that guy - part 14 - The End!

That guy, crooked with simple hatred and half blind with a new found passion for life (in the shape of Babe), raged behind the gimpy pair on the stairs, tangled himself in the procession and was stunned when the bloody body of Gus smashed headlong into the cheap pine box.

    When Crawly squealed it was Crimp who let go of his end of the crushed pine box first. Swine let go when the weight if the load snapped his index finger.

Crimp tumbled onto Gus and Swine skid into the heap and the busted box gave way and caught hat poor guy Right in the forehead .

He stuttered and burbled as the world spun. A word came out of him and Babe leaned into the coffin at the top of the stairs to get a better angle on the sound. The pressure it put on Crawly there, still bleeding beneath that filled box, was enough to crush the last few intact ribs on the little fellow.

"What was it?" asked Babe over Crawly's wails.

    "Babe," said that guy. A trickle of blood ran down his forehead, went zigzagging as the swine and Crimp tried to use him like a rope.

Crawly groaned.

    "Shut up," said Babe, “I can't hear him."

Babe leaned harder against the edge of the coffin. It pressed into Crawly's throat and cut off the little air getting through. Babe smiled. That guy, with one finger making to wipe his split forehead, went for a smile himself. It didn't work.

    Crawly gave one last heave, and babe was leaning just a bit too forward on the coffin when he did that. Her weight gave the push enough leverage so that the coffin tipped forward, crushing Crawly's jaw, and toppled down the stairs, Babe, stiff, and box at once.

    That guy. That poor guy. With his head split wide open and all that blood running down his face, Babe looked to him like an angel of he lord coming to bring him to paradise.

    He was right!

    When the cops got there they found Creepy dead, Crawly dead, the dead guy in the coffin even deader than before, and that guy, that poor guy, a dead guy too. They found two crushed coffins and blood and guts and brains all over the place.

    What they didn't find was Babe, or Crimp, or Swine. The three of them knew better. After Babe gave a gentle kiss to what she believed was a piece of that guys forehead, she took her valuables from her apartment while he two narrow guys rifled any dough they could find from the apartments upstairs and downstairs. 

Then all three of them went to the twenty-four hour Skeeter-Bowl over on Third.

    Try watching Babe bowl a round.

   It didn't take long for Crimp and Swine and every other hooligan and dumbbell in the dim place to scratch up dreams of a new lives, happy

with Babe at their side. Babe saw it it all in their eyes, what she looked like for each of them. She felt it, and knew she could do it, be everything for each of them and everyone else in the world without the slightest effort. She knew it and it made her sick. 

“I’m gonna go get a soda,” she said. And Babe left the alley, passed the soda jerk, passed the elevators and took stairs down and out into the new day and never looked back.

The end