The Sickle Vixen Read online

  Jim screams and punches harder than he’s ever punched before. The blow sails through the air like a psychotic rocket and nails the army fatigue vixen right in her beautiful Roman nose. Her nose pops off and she topples off the roof, out into the parking lot.

  “Vixens, help her,” the sickle vixen yells. “She can’t die.”

  And Jim sees Max in his cruiser, handlessly waving at Jim to get in, pushing open the passenger side door. “Saving my life, huh, Sebring?” Jim shouts. “You're not so bad after all.”

  “Hurry up,” Max says. "You ain't got a choice."

  And a shotgun blasts Jim in the shoulder, cracking bone and splattering blood. He screams and swan dives off the roof.

  Gunshots light up the sky, but the other vixens are scrambling to scoop up the army fatigue vixen, help her to her feet. Jim pushes himself harder in the air, swimming, and like a magical diver, aims right for the cruiser.

  Max covers his face and Jim’s body crashes through the windshield.

  Hit the engine.

  Tires peel.

  And Max is gunning it right into the army fatigue vixen.

  Her body flops, breaks, snaps under the tires and the other vixens hit the deck, back off. Max cuts the wheel hard and her body is ground to chunks under his back tires.

  Jim scoops himself upright.

  A shotgun shatters the back window.

  “Drive, Sebring, drive,” Jim says. “Get us the hell away from here.”

  And Max punches it out of the parking lot.

  ***

  The sickle vixen walks up to the heap of blood and guts formerly known as the army fatigue vixen. She wipes her brow, scratches her chin with her sickle hand.

  A glow stick bearing vixen dances up. “Road rage,” the vixen says, laughing. “Day late and a dollar short.”

  “Let’s make it two,” the sickle vixen says, jamming her sickle into the wise-talking vixen’s gut. She slices up and the vixen splits in two, stumbling two-faced to the pavement. “Now, listen up,” the sickle vixen says. “We have two renegade assholes who killed our own on the loose and that has to be dealt with. Now, what do we got for wheels?”

  ***

  The cop car hits an empty country road. Fast.

  “And you shanked her?” Jim says. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  "Fling Camp," Max says, nodding.

  "Fling Camp, indeed," Jim says. "Never read it."

  Max is one-handing it down the road, pedal jammed to the floor. They nail a roadblock, keep driving. “Cold blooded killers,” Max says. “Jim, I’m sorry about what I did—never meant to hurt anyone—I would never—was just a joyride, you know.”

  “Don’t explain,” Jim says, pulling his police shotgun out of its holder. “You saved my life, boy. I don’t forget things like that.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “Follow this road out—next station’s not too far. We gotta get help.”

  Jim tries the radio again—just static.

  “Something’s strange here,” Max says. “Who are these vixens?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Jim says. “But we’re gonna put them down.”

  Suddenly, headlights in front of them flare up followed by more headlights across the entire road. Both lanes are lit up with oncoming cars. “Jim,” Max says, “those cars are on our side of the road.”

  “I see that,” Jim says. “Looks like our night’s just getting started.”

  Behind them, more headlights appear in the distance. They’re coming up quick.

  Max pushes the gas, tries to keep focused, but his bloody finger-holes burn.

  The oncoming traffic does not slow.

  Max does not slow.

  The cars behind them approach faster, horns honking.

  Jim pumps the shotgun.

  “Should I swerve?” Max says. “Help, Jim, what should I do?”

  “Give them Hell,” Jim says. “Let’s light them up.” And he aims out the windshield firing shot after shot like a madman. "They wanna play chicken. We can play chicken, too."

  “Brace yourself,” Max says, shutting his eyes.

  And the cruiser rams into the oncoming wall of traffic: crotch rockets, Hummers, rusty pick-up trucks, fancy sports cars—a whole fleet of vehicles—top speed. The cruiser crashes, nails a motorcycle and drives hard into a Chevy, exploding and pummeling forward in a ball of fire. Max keeps his eyes shut and his foot on the gas, but the car spins, rams into more automobiles and the cars behind them can’t stop either. The world is filled with light.

  Kaboom! The entire road is an explosion of metal and skin, bone and blood.

  In midair, upside down, Max opens his eyes and Jim Rain is still holding the shotgun, but his head is missing, has been torn right off his neck. “Sorry, Jim,” Max says. He shuts his eyes again and the car rolls end over end. Still more cars knock it left and right.

  The screams of fiery vixens. The sounds of pigs.

  The scrape of the cruiser on the pavement.

  Fire and explosions galore.

  Max comes to upside down, buckled in and cut bad. His shoulder sings. He rips the seatbelt out and drops, hurting his neck. He crawls out of the cruiser and drags himself off the road.

  A huge gob of destroyed cars and bikes are on fire. Over there, a vixen stumbles and drops dead. She has a fender sticking out of her chest. A baseball bat rolls into frame. A broken pair of chopper shades get crunched underfoot. A crumpled motorcycle blows up, the wheel smashing into another dead vixen's torn-off face. Max laughs, remembers he’s missing a hand and screams. He’s pissed himself.

  A punk vixen, face half melted, jumps from a twisted pile of truck parts and bites him in the throat. He kicks her in the crotch and clubs her with his bloody stump hand. He laughs at this, too, but Officer Jim Rain—where is he? Max forgot. The world is spinning.

  Blip.

  He sees the officer, headless—shotgun still aimed out the window.

  Blip.

  Another vixen leaking guts and spitting up blood rushes at him. He elbows her in the jaw, twists her neck until it tears.

  A car explodes, the flames spreading and another blows sky high, the hood rocketing into the night. The black sky is awash in smoke and flames.

  He looks around at the blackness. He’s somewhere out of town, can’t be sure where.

  A hill in the distance. A mansion? He must be seeing things, but he sees it so clearly, has never seen it before. It’s a gigantic mansion and the sound of women laughing and music, too. He shakes his head, burps and pukes.

  “Why me?” he says, dropping to his knees.

  “It’s your time, asshole.” It’s the sickle vixen. She strides up out of the rubble, eye-patched and gorgeous. “You’ve been a naughty boy—killed my vixens, you did.”

  “Who are you people?”

  “Bloodthirsty and savage vixens,” she says. “And it’s your unlucky night.”

  Her sickle arm glows in the fire.

  Max reaches down and picks up a broken steering wheel. Better than nothing, he thinks.

  This sickle vixen is tall. She flicks back her hair, sees the mansion on the hill. “They started without me,” she says. “It’s all your fault.”

  “We can walk away from this,” Max says, out of breath—his hand kills.

  “No,” the sickle vixen says, “we can’t.”

  “To the death then?”

  She smiles. “To the death.”

  And they both charge at each other, jump midair and collide in a fury of sloppy punches and slices. Max hits the sickle vixen in the kidneys with the steering wheel, but his stumpy hand gets sliced down the middle by her sickle. Veins sputter out.

  They tumble to the ground. Something cracks. It's his skull.

  Right next to Max, a motorcycle blows up. The force lunges him forward into the sickle vixen. She catches him and gives him a backbreaker on the pavement. He bites his teeth, yells
. He can’t feel his face.

  Move—her sickle is coming down fast. Max dodges to the left. The sickle hits the pavements. Sparks fly. Again. He dodges to the right, boots her in the chest.

  “You’ve got some chops,” the sickle vixen says, “but mine are always better.” She hits a button on her wrist and her sickle is a whir of spinning fury. “Try brushing your teeth with these tits.”

  And it’s on. She thrusts, he jumps back, slipping on a patch of gasoline. She dives at him and her sickle catches him in the thigh, gashing his knife wound. Blood sprays.

  Max limps back.

  Something squishes under his feet.

  It’s Officer Jim Rain’s head.

  Max looks down into those dead eyes, that dead mouth and hears Jim say, “Finish her, boy. You’re all I've got.”

  And the spinning sickle cuts the air. She’s leapt and is plunging down at Max. He ducks, grabs Jim’s head and jams it into her blades. Like a woodchipper on the fritz, the blades jam and sputter to a stop. Max’s fingerless fist meets the sickle vixen’s eyeball and he rams his fist into her face, stepping in and tripping her in the process. She goes down and he leaps on top of her.

  His fist doesn’t stop.

  Max rams his fist right into her eyeball-hole and up into her brains. The inside of her face is molten hot.

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” he screams, scooping out vixen insides until his fist hits pavement. "I never meant to hurt anyone."

  The sickle vixen goes limp.

  The mansion party is louder than ever and Max stands over the sickle vixen's mutilated body. He’s filled with anger, loss and pain.

  Jim’s voice on the wind: “Take the sickle. You’ll need it, boy.”

  And Max does.

  He tears off her sickle vixen arm, squeezes it tight, and stumbles toward the mansion. Maybe there, he thinks, someone can help.

  On the edge of the fiery car pile, he sees an undamaged vehicle. It’s a moped, but it’ll have to do. He props it up, sits down.

  Luckily, Max knows a thing or two about gadgets, because before we can say “vixen,” he’s already tore that sickle from its stump and is hard at work rerouting wires to get the thing to fit onto his middle finger-hole.

  Click. Whirr. Buzz. Ping. Not a perfect fit, but it'll do the trick.

  The moped roars to life, sputtering. He revs it.

  Max's new finger-sickled hand grips the gas, revs harder.

  We go tight on Max’s face, the look in his eyes and one solitary tear dropping down his cheek. “Time to turn over a new leaf,” he says. “See what’s on the other side.”

  Tires screech.

  Max takes off down the lonely country road.

  But we track back through the wreckage to the sloppy spilled head of the sickle vixen and her one good hand is still moving, groping the ground for something to grab. We watch fingers move across pavement until we notice those fingers are gripping at the disgusting remains of Officer Jim Rain’s decapitated head.

  Slice. Squish. Splat. Blurp.

  Blink.

  The sickle vixen stands, bends and scoops up her eye patch. When we pan up to her face, though, it’s not her face we see. It’s the face of Jim Rain. The sickle vixen slaps the eye patch on and examines her slimy arm. “I guess it’s time to party,” she says, watching the moped's tail lights slither toward the mansion.

  THE END

  If you liked this Pocket Novelette, be sure to check out Grefe’s New Bizarro Author Series’ novella, THE MONDO VIXEN MASSACRE, now available through Eraserhead Press and wherever fine books are sold.

  BIO: Jamie Grefe was born and raised in Michigan and spent his post university years in South Korea, Japan, and China. He has worked as an international school English Language Arts Teacher, a Creative Writing Teacher, a Japanese-English Translator, an Assistant Director and Video Editor for Japanese television, and a Video Store Clerk, not to mention that one week stint as a Runner for AC/DC. He has recorded more than a handful of noise and improvised albums under various project names, but gave up noise-making in Beijing for fiction-writing after the stunned silence of his colleagues upon his public reading of a stream-of-consciousness folk tale about skulls. Grefe is currently working on a cannibal novella and works freelance in Michigan with his wife, daughter, and their two dogs.