Chapter 6: Chapter 6 – A Typical Day at an American Mall

The shooter stands at the entrance of the Fort McArthur Galleria in Maryland. He looks at his reflection in the reflective black glass doors outside Macy’s, on the South side of the shopping mall. His welding mask is on and he holds his rifle with one hand. He turns on the recording button on the side of his mask and addresses his viewers. 

“Hello, shooters. Welcome to the show. I’m about to walk into this mall and see what’s on sale. Think I can find anything good?”

He swings open the double doors and takes aim. Just beyond the entranceway, a woman and her child examine a pair of jeans on a clothing rack. “Bye bye” the shooter whispers as he fires off a round into her head. She doesn’t even notice him before she dies. He runs past her startled child and sprays bullets at the other people in the denim section. Two old men in fedoras collapse under the rain of lead. 

Employees jump for cover behind the wood paneled cashier’s booths around the store. The shooter follows them, shooting into the booths and causing ungodly shrieks of pain to emanate from within. Mannequins explode as he fires through them into the customers cowering behind. “Excuse me-“ he shouts, “do you have anything like this in my size?” He rips a dress from a rack, then shoots through it at an employee running towards the intercom. She falls heavily and slides on the polished floor, her body squeaking until it loses momentum and halts in the middle of the store. 

The shooter laughs to his audience. “The big ones always make funny noises.” He steps toward her. Dark black blood spills from the wounds in her back and pools beneath her prodigious form. She makes labored breathing sounds. The shooter sticks the barrel of his rifle under the back of her black uniform skirt and lifts it up. “I wanna make sure you guys get a good look at this.” He crouches down so the livestreaming camera on his helmet and the other one strapped to his kevlar vest can “see” up the woman’s skirt to get a view of her panty hosed thighs, which are trembling in shock. “Look at the size of those things,” the shooter exclaims. “I wonder how long it takes her to stuff those beef sausages into her panty hose before work every morning. How does her fat even stay in there? Well, I guess she won’t have that problem any more. Or really, any problems in general…” 

The shooter laughs and stands back up. He jogs to the other end of the store, which connects to the larger galleria. “Hey, looks like we got some runners.” A few polo-shirted employees sprint out of the Macy’s ahead of the shooter. “Better stop them before they alert the cavalry.” The shooter pauses his jog, takes aim, and with the form of an Olympian, expertly hits his marks, each man collapsing as bullets explode the backs of their heads. Like so, the shooter continues his bloody rampage, live-streaming every moment. He goes through each store methodically, executing or maiming its patrons and employees, until he hears the police sirens approaching, at which point he makes his escape, unscathed.

#

Director Harris rubs the space between his eyebrows. He addresses a suited West Point graduate in front of him. “No luck. No fucking luck, huh?”

“No sir.”

“I didn’t say you could talk. You realize you’re embarrassing me, right? When you retards can’t find a repeat mass shooter who films himself at every location, during each mass shooting, I’m the one who looks bad. You don’t have your neck out there like I do. You just sit in your goddamn cubicle and beat off while I get slaughtered out there and out there.” The FBI Director points to the TV in the corner of his office and holds up his iPhone to indicate each “there,” respectively.

“Um, your phone locked, I think. It’s just black.”

The FBI Director looks at his phone. He tries to swipe it open but Face ID won’t work. “God dammit.” He stares longingly at the bottle of Glenfiddich 21 in the open drawer under his desk. “Listen. The public doesn’t know it’s the same guy yet. The media doesn’t know it’s the same guy yet. Outside a handful of degenerate basement dwelling pedophiles, no one is watching this guy’s stream. And if they are, they like it. But that’s gonna change real soon.” 

“Yes sir.”

“Stop sir-ing me, you little faggot. It’s making me sick.” The suited underling keeps his face blank.

Director Harris stands up and peers out the blinds of his office window. “When you need to catch a demon, you call The Devil. Get me Chris Kyle’s Killer’s Killer.” 

#

The outskirts of Pampa, Texas. A small town with a population under 400 next to the border of Oklahoma. Large crucifixes and scattered billboards promising great deals on guns and ammo line the dusty two lane highway. Outside of town is a trailer park called Dusty Ridges. At the far end of which, one trailer stands out in its degradation. Cracked and faded polyurethane panels barely hang on to the sideboards. A half eaten possum’s corpse serves as a welcome mat and the windows are plastered completely with an amalgam of porn rags. We can hear a muffled commotion from the inside. Let’s take a look…

Ah, the commotion is just an episode of Looney-Toons playing at full volume on an ancient television set. A black and white pig smacks a black and white wolf on the head with a comically large beam of timber. Receiving this violent scene, maybe in a dream, is a sleeping soldier. Slumped in a burgundy corduroy upholstered La-Z-Boy, complete with a cupholder currently occupied by a big gulp cup overflowing with cigarette butts, is a man of great size. Around 6’5.5, 280 lbs., with unkempt hair and beard. The pommel of a greatsword tattoo creeps up the back of his neck. Assorted military tattoos cover his heavily muscled arms and chest, visible under a stained wife beater. He has a prodigious beer gut that looks like it could’ve been hammered out of steel. A shriveled human penis hangs on a long black cord around his neck. It’s his. He wears military-issue cargo pants tucked into his combat boots. 

The rising sun glows faintly through the spread vaginas and assholes of the trailer’s makeshift window coverings. A tattered and bullet-ridden American flag adorns the wall above the television set. Underneath is a plaque: “This flag flew over the Battle of Fallujah. 158 enemies of freedom were consolidated. 3 brave American Soldiers lost their lives defending it. Hooyah.” 

An empty handle of Jim Beam sits on the mountain of crushed beer cans burying the coffee table. The mobile home’s carpet has long been blackened by tobacco, spilled beer, and other things. On the tv-dinner tray next to the La-Z-Boy is a Glock 19 with the safety off, resting on top of a half-written suicide note. Against the front door leans a shotgun. Hanging on the key hook next to the door is a glimmering metallic phallus. It has some type of plug, or fastening mechanism, at its base. One of its sides has a glass panel that reveals tubing inside the dildo, and a series of pumps and wires. In a hard plastic gun case with a crude label saying simply “C.U.M.” next to the dildo is a variety of vials, all labeled differently. AIDS, Herpes, Syphilis, Measles, Plague, Rabies, Bowel Cancer, COVID-22, MRSA. Yes, if you’re still wondering, this motherfucker carries around an attachable dildo filled with weaponized cum. 

The phone rings. [Military rank redacted] Fritz Stone jolts from his slumber— grabbing, cocking, and pointing the Glock from the tv-dinner tray so quickly that the fly buzzing through his trailer is blown out the window by the gust created from the barrel’s movement. He sucks in air through his nostrils and leers at any potential threat in his sights. None detected, he slowly picks up the yellow, 90’s era landline from its base and waits a few long seconds before saying “What is it?”

The blinding pain of the hangover from a weeks long bender crashes into his skull and then his stomach. He sets the Glock down and grabs the empty pack of Marlboro Blacks sitting on his lap. He crushes it like a roach upon realizing its emptiness. His Texas drawl comes out thick and coarse like churning gravel. “Sure, I’ll come out to Warshington. You know I’m not allowed to return home before I take the life of another, right?”

With renewed purpose, Fritz packs his duffel. Just a few changes of clothes, a sleeping bag, 12,000 rounds of ammo, a shotgun, sniper rifle, Desert Eagle, a few utility knives of varying lengths, frag and smoke grenades, expanding steel nightstick, combat ka-bar, and 2 orange bottles of cyanide pills. One’s a backup in case he runs out of the first bottle. 

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He turns his television set off and drinks the dredges of one of the bottles of Lone Star on his coffee table to wash the taste of last night out of his mouth. He slings the duffel over his broad back and tucks his glock into its ankle holster. Before he opens the door, he unzips his cargo pants, and pulls the attachable penis off its place on the key rack next to the door. He attaches it to the metal plug where his real penis used to be. It makes a satisfying click as it locks into place. “There we go.” He zips his pants back up and heads out. Outside, he tosses his go-bag into the back of his truck. An old faded red Ford. As the road stretches out before him and the sky reaches up to infinite his thoughts begin to wander.

The last time he had been allowed to hunt like this was when he killed Chris Kyle’s Killer. Chris Kyle was a prolific American Sniper. And, like Fritz, a Navy SEAL. He had the highest number of confirmed kills of any U.S. sniper, and was immortalized by Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper in a movie. Sadly, he was killed by another veteran who had PTSD, while taking him out to the gun range as part of his rehabilitation program. 

This man was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. Fritz, however, wouldn’t sleep until justice was done. He booked a motel room by the mental hospital Chris Kyle’s Killer was being transferred to and waited. When the van came around he flagged down the driver, yanked the killer out and shot him dead in the street like a dog. He left him there to rot. Next, he hunted Chris’s Killer’s family down to exterminate the bloodline.

Many officers praised this course of action behind closed doors, and he was never charged for a crime, but some of Fritz’s higher ups looked down on his reckless vigilantism. When he started stalking Chris Kyle’s family, however, and sending death threats to his wife, saying she should’ve gone with her husband, thrown herself on his pyre, so to speak, so she could accompany him to the afterlife, he was officially discharged and, without any skills unrelated to those required for war, was forced to work as a bagger at Walmart to make ends meet. 

FBI Director Harris always kept tabs on him, though. Someone born with such talent for violence should not go to waste, especially not when he may be of use to the U.S. military or his higher ups in an emergency.

The Walmart days were tough. Demeaning. The lack of security guards made Walmart a prime place for shoplifters, teenagers filming prank videos, fights, and even public sex. A man of duty, Fritz had trouble. He’d catch a teenager swiping a pack of batteries, smiling cooly, staring straight ahead as though he was a pockmarked Clint Eastwood, and the redness would take over. He’d chase the teenager down, shove their face into the hard linoleum covered concrete floor, and press their face into it until their teeth started cracking. He’d keep his foot on their neck until the authorities got there. He made his coworkers uncomfortable. He’d spend his lunch break doing push ups, crunches, and sprints in the parking lot. He would smell of booze and smoke constantly.

Eventually, his coworker Britney, a socially aggressive mother of three who liked to litter, decided she’d had enough. Her bullying friendliness never seemed to work on the former SEAL. So, one day, she told him what was on her mind. 

“How come you never come sit with us during your lunch break?”

“I work out during my lunch break.”

“Yeah, but don’t you wanna get to know your co-workers? C’mon, we don’t bite.” She laughs at her “joke.”

He stares into her eyes. Big, flickering dishes. Like those of a mother hen. Used to nagging, pestering, and getting her way. Getting the kids in bed. Getting them up. Telling her husband to get a haircut. 

“I do.”

The flickering in her eyes picks up the pace. 

“Woah. What’s that supposed to mean?” 

She puts her hand on her hip, her fat wrist wrinkling as she tries to enact a casual, but confident stance. He’s seen this stance before. Many times in many different forms. Older middle school boys, when he was a tall fourth grader, puffing out their chests at him, looking for a fight, moments before his hands found their throats and caved in their tracheas (they’d end up in the obituaries and he’d attend the memorials), P.E. coaches who tried to make him wear the school assigned uniforms, their authoritative grins turned bloody afterwards, Shiite rebels, before being mowed down. 

This time, though, his hands shake. He knows that after the incident with Chris Kyle’s Killer, he is on thin ice. He can’t just let his body do its thing, crush her head between his hands and smash her face into the cash register until it is no longer a face and the jelly of her flickering eyes runs between the cracks in the number pad. He can’t just rip her Walmart vest up over her shoulders and wrap it around her neck until her face turns blue. He can’t simply kick her cunt in until he cracks her diaphragm. So he just keeps staring into her eyes. He’s trembling now with unreleased adrenaline.

His inaction inflates her confidence. 

“What? Ha-ha, cat got your tongue?” She laughs again at her “joke.” Which isn’t so much a joke as it is a repeated phrase she has heard her family members say, seen in sitcoms, and in movies, which somehow feels fresh and original as it rolls off her own tongue. 

The added slight is too much for him to handle. The energy coursing through his body has to go somewhere or there will be a meltdown. He rips the cash register out of the bolts that were holding it in place, and throws it at the ceiling, it smashes into a fluorescent light and comes crashing back down onto the linoleum.

He puts his face in front of hers and releases a roar that would make a lion piss itself. She collapses and hits her head on the corner of the bagging stand. Later that day, he was informed she’d died of a heart attack. He runs out of the store. Ashamed at himself for his inaction. Ashamed at himself for not getting killed in honorable combat. Ashamed at allowing himself to live in a world where he spends his days bagging and cannot freely speak his mind or act out his desires.

He goes to the employee bathroom to take one last piss, and notices his penis has shrunk almost so it is just a flap of skin peeking out of his pubic hair. His balls too. It seems as though the adrenaline rush he got in the argument caused his penis to hide itself. This is how he gets the idea of removing it. And giving himself a weapon-penis in its stead.This too, is how he falls towards rock bottom. The next year becomes one of bar fights, whoring, and drinking. It becomes a 3 year binge. But nothing seems to be able to kill him. The phone call from this morning is a lifeline. 

An orange rocky canyon face, bifurcated by shocks of sagebrush, looks down on Fritz and his red truck as he drives along the 10 freeway toward West Virginia.

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