The Winner: Part Thirty-four

“You may want to rethink blowing me up,” I whisper back to him.

“I doubt your reason is any good, but tell me anyway. You can consider them your last words.”

I clear my throat. “Well, if you want another chance to kill the President, then you really should leave me alive. After all, if you think his security is skittish now, just think how tight it will be after a failed assassination attempt. I think you can pretty much write off the President be let out in public for the rest of his term.” I pat him on the shoulder. “Also, I’m sure there will be an investigation into how I could get past all their security measures with a bomb, so if you blow me up now, you can pretty much count on Burke’s role in your conspiracy getting exposed. Am I right?”

“And what are we supposed to do? Just let you go?”

“Yes, just let me go,” I say. “As well as Apple and her babies.”

“And you think I believe you wouldn’t talk if we just let you go”

“Listen, I really don’t give a shit if you assassinate Bush or not. I’ll keep quiet about your little conspiracy. Hell, conspiracy theorists are a dime a dozen nowadays, you think anyone would even listen me? As long as the two of us are safe, you can count on my silence. However, should your stupid little plot succeed in getting you on a ballot, I wouldn’t count on my vote.”

Van Hertzwelder laughs. “You think you’re real clever, don’t you? You must have spent a lot of time thinking this through, huh? Got all the angles covered.”

“I think so,” I say, since I have been making most of this shit up as I went along. “Did I miss something?”

“Well, I’m sorry to say that I’m unconvinced by your reasoning Peanutz. First off, we probably don’t even need to assassinate the President now in the light of this ‘suitcase nuke’ stunt. I can only assume you’re the one who’d be so stupid as to think you could derail us by calling in a bomb threat.”

“I didn’t have to call it in,” I say. “It’s just my mom in a burqua standing outside the country club holding a suitcase and yelling ‘allahu ackbar’. The dead man’s stick is just a heavy duty stapler tied to the case with some rubber tubing. The only thing toxic inside that suitcase is a couple pairs of soiled underwear.” I shrug. “I guess that makes it less of a suitcase nuke and more of a dirty bomb.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Van Hertzwelder says. “By the time we get Rupert on it, we’ll have the public convinced it’s a twenty megaton warhead your bitch of a mother is carrying out there. And between a nuclear device on American soil and the attempted assassination of a sitting President, we won’t need to actually kill Bush in order to turn Iran and Syria into sheets of glass by the end of the day. And it can only help my budding candidacy that I narrowly survived the assassination attempt myself.”

I feel deflated. “Shit, I didn’t think of that.”

“Besides, to me at least, whether any of that happens is just the cherry on the sundae. The only thing I really want is revenge for you raping and killing my son.”

“Hey I didn’t kill him,” I protest. “He committed suicide…”

“He committed suicide because you raped him, therefore I hold you responsible. I’m done arguing with you now Peanutz. I only wish you’d die in a more painful manner than what’s been planned out for you.”

“Okay then,” I say as Van Hertzwelder starts backing away from me. “Better hope this gets caught in the blast too.”

So I pull out the mini-tape player I’ve had in my pocket on RECORD, and snap it off. I push the slider to rewind for a few seconds before pressing play and turning the volume all the way up. “…by the time we get Rupert on this, we’ll have the public convinced it’s a twenty megaton warhead…”

Van Hertzwelder’s face turns white as I hold the tape recorder up in the air. I savor it for a millisecond, then say out loud, “Excuse me everyone…I have something you all really need to hear…”

“STOP HIM! HE HAS A BOMB!” Van Hertzwelder screams, apparently louder than me because everyone seems to hear him and not me.

A Secret Service agent trots over to us with his weapon drawn but not aimed at anyone. He is busy talking into the microphone on his wrist, whispering tersely, “Unit twelve…location Bravo…be advised…VIP is reporting a second bomb on the premises…”

Van Hertzwelder begins walking backwards, trying to put some distance between me and him. The Secret Service agent yells at him, “Halt, sir! Where is this bomb located?”

The agent isn’t paying attention to me, but he’s going to soon with all of Van Hertzwelder’s yelling, and good ole’ Carl is quickly getting out of the kill radius of this bomb. I’ll be dead any second unless I do something NOW…

So I drop the tape recorder and stick my hand down the back of pants into the wet, warm, squishy pile of feces that’s collected there. I twist my hand in my ass crack a few times, just to make sure my whole hand is coated and that I have a good handful in there.

Then I turn to the Secret Service agent (who is still distracted from yelling at Van Hertzwelder) and rub a wad of my shit filled with partially digested corn and peanuts into his face. I get some into his eyes, in his nose, and try to get some into his mouth before flinches away and doubles over vomiting into the grass.

This is my chance. While the agent is puking, I pry the automatic pistol out of his hand. This snaps him out of his nausea, and he rubs the shit out of his eyes and looks like he’s about to pounce, but not before I kick him in the face, which sends him falling backwards on his ass.

I don’t stop to see if I laid him out. I start running after Van Hertzwelder as fast as I can. He’s running towards the edge of the golf course where Burke is patrolling. He’s got about a twenty meter head start on me, and for an old man, he runs very quick. I don’t think I can bridge the distance so I aim the gun at him and shoot as his leg…

…and being a crack shot, I miss him completely, the bullet doing nothing more than kicking up a clod grass in front of Van Hertzwelder, who stops running on tries to cover his head with his hands so I guess it does the trick. I bridge the distance and punch Van Hertzwelder in the back of the head before putting him in a headlock with my shit covered hand bracing him just under the chin. I put the barrel of the gun in his ear and turn around towards the legion of Secret Service and SWAT team members racing towards us, guns drawn.

“STOP!” I yell at them. “COME ANY CLOSER AND I’LL BLOW HIS FUCKING HEAD OFF!”

They screech to a halt, but keep their guns trained on me. There at least six glowing red dots from their laser sights running over my chest, so I let Van Hertzwelder out of the headlock with my gun pressed against his temple the whole time and put him in front of me, where they won’t have as easy of a shot.

I look over my shoulder and try backing up as close to Burke as I can, but he backs up just the same, just out of bombs presumed blast radius. “Burke, toss the detonator on the grass. This is over.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he says. At least I see both of his hands since their both keeping his Sig-Sauer trained on the back of my head.

“Alright then, Tupac, let me spell it out for you. If you blow me up now, you’ll kill Van Hertzwelder too and you’re whole plan goes to shit. Toss the detonator on the ground and get away while you still can.”

Burke gives a little chuckle. “My dear Poopy, you’re mistaken. The events of today are larger than all of us. They are certainly larger than Van Hertzwelder. I’m sure my superiors will consider him acceptable collateral damage.”

“WHAT?” Van Hertzwelder yells in disbelief. I half expect him to shit in his pants himself. “You…you can’t do this! The whole point of this is to get me elected to office!”

Burke shakes his head. “The whole point of this is way larger than a moron like you, Carl Van Hertzwelder, could possibly understand.” He drops his hand into his pocket to trigger the detonator. “Goodbye.”

I let go of Van Hertzwelder and whip the gun around and shoot at Burke. I fire about half the clip but it only looks like I hit him once in the bicep. It’s enough to keep his hand away from his pocket for the moment. Burke dives towards the ground and lays prone.

I’m about to unload the rest of my bullets into him and kill this motherfucker once and for all when I feel a bullet cut hot air next to my ear. I pop off two of my bullets towards the crowd of SWAT and Secret Service behind me and they dive for cover. This gives me the bare opportunity to dash off into the wooded area around the golf course.

I get a few meters inside the woods when they start shooting at me again. I get behind the biggest tree I can, and stop. Bullets fly past me or pock against the tree, sending splinters and pieces of bark flying everywhere. Goddammit, I’m pinned down.

And even worse, the explosive watch on my wrist starts to vibrate. Oh shit…I’ve got maybe a few seconds before the binary explosive mixes and I’m dead.

I struggle with the clasp, but it’s locked down on my wrist. I try to pull my whole hand through the band, but my fucking thumb is in the way. I won’t be able to get it off me in time.

There’s only one thing left for me to do.

The one good thing about being put in these life and death situations is that it doesn’t give you much time to think about the horrible choices you have to make to preserve your own life. The best part of it is that even if you fuck up, you’ll be dead anyway, so it’s not like you’ll have to beat up on yourself a whole bunch.

So I pick up my handgun, stick the barrel against the heel of my hand and pull the trigger.

Droplets of my own blood spatter my face and get in my eyes, but I don’t have time to wipe it away. I barely feel the pain in my hand, just a vague sort of heat down there. I look and see that at least the bullet did what I wanted it to: my thumb is hanging from my hand now by nothing but a thin strip of flesh. I drop the gun and yank what’s left of my thumb off and toss it on the ground. If I live through this, maybe I can get it reattached, but judging from the shape it’s in, it’s probably not worth the trouble.

I grab the watchband and slide it down my hand again. It goes down farther without now without the thumb to get in it’s way, but my hand is still wide enough that it doesn’t go easily. My hand sings in pain as the band rubs against the pulpy knot of gore where my thumb used to be.

I scream and pull one last time.

The watch comes free.

I immediately toss it as far as I can into the woods.

It doesn’t even hit the ground before it goes off.

I feel the explosion more than I hear it. I doubt I’ll be able to hear much again after the thunderclap of pressure hits my eardrums. All the air gets sucked out of my lungs and I feel a great heat before I’m lifted from the ground and tossed through the air like a half full sack.

Luckily, I go unconscious before I feel myself hit the ground face first.