

  The army fatigue vixen picks up Bob’s still burning cigarette from the ground. She takes a hit. “Girls," she says. "You know the drill.”

  “No survivors,” a vixen says, twirling a knife.

  Another slides a baseball bat against cement, “Only blood. Like always.”

  The army fatigue vixen takes another drag, spits the cigarette into Bob’s goopy face. “And get Ashyln out alive—we have a party to get to.”

  Cut to:

  ***

  Max Sebring is comfortable in his cell bunk. He turns another page of Fling Camp. His eyes and lips scan line to line. He’s read this trashy paperback more times than he can count. He’s absorbed in Peggy’s raunchy antics with the camp counselor, how Jimmy lost his shorts in the shower and had to sneak past the girls’ locker room in the buff—the things he saw in the bushes.

  Yeah, Max’s been here before—nothing changed—nowhere else to go when you’ve been ordered to sober up in the clink for a night.

  But tonight, something feels wrong. Dead wrong.

  He slides off the top bunk and splashes toilet water over his face. It stinks. His white T-shirt stinks, too. “Driving Under the Influence,” they say. “Possession of a Stolen Vehicle” and “Indecent Exposure while Intoxicated.” It was just a joke. What is this, he thinks, the nineteen fifties? Since when is jacking a cop car for a psychedelic joyride a crime? Sure, he smashed the red and white cruiser, watched it blow up in a ball of beautiful flame and took three gas pumps down with it. A guy’s gotta have fun on his birthday, right? Max ended up stumbling away without a scratch, ran right into Officer Jim Rain’s unlucky nightstick and that was that.

  No one escapes Officer Jim Rain.

  Boom! A shotgun blasts down the hall.

  “Gunshot?” Max says to himself. The wing is empty, only Max. The other wing, though, that’s where they keep the basket cases. “What’s going on out there?” he asks.

  Another blast. Max cranes his head, sees the empty hallway, the wood door at the end of it, can’t see into the office through the gauzy glass on the door. “What the—”

  The sound of men squealing, chairs and desks being flung, crashing, and a woman screams. The sounds of abuse.

  “Hey,” Max yells. “What is this, a riot?” No response. “Hey, answer me.” No one comes.

  Another blast, splat, and laughter—a woman’s voice, muffled, frantic.

  That wood door’s window is coated in dark blood.

  Butterflies jump in Max’s stomach. Something is seriously not right.

  ***

  Vixens staple a cop’s nostrils shut, use a baseball bat to make brain soup and splatter the remains all over the bulletin board. Our Japanese vixen papercuts playing cards down another cop’s chest, makes him swallow a glow stick and kicks him into a filing cabinet.

  The army fatigue vixen holds a shotgun, its barrel still smoking. She stands over an elderly officer, his left arm blown to shreds. He’s mumbling in and out of consciousness. “Someone take out this trash,” she says, then spits on his chest and tears off his gold star. “We are the new law—vixen justice.” He has a heart attack.

  A cowboy boot kicks over a desk. One vixen has a cop’s mouth yanked open, is pulling out teeth with a pair of rusty pliers and a crowbar. She smiles her pearly whites, gives him a kiss on the forehead and moves on to slice the tongue—she uses a meat cleaver.

  A detective cowers behind his desk. “Stand up,” the army fatigue vixen says. He does. “Turn around and smile pretty.” He’s cowering, has pissed himself. “Where’s Ashyln?”

  “I-I-I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  The vixen blows his right leg off at the kneecap. He drops on the stub and howls. “Refresh your memory? The one with the sickle, you fool.”

  Another vixen grabs him by the throat and hurls him, face first, into a small trash basket. She jams it over his head, makes him stand. He’s hobbling on one leg. “Next shot,” she whispers, “and we’ll make sure you never dance again, detective.”

  “She’s in the second wing,” he says, off balance, arms flailing.

  “Thanks,” our army fatigue vixen says. She blows his other leg off. He drops, twitching. “Let’s go, girls. Wing two.” The vixen reloads, pauses. “Where’s Naomi?”

  ***

  Max is backed up against the cell wall. Naomi, a curious bikini vixen with a penchant for kitchen knives slides a knife across his cell bars. She gives him a flirty grin. “I’ve got the key,” she says. “To your heart.”

  “Am I being transferred?” Max says, confused.

  Naomi holds up a chopped off hand still gripping a ring of keys and she inserts a skeleton key into the lock, clicks it and slides his door open. “Something like that,” she says. She throws the dead hand at his chest. He’s too stunned to blink, just watches it splat on the ground. “Come out here and fight.”

  Another shotgun blast from the office and a man gurgles death loudly.

  Naomi gives a quick glance to the wood door. That’s all it takes.

  Max lunges. He rams her against the wall. He throws a punch to her bare gut and she doubles over.

  She’s fast.

  Her knife slices across his thigh, whizzes up, misses his chin. He spins, windmilling her into his cell.

  She drops her knife. “You broke my jaw.”

  Max grabs the knife, looms over her, out of breath. She grabs the edge of the toilet and stiffly stands. Her mouth is a deformed splotch of bloated lips and teeth.

  “And you broke my lip,” she says. “Nobody breaks my lip.” She sees Fling Camp propped open on the bunk, its unmistakable cover—two lovelorn hotties in a heated embrace. “Hey, is this—?” And Max acts. He plunges the knife deep into her
chest. He rams it, twists and she sinks sideways onto the toilet, slumps against the wall.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Fling Camp. It’s a classic.”

  Poking out of her bikini bottoms is a small business card. He grabs it, holds it up to the light. It reads, “MONDO VIXEN ENTERPRISES: REACH OUT AND SLASH SOMEONE.” He flicks it at her dead body.

  “Vixens?” he says. “You gotta be kidding me?”

  Women are laughing on the other side of that wood door.

  We move in tight against Max’s face. He’s dumbfounded, maybe still drunk.

  “Naomi?” someone yells. “Honey, we found her. Let's move.”

  And that voice is close, on the other side of the door and when those vixens find what must be chest-stabbed Naomi, dead on a prison toilet, it’s going to be Max who’ll have to pay the price.

  Gulp.

  He steps into the hallway, wipes the knife on his jeans. He touches the thigh wound, winces. “Freedom calls,” he says. “Here goes nothing.”

  ***

  Pull back and we see a gorgeous eye-patched vixen silhouetted by cell bars. Her right hand is a rusty sickle sewn messily into her stumpy wrist. She turns to greet us, to greet the sound of her cell door easing open.

  “Thought you’d never get here,” she says. “Wing two’s a bitch.”

  The army fatigue vixen: “Had a little fun in the lounge.”

  “Talk to Linda?”

  “Party to end all parties.”

  Ashlyn smiles, studies her sickle hand. “Then let’s get to it, shall we? Our nurse awaits.”

  ***

  Officer Jim Rain pulls his cruiser into the station parking lot and kills the engine. He fumbles over a file folder on the passenger side seat, takes a sip of lukewarm coffee. He’s been busy tracking strange calls from abandoned houses. This is when he sees Bob’s body.

  Spit take. Coffee splatters the windshield. He wipes his mouth and is out of the car, armed and ready. He leaves the keys in the ignition, driver’s side door wide open.

  Click. He cocks back his Magnum and creeps to where Bob’s body oozes brain-shit. The face is just a mess of runny goop. Jim swats the flies away.

  “No, Bob,” he says—a shotgun blasts from inside the station.

  Jim crouches near Bob: “That son of a gun.” The phone inside rings—another blast blows it to pieces. The sound of women laughing. The only thing Jim can think is that good for nothing hoodlum, the one he brought in himself last night, Max Sebring. He’s always been a local troublemaker—must be his girlfriends come to bail his sorry ass out.

  They just messed with the wrong officer.

  “We got company, girls,” a vixen from inside says. “More fuzz.” She tosses a grenade. It smashes through the glass front door, lands feet away from Jim.

  Without thinking, he counts—five, four, three—no shit! He dives.

  The blast rocks the front of the police station. It propels Jim into a clump of bushes. He rolls to a crouch and claws his way out, his trigger finger itchy and his body wobbly.

  A pink bikini vixen steps outside. She’s waving a green glow stick as if it were a magic wand. Jim aims, shoots—blam—watches a string of blood spout from her throat. Before she can even clutch the wound, she’s down.

  “You and your girls just started a war, Max Sebring,” he says. "Come out with your hands where I can see them."

  ***

  Boots on cement. Max breathes heavy against the blood-spattered wood door. On the other side, he hears voices: “I thought we axed that teacher scumbag?” “She never should have done that to his wife, if you ask me. “I would have watched her bleed the son dry.” And: “Payback, vixen style—I need a drink.”

  Max presses his ear to the door, studies those voices. There must be five or six of them. At least. Where are the other officers? Who are these vixens, some kind of special forces unit? But Max is beyond that. He’s trembling cold fear. The moment the kitchen knife hit vixen skin, he knew his deep pit of crime just got deeper. He thinks Mexico, Alaska, or Detroit somewhere he can start fresh, hide for awhile and wait for this to blow over.

  Too late.

  The wood door swings open, knocking him back. A short-haired vixen in a mini-skirt steps up. She’s got a pink crowbar. Max flinches, drives the knife into her throat. She flies back into the office and the room erupts. “Get him,” a vixen yells. “More man meat for dinner,” another says. He throws the knife, nails a broken chunk of wall.

  Vixens rush in, haul Max into the room. He trips over the legless detective, screams at all the blood, the stench of rot. Dead cops surround him, their entrails smeared across desks and walls. A baseball bat cracks him in the ear, sends him flying over a desk.

  “Hold him down,” a goth vixen says, twerking him rough enough to chafe. She jabs him in the lungs. The Japanese vixen rams a glow stick up his nose, licks his cheek.

  They rip off his shirt and rake nails down his chest, use a feather to tickle his armpits and spit needles in his ears. “Let’s de-finger this brat,” one of them says.

  From the hallway, a vixen says, “The prick shot Naomi.”

  “Did you shoot Naomi, prick?” a vixen says, pinching his cheek.

  Max: “Go to Hell.” He spits in her face.

  The vixen grabs him by the neck and holds him down on top of a desk. “Someone get me the cleaver. Time to de-finger pretty boy.”

  A gigantic meat cleaver hovers over his face. A vixen comes close to his ear, leans in, “We’re going to cut off your fingers, make you suck.”

  The cleaver suddenly crashes down on his index finger, chopping it off. They laugh. Max howls, but the vixens are too much. They hold him there. The cleaver goes up, slices down, chops off his middle finger. Applause. “Not my ring finger,” he cries, but vixens don’t listen and don’t marry. Slice. Off it goes. A standing ovation.

  “Pinkie time,” one of them says. Slice.

  “Thumbs up,” one of them says. Slice.

  Max’s world flashes green and orange. His ex-girlfriend Kathy spins before his mind. His whole life flickers and buzzes, swirls and melts in a stinky dew. A vixen tongue kisses him, slams his head into the desk, punches him in the jaw. “No one kills a vixen and lives to talk about it.”

  “Let’s just chop his head off and be done with it,” a cowboy vixen says.

  “We got time for finger soup?” another says. "I'm hungry."

  “Leave the bastard alone,” a man says from outside. He’s standing in the blown-up entryway, holding a Magnum at the torturing vixens. “You’re all going away for a real long time.” It’s Jim Rain.

  Max cranes to see, but his eyes won’t focus.

  “Max Sebring,” Jim says. “Surrender to the murder of Bob Felch and things’ll go a lot smoother for you. Might even be able to pull the death penalty off the table, boy.”

  “Who is that scum?” a vixen says, suddenly noticing the dead vixen outside.

  “Thought Sue took care of him,” a vixen says.

  “Looks like he took care of Sue.” It’s the sickle vixen, stepping from wing two with the army fatigue vixen in tow. “Bury that asshole cop—him and your little Mr. Fingers.”

  From the back of the room, a machine gun wielding vixen opens fire on Jim. He jumps up, disappears like a ninja. The machine gun clicks empty—reload.

  The other vixens let Max’s body slump off the table. His hand is a goopy wad of skin and mush.

  His eyes snap open. His heart is still beating. “I didn’t do it,” he mutters. "I would never..."

  “Did you get him?” the sickle vixen says. "Tell me you greased that copper."

  “I’ll take care of this,” the army fatigue vixen says, stepping up and moving to the front door. She grabs her bloody sawblade from a desk and strides outside.

  Crickets.

  The vixens watch her attentively.

  Suddenly, from the back of the room, a window breaks, glass everywhere.
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  It’s Max. He’s jumped out the window.

  “Where’s that murderer?” a vixen says. “Get him! The window—”

  And Max bolts around the side of the station to the parking lot. The army fatigue vixen spots him rounding the corner and flings her saw blade.

  We follow that blade. It cuts the air and is coming right at his head. “Eat saw,” she says.

  A bullet cracks the air, hitting the saw blade and sends it flying into the bushes.

  “Officer Jim Rain?” Max says. “You didn’t shoot me.”

  And it is. He’s standing on the station roof, his gun still smoking. “I’m a cop,” he says. “Guess you got lucky. Now, surrender your girls and we deal with this the right way. In a court of law.”

  The army fatigue vixen is sneaking up the wall.

  “It’s not me,” Max yells, throwing his hands in the air, his one arm spilling blood down his bare chest. “They're vixens, officer, vixens—they killed everyone. Watch out!”

  A karate kick nails Jim in the back of the head. He drops. It’s the army fatigue vixen. She throws an uppercut, nails him right in the chin. His teeth spill out of his mouth like yellow pieces of popcorn. And the fight is on.

  Inside, the sickle vixen says: “Grab your weapons. Kill these pests and hurry it up. I promised Linda I’d be at her gala—I don’t break promises.”

  And the vixens are rushing to their weapons, scuttling to get outside and kill, baby, kill.

  The sickle vixen eyeballs the legless detective writhing on the floor. “Poor baby,” she says. “Did someone lose their legs today?” He grunts, blabbers. “Well, you just lost your pathetic life, too.” And she brings her sickle hand down and scoops out his heart, slicing deep and raking his chest open. The heart is still beating.

  Outside, Max is mad-dashing to Jim’s cruiser. He slides across the hood and a shotgun blasts out a headlight. Someone throws a baseball bat and it misses Max by inches. He rolls away. He falls, pulls himself up in agony and throws himself into the cruiser. “Jim,” he says, “they’re coming. Quick!”

  On the roof, the army fatigue vixen and Jim Rain duke it out. She throws a punch. He throws a punch. They are both bloody and weak. Jim cocks back his fist, sees his family and friends, sees Bob’s face and his brother-in-law, Hal, and his whole normal law abiding life explodes before his eyes in a whirlwind of hate. Finish her, a voice says. Finish them all.