Here is an excerpt from a novella I've been writing on and off for the past few months, mostly as a restorative exercise to do in between screen/TV writing projects.
Hit the Spirit Plate
A man should only be concerned about his drunkenness if it gives him a sense of peace. Karson smiled at the thought as he slipped on his burnished brass knuckles, felt their comfort around his fattened fingers. Snow drifted in through the broken windows like piss trickling on the walls. Two men left. A third was on the floor, certainly unconscious if not already freefalling towards hell. A fourth lay on the ground outside with a choked out throat. He was dead. His name was Flagg; he’d crumpled to the ground and Karson imagined a fine layer of the white gathering atop him.
The two left were almost young men by his standards, sixteen perhaps, though he had to admit his lens for discerning age always dissolved after ten or eleven shots. At fourteen, the current count, wrinkles and baby cheeks sloughed off in equal measure. With that much alcohol in his gut, the whole of boys and men mixed into one vat of loathsome anger then. Karson believed that any man who stood straight and knew how to hold a fist deserved to die if he invited death to his front door. These boys were men now and the group had called him over with hell’s trumpet when they broke into his home, stole his basement liquor, bashed his lamps, and punched up the face of his landlord’s daughter, Mercy, during their haphazard getaway.
Finding them so easily was a relief. Two hours after Karson had returned home and witnessed the destruction, he learned which abandoned ware house the boys snuck off to. It was an old dog-fighting house turned dock’s pub turned rust-beamed shithole. Karson’s fury started with Mercy’s poor punched up face, but it really set alight when he realized – in order to get good and drunk and strong enough to dole out justice – he would have to buy a new bottle of Whiskey with the little money he had on hand. So, he bought some white mash bullshit from Halloran and sat outside the boy’s hideout in the cold. The drunk came quick and he kept with it till he finished the bottle. Sometime soon after was the strangling. Flagg, whose name he heard shouted after him as he exited the building, had just come out for a quick piss but ended up letting it out in his pants along with everything else once Karson finished the job. Then he headed inside the shithole. Well the well, that brings the tale up to speed.
Boy, did those brass knuckles feel nice – he thought maybe he could smell their metal bite just a little. Then he realized it was just that simple sensation which came from the blood treading down from his own nose. The two young men, though not quite ready to die, decided they had to stand their ground. Certainly running was no option. Maybe Cotton will get in front of him and then I’ll stab the big bastard in the back meanwhile, that’s what one young man thought. The other, who was Cotton, started thinking about his grandpa’s old joke about outrunning bears… you know how it goes. They were both just thinking, and that was their fault. Maybe chalk it up to their inexperience, but Karson didn’t give a fuck, did he? That’s when he rushed them.
They instinctively both tried to meet his charge. Karson focused on Cotton and sent him into the air with a blow so devastating it must have turned the boy’s right cheekbone into a texture as soft as his sobriquet. Cotton landed on some old glass mugs and they pâté’d his backside up nicely. Some final wheezes let Karson know he’d been effective with that one. Meanwhile the other shitdoodle had sliced down Karson’s flank, but the bourbon made sure it wasn’t any sort of distraction. One hook to the ribcage, one hook to the neck, a few sucker stomps to the face and it was over. Karson was feeling mighty fine.
Some sort of alchemy happened then. The bourbon, the easy mix of rage and joy Karson felt at his own damnation, the thinned life blood seeping from his side, and the young deaths evaporating in the air like angels’ share in a whiskey distillery. What happened was Jesus Christ came down to the rust-beamed shithole and made it like the sun. In that moment, he looked into Karson’s eyes and emptied all his eternal, celestial frustration with mankind into Karson. As he did, Jesus plunged his hands into Karson’s wound and fixed him. But before Karson could feel life’s salvation, Jesus broke each of the big man’s fingers against his own tight brass knuckles. Jesus Christ spoke in a whisper, “You will be the holy reservoir of Jesus Christ. You will accept the frustration caused by those who have failed their deliverance, which is all. You will be Karson Redfist, and Christ’s fury will sustain you.” And like a bobcat in a lightning storm, Jesus disappeared and the whole building came down atop Karson Redfist just as the snow came down atop dead Flagg Millward lying in the mud outside.