No One Lives
Forever
©2009 The Angst Guy (theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Daria and associated characters are ©2009 MTV
Networks
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me,
whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com
Synopsis: It’s a typical day in
Author’s
Notes:
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Thomas Harris, who almost gave me a
heart attack with that first chapter in
*
The plastic clock on the checkstand said
it was 9:11 a.m. when the twenty-something blonde’s cell phone went off, just
as she was about to fill out a deposit slip in the bank’s lobby. She pulled the
phone from the back pocket of her tight jeans, flipped it open, and tried to
talk and write at the same time, holding the deposit slip in place on the
marble checkstand with an elbow.
“Hi, it’s me!” she said in a cheery
squeak, golden pigtails bouncing. “Hi, Mom. Yes, I’m
fine. I’m at the bank.” She frowned. The deposit slip kept wrinkling on the
glass tabletop as she wrote. “No, Mom, everything’s okay. Yeah. Well, I’m sure
I’ll find an acting job soon. I still have enough left for two months’ rent on
the apartment. Mom, thanks for looking out for me, but I’m fine, really. Yeah.
No. Mom, please—”
The pen ran out of ink. She scribbled on
a corner of the deposit slip to restart the flow, but the deposit slip tore in
half. She sighed and put down the pen, turning in place to look out the bank
windows at the midmorning street scene. It was a cloudless day in
A black, four-door Cadillac DeVille with
the windows rolled all the way down pulled up to the curb in front of the bank
with a screech of tires. A rusted-out Ford Fairlane station wagon stopped
behind it, rocking on its springs. With the engines still running, the car
doors opened and young men in trench coats got out and headed for the bank
doors. Each wore sunglasses with a cap of some kind; several had gold neck
chains and most were tattooed. The blonde counted five coming in, with a driver
and a gunman left to each car, scanning the street and sidewalks for police.
The men were all business, a typical
“Mom?” said the blonde, watching through
the windows. She maneuvered around the checkstand. “Mom, I gotta go. I’ll call
you back. No, Mom, I promise. Real soon. Love you,
too. Bye.” She shoved the cell phone back into her pants pocket just in time.
The two glass doors to the bank flew
open. Weapons rose out of the trench coats as the men spread quickly through
the lobby. “Down on the floor!”
yelled a man with amber sunglasses and a head bandana. He swung around an AK-47
with a banana clip. “Get the fuck down
before we blow your fucking heads off!”
Four bank customers and a portly security
guard went straight to the floor. The pigtailed blonde behind the checkstand
raised her hands to shoulder height and studied the five in the bank. Everyone
knew his part. Three men carried bags and pistols, a big guy covered the
customers and guard with a sawed-off shotgun in either hand, and the leader had
the automatic rifle. The bag-carrying men threw their sacks over the counters
to the tellers without bothering to tell them what to do next.
“Yo, bitch!”
shouted a bagman, a tall rail-thin teen with acne and a scraggly goatee. “You deaf or what? Get your fucking ass down!” He walked
toward the pigtailed blonde with his black 9-mm Glock held out sideways as any
style-conscious L.A. teen thug would do, the barrel aimed right between the
blonde’s blue eyes with a thirty-round long clip sticking out from the grip.
“Don’t shoot!” the blonde squeaked. “I’ll
be good!”
“Yeah, you’ll be good, all right.” The
bagman grinned and reached for one of the girl’s upraised hands. “You come with
us and be extra good, and maybe we’ll—”
The girl’s right hand shot forward and
the heel of her palm rammed the teenager’s nose, snapping his head back. Her
left hand caught the underside of the Glock and forced it up, breaking the teen’s
thumb and causing his trigger finger to tighten and blow a fist-sized hole
through one of the bank’s front windows with a deafening bang. Then the
teenager was whipped around, his right arm forced high behind his back. He
screamed as blood spilled down his face from his broken nose. The Glock came
around his right side in the blonde’s right hand.
“Drop
your weapons!” the blonde yelled, but another bagman was taking aim and
Bandana-Head had jerked the AK-47 around at waist level. The Glock in her hand
jumped as both men fired at her. The teenager’s scream turned into a gurgle as
the automatic rifle opened a half-dozen bright red holes across his upper
chest. The plastic clock on the checkstand exploded. The dying teen fell to the
left. The blonde fell with him, still using him as a shield, the Glock still
flashing.
When she hit the floor she rolled behind
another checkstand. A shotgun blasted away half of the checkstand’s
top; deposit slip bits and marble shards rained down. She leaned to one side
and fired twice around the base of the stand and saw the huge guy with the
shotguns stop and rock forward. His second sawed-off blew a framed photo of
She was on her feet a second later, a
focused look on her face. She shot the crying bagman in the forehead as she
went by and was at the door before his brains slid down the marble façade of
the tellers’ counter behind him. The third bagman had stopped on the other side
of one of the glass doors, his .45 revolver aimed back at her. She fell back
and fired twice at the same time he did; the door burst into a shower of safety
glass flying inside and out. When she got up and came out the door, she didn’t
need to open it. The bagman lay on his back on the sidewalk, desperately trying
to cover his sucking chest wounds so his lungs would work. She put a third
bullet hole in him between the other two; he sank back and relaxed. Dozens of
passers-by on the sidewalks ran for their lives, shrieking and dragging
children with them as they dodged into stores and fled across the boulevard
through traffic.
Bandana-Head dived through the open back
door of the DeVille with his AK-47. The passenger-seat gunner in the station
wagon twisted around to fire at the blonde but she shot him in the throat, bent
down to scoop up the .45 from the bagman with the chest wounds, then stood and
fired with both guns straight out, left-right-left-right-left-right. The
station wagon and the DeVille squealed away from the curb, tires smoking, but
the station wagon’s driver slumped over and fell out of his half-open door. His
legs caught on something in the car and he was dragged along until his legs
came loose and he went under the left rear wheel. The Fairlane wagon then
crashed into a parked pickup truck across the street and set off a half-dozen
car alarms. The passenger-seat gunner in the DeVille hung half out of the
fleeing car Cheyenne-style and fired back at her with a MAC-10, but he was
panicked and his aim was bad. She fired both guns left-right-left-right. The
door gunner slid backward out of the window and rolled on the street until he
stopped face down. The blonde threw the empty .45 aside.
Two police cars were coming up the
boulevard four blocks away with sirens wailing, heading straight for the
DeVille. The driver spun the DeVille around in a tight one-eighty, rear tires
screaming, and gunned the engine and headed for the blonde, who was walking
over to pick up the MAC-10 that the DeVille’s door gunner no longer needed. She
planted herself in the street, straight-armed the MAC-10, and fired until the
clip was empty. The DeVille’s windshield evaporated; the black car swerved and
roared past her, the faceless driver lying on his side, then went over a
parking meter and across the sidewalk at 45 mph and slammed into the granite
façade of the very bank the gang had tried so earnestly to rob.
She walked over to the steaming DeVille
as a rear door opened and Bandana-Head tried to get out, leaving his AK-47
behind in his desperation to escape. He then saw her coming and raised his left
hand in terror, his right arm still not working. “Don’t shoot!” he shrieked. “I’ll
be—”
She shot him in the gut and he fell back
in the car. She then fired into the rear of the DeVille with the Glock until
the gas tank exploded. Bandana-Head tried to get out, but she shot him again
and left him screaming in the fireball. She emptied the rest of the Glock’s
magazine into the car, dropped it on the sidewalk, and went back into the bank
through the shot-out glass door just as the police pulled up.
Once inside, the pigtailed blonde stalked
over to an undamaged checkstand, carefully swiped her forearm across it to
remove the grit and dust, found a pen on a chain that had ink in it, then
pulled out a fresh deposit slip. She had just filled in her name when her cell
phone rang again. She sighed, put down the pen, pulled out the phone, and
opened it. “Hello?” she said. After a moment, her eyes rolled in exasperation. “Mom,
I said I was going to call you back, all right?”
Original: 03/25/06, modified 06/01/06, 09/18/06, 07/03/09
FINIS