V. Diner of the Dead

Coalburner has a drinking problem.

I see the greasy smokestack hanging in the sky like congealed fat. The air is thick with the stench of deep-fried...everything. This must be the place.

There's a small building atop a hill of bones, radiantly wrapped in piss-yellow neon with an imposing sign that reads FAT NANCY'S HOUSE OF GRITS in giant glowing letters. Below it in smaller print, but no less proudly displayed, is WORST FOOD IN 7 HELLS.

"Seven hells?" I ask Coal.

"Well, ya got seven continents on the core, all of 'em named Hell. Then ya got your countries and cities and villages and all that crap. They're all named Hell, too. You just gotta go by the zoning districts if you want to tell 'em apart."

"Why don't they just give them different names?"

"Don't really matter where ya land here, everybody says the same thing: aw s**t, I'm in Hell! So it's just easier to call everything Hell."

"Makes sense."

We walk into the diner. It's a redneck freakshow. The florescent ceiling lamps are way too bright. Some people are better suited to dimly lit rooms, out of focus and shrouded in wandering trails of tobacco smoke. These people do not need to be seen in the light. Pasty sagging skin. Blotchy patches of discolored flesh, pinkish-brown here, a reddish-purple bruise there, yellow eyes, yellow teeth. Bloated, wrinkled faces. Angry, ugly stares. A split lip. A glass eye. Oily hair and dirty wrinkled clothes. Open sores. Foaming mouths.

They can smell outsiders a mile away.

We grab a booth in the back under a stuffed and mounted stag's head. Country music plays on the jukebox. It's a slow drunken ballad about wife-beating. Flies are swarming the place. Ants march across the table like a parade. There's a framed certificate on the wall that declares the sanitation grade is a C minus. That seems generous.

Our waitress strolls over to us and slaps two menus on the table. She's an ill-tempered fat hag in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. Tiny devil horns rise just above the hair-spray frozen curls of her permed red hair. Her face is gratuitously caked in makeup, from the tarantula eyelashes right down to the raccoon eye shadow and rosy red cheeks. Red lipstick smeared around the mouth in a heavy-handed scrawl, the way crazy people wear makeup. Like the blood-caked fur of a polar bear's face after the feast of a kill. Her name tag simply reads "eat s**t and die."

"Whaddya want, a******s?"

Coal orders first. "Yeah, lemme get the chicken-fried steak, two sausage biscuits with gravy, bowl a' grits with extra butter and bacon, and uh...piece a' pig's a*s pie. And a bottle a' Jack Daniels."

She scribbles the order on her little notepad and turns to me impatiently.

"What are your specials?" I ask her.

"I got three retarded kids. You gonna order somethin', ya cheap b*****d?"

"Coffee."

She rolls her eyes and walks off, smacking her chewing gum loudly.

A busboy is wiping the blood and maple syrup off of the table next to us. His leg is in a cast. He's missing a couple of fingers. His head is bandaged. One of his arms is broken (the one with the most fingers). Watching him attempt to scrape together all the filthy cracked dishes onto his cart while trying to balance himself on crutches is quite possibly the most pathetic thing I've ever witnessed.

He looks at us, eyes void of life or happiness, and whispers, "Kill me."

"Get back to work!" someone screams at him from the kitchen. With a sigh, he limps away from us.

The short order cooks behind the counter are shackled to the grill. The manager is a sweaty pig demon in an ill-fitting button down shirt. He's screaming furious gibberish at them as he beats them with a metal spatula. He speaks an unknown language of squeals and grunts, but physical abuse is universally understood.

There's a bear-sized woman glaring at us from across the diner. Buzzed haircut on the top, trailing into a greasy mullet down her back. Scar on the side of her face, corner of the mouth curving up to the ear. Half a joker smile, courtesy of some knife fight. She looks about forty, but that's hard living forty, not growing old gracefully forty. Skin like rain-worn leather. Fists like bricks. The kind of woman that could rape Paul Bunyon with his own axe.

The waitress hag comes back with my coffee and Coal's whiskey.

"Why is my coffee green?" I ask her.

"Cuz it's anti-freeze."

"And why would you do that?"

"Jus' don't like ya. Can I getcha anything else?"

"No," I say, "that'll do."

As she walks off Coal asks, "Hey darlin', my food almost ready?"

The answer comes in the form of a skyward middle finger. I tell him, "You know she's gonna piss in your food, right?"

"Well it ain't like I was gonna tip her or nothin'."

Coal cracks the top on the bottle of Jack and tilts it up, drinking about half the bottle in the first chug.

"Just take your time, sweetheart!" Coal shouts at the waitress as she comes around to another table in the section. "Don't you worry 'bout me! Ain't like I was hungry or nothin'! I'll be here all goddamn day! So you just go ahead an' take as looonnng as you need. Any f****n' time you wanna bring some food over's just fine by me. I'll be right here. Waitin'." She ignores him. He drinks the other half of the bottle.

I try to placate the belligerent drunk by offering him a cigarette to calm him down. He snatches it and puts it in his mouth. He struggles to light it. Hand-eye coordination isn't one of his biggest strengths right now. Hell, he can barely even sit up without propping up on his arm. He bows his head silently for a moment.

"You alright, Coal?"

"Shut up, I'm prayin'. Dear Lord Judas, please hear my prayers. Now you know I ain't never asked you for nothin' cause ya never done s**t for me anyhow, but if you could just find it in your selfish heart to grant me three wishes then I promise to do whatever the hell it is you expect your humble servants to do in order to reap the benefits of whatever kinda horseshit you were talkin' about in that book you wrote, even though I read that f****r about a hundred times and most of it don't make a bit a' goddamn sense. My first wish is for a solid gold tank, and I wanna destroy a city with it. I don't know, I just think that'd be cool. My next wish is for a million dollars. No, wait, a sugar mama with a million dollars. And big tits. And my last wish is for the chicken fried steak I ordered to HURRY THE F**K UP and get here, along with the biscuits and the grits and the pig's a*s pie. Thank you for listening to my prayers even though you probably weren't cause you never do and I don't even know why I bother. Amen."

He lifts his head up and looks around the diner through his half-closed eyes. He's still antagonizing the staff. "Chop-chop, fuckers! You guys cook the way snails f**k!" And just to make absolutely sure that everyone in the place understands his precise meaning, he adds, "SLOOOW!!!"

I tell him, "You realize that's not helping."

"Well s**t, everybody else got food. That b***h has food. Those a******s got food. Hell, even that f****n' crackhead in the corner's got a plate a' scrambled eggs! And look at 'im! He don't even eat the s**t! Just dumps it down the front of his pants!"

"Wow, that guy's fucked up. Is he dancing?"

"Yeah, he does that. He ain't real big on what you'd call self-respect. Man I'm f****n' bored. Where's the goddamn food? And somebody needs to bring me another bottle a' whiskey, this f****r's empty!"

"We might be here awhile. So tell me more about Hell."

"Tell you about Hell? It's a miserable goddamn cesspool! What the f**k else do ya need to know? I f****n' hate this place!" He throws the empty Jack Daniels across the room, smashing it against a wall.

"What?! I thought you said Hell was great!"

"I said that? Naw man, that don't sound right. Was I drunk?" He pulls a fresh whiskey bottle out of his coat and announces to the kitchen staff, "Don't worry about me, I brought my own booze! I'll just drink that! Wouldn't want you guys to get your shirts wrinkled or anything. Just go back to suckin' each other's dicks, I'll be fine."

"Feel free to draw less attention to us, Coal."

"F**k these a******s! I'll take on all these m***********s! Ask me if I give a f**k! Seriously, ask me! Ask me right now if I give a f**k! The answer might surprise you!"

"Uh, okay. Do you give a--"

"Hell no I don't give a f**k!" He suddenly turns around in his seat to harass the elderly couple seated at a table across from us. "Hey! Hey! You gonna eat all that? Gimme a piece a' toast! I'll fight ya for it!"

The old lady whispers to her husband, "Just give the crazy man a piece of toast so he'll go away."

The old man gives Coalburner a defiant look and says, "No. This is my toast. Get your own."

Coal gets up and walks over to their table. "Look now, don't make me punch your wife in the tits."

Still the feeble old man tells him, "I said no. You can't have it."

The trucker thinks about this for a moment, then steals a piece of toast from the old man's plate. Then, just to be a complete dick, he knocks their drinks over and walks back to our table.

We're obviously not going to make any new friends here today.

I take another look around at the local denizens in the place. Well I'll be damned (wait, you know what I mean...all my favorite turn-of-phrases seem ridiculously ironic lately). Death is here. At the bar, drinking coffee. Probably real coffee. On second thought he probably would drink anti-freeze and like it.

I rise from the booth in a livid momentum and stride towards the soul-sucking prick. We need to have a little chat. We have unfinished business.

"You!" I growl at him in a low raspy tone, "You killed me!"

He gives me a look of puzzled disinterest and says, "Do I know you?"

Odd. He seems different somehow.

"This guy bothering you?" another Death says to Death.

Uh-oh. Two Deaths, neither one of them mine. And I just picked a fight with them.

"Apparently all us reapers look alike to this guy," says Death number One.

"I...uh, thought there was only one," I explain.

"What am I, friggin' Santa Claus?! I work a sixty hour week on a six block route! I ain't had a vacation in nine years!" says Death number Two.

"Okay. My mistake. It's not your problem," I try to pass off as a half-assed apology.

"You're goddamn right it's not my problem!" says Death number One.

Death's doppelganger slides a switchblade from sleeve to palm with the casual sleight-of-hand of a Vegas magician summoning doves from his pockets. The polished bone handle matches the hand that wields it, and the thumb gently pressing the stainless steel button. The blade flashes open. Its spring-loaded arc cuts a clockwise half-circle through the air. The quiet click of an assassin. He makes an angry stab at his plate of waffles.

"I should go. Sorry for disturbing you," I say to the reapers as I begin to carefully edge my way back.

One of them stands up. Then the other one. They glare at me without eyes. They shuffle towards me, closer and closer...

Out of nowhere a chair flies across the room. It hits one of the reapers in the face. He drops like a stone. Well, that was lucky.

I hear a bottle break behind me and the sound of the trucker howling, "F**k you, Skeletor!" as he rampages on the scene wielding a makeshift glass knife. Yeah...it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Looks like Coalburner's gone headfirst into barfight mode--a trancelike state of hillbilly berserker rage filled with pure drunken bloodlust and wanton property destruction. Bleary-eyed, adrenalin-fueled bliss. Those who have seen it firsthand know of its awesome majesty and terror.

As if on cue, everyone in the diner jumps up in a fury to join the infectious brawl. Tables are flipped. Dishes are thrown. Noses are broken. Knuckles are bloodied. A fat man punches an old lady in the mouth, knocking out her dentures. She retaliates by cracking a pool stick over his skull. There's not even a pool table in here! Where the hell did she get that?

The fat she-hag waitress is hurling glass coffee pots of boiling water into the crowd. One of them hits the busboy who immediately drops to the floor and spends the rest of the fight being trampled. The bossman pig demon is shoving one of the short-order cooks headfirst into a deep-fryer. You can hear the wet sizzling of flesh and the screams (in between dunks into the vat) of a man that truly despises his job on a level that most people--if they're lucky--could never completely fathom. The other cooks are all busy stabbing one another.

The scar-faced she-bear lifts up a man--about 6'5 and not a dime less than 250 pounds--with one hand. She effortlessly hurls him through the plate glass window. There's a hunting knife in her other hand. It's not for show. She's racking up a heavy body count.

Elsewhere on the battlefield, the crackhead's gnawing on the skull of the reaper who got hit with the chair. Coal's pounding the dogshit out of the other one ("Not so tough against a dead man, are ya?!"). The disoriented reaper's gone completely limp at this point. The trucker just keeps laying into him without mercy. He's drunk as f**k and absolutely relentless.

"And this is for Grandma! And my drunk Uncle Ted! And my dog Bandit!" He's breaking bones. He makes it look easy.

A dead man's revolution. Rise up against the Scythe. It's a symbolic victory, somehow.

A well dressed man with a clean shave and a sharp haircut walks into the diner. He's lost and completely out of place. He strolls through the midst of the raging brawl without even the slightest hint of concern. Perfect smile. Not a care in the world.

"Excuse me," he speaks unheard into the violent mob, "can anyone tell me how to get to Limbo? I'm supposed to meet my brother and his wife there to live in their mansion."

"Yo, right here," I lie, quickly snagging the opportunity to bail on the check and hopefully freeload off of some rich stiffs. "Let's ride."

Reviews

[roarke]

heh, this stuff makes the Batman/Judge Dredd series look like romper room...... Jack seems a bit like a prom queen in this one... limbo? the rich man's purgatory?