Bad Days

By Wolf Heinrich

Ever had a bad day?  Who hasn't?

Ever had a bad day that involved getting bested by a genetically enhanced toddler?  Probably.

Ever had a bad day that involved aliens wrecking a your big meth deal?  Probably.

Ever had a bad day that involved Hitler finding out your sleeping with his girlfriend?  Yeah, that's probably happened to you too.

If you've led that kind of life then this book is not for you.  You've already lived it!

Contains the stories The Assassin, Mexico Juice: A Tale of Alien Invasion, The Light, Stalin, and The Corrective Collective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wolf Heinrich
• Release date: Feb 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386540564

Book preview

Bad Days

by

WOLF HEINRICH

Contents

THE ASSASSIN

THE LIGHT

THE CORRECTIVE COLLECTIVE

MEXICO JUICE

STALIN

THE ASSASSIN

Rocco threw the baby against the wall knocking a cigar from its mouth.  His beady eyes grew wide as the baby slowly stood and shook its head.

Damn, the baby muttered.  It looked up at Rocco with broiling fiery red eyes.

I’ll get you, you Goddamn assassin!  The baby charged and grabbed hold of Rocco’s left leg.  Rocco reach for the gun in his shoulder holster, but the force of the baby knocked him backwards.  He crashed to the floor dazed.

The baby stood up and stared dumbfounded at the aluminum leg in his two small pudgy hands.  A crip?

Rocco sat up, his back pulsed with pain.  Gimmie back my leg!

Rocco’s fist lashed out and connected with the baby’s jaw knocking it unconscious, sprawled on the blue shag carpet.

Rocco pulled up his pants leg and reattached his prosthetic leg, his eye glued to the prone little body clad only in a white cloth diaper.  He grabbed his straw hat which fell off during the assault and stood up.  An orange band circled the bowl of the hat and matched the orange bow tie and beige and orange plaid suit that padded out his aging and meager frame.  Rocco brushed himself off with his hands and after pushing back a falling lock of white speckled black hair dangling between his eyes replaced the hat on the top of his head.

Today was not going as planned.  Today was one of the worst days in Rocco’s life.  Wore than the day his first kid was born.  It was that bad.

A sense of isolation and vulnerability clouded Rocco’s mind.  Like heavy traffic in a fog, his thoughts slowed and the once clear road before him disappeared in a cloud of opaque vapor.  For a few precious moments, he stared at the still figure of the baby unable to think, unable to do, unable to pull out his gun and complete the contract.  The world died around him.  The living room and the house in which he stood melted away until there was nothing but a darkened stage in his mind two spotlights shining down upon two lone actors.  Rocco and the baby were all that existed and both were impotent.

Kill a little kid, his boss told him, pretty simple.

No problem, just in the back door and then out the same.  The nanny wasn’t a problem.  An older woman, her soft brown eyes and the gentle wrinkles that crisscrossed her face vanished under the force of a hollow tipped bullet fired at close range.  Rocco cursed as blood splattered him and when he came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel, he found the kid, the baby, standing right in front of him. 

The baby...

Rocco aimed his gun at the still body face down on the floor.  He could feel the cold trigger on the pad of his index finger.  He was about to squeeze when the front door opened and a swath of sunlight cut into the living room.  A man walked in carrying a sack of groceries.  From his assignment, Rocco recognized the man as Doug Lawningston.  Stick of celery and carrot stalks framed his face.  He stopped and his eyes widened under their bushy hoods which jutted forward like thatched overhangs.  The red of terror and fear washed over his features.  The celery and carrot stalks performed a jerky dance as the grocery bag trembled in his hands.

What the heck do you think you’re doing, Doug asked.  His casual tone implied a fearlessness that contradicted his body language.

The father!

Rocco spun towards the front door and fired his gun.  A large section of the door frame exploded in a hail of splinters.  Doug’s body jerked and he threw the sack away from him, the content spilling into the air like chaff, and dove backwards through the open door.  Rocco fired again, but the round slipped through the doorway and into the warm sunlight.

Rocco cursed as he turned to deliver the fatal round to the baby’s blond down head and found it missing.  A brilliant white flash exploded behind his eyes.  Pure anger knotted Rocco’s features into the visage of a frustrated demon that knows a battle has been lost.

Little boy, Rocco yelled.  Little...

The cocking of a double barreled shotgun cut Rocco off.

A tall blonde woman stood in the door way holding a shotgun across her chest with both hands.  Her shadow fell across Rocco and he could not see her face until she stepped through the door and into the house.  Her face was a homogeneous mix of feminine beauty and masculine power.  Her body, though long and obviously muscular, possessed a grace and an erotic aura that could make violent deaths pleasurable.  An electric intensity emanated from her rigid stance and her blue eyes burned from her tanned face.

Where’s my son, old man?

Any power the woman might have held over Rocco disappeared in an instant.  His eyes narrowed.

Did you say old?

The woman replied by bringing the shotgun to bear on Rocco and fired.  Rocco hurled himself through the entry way of the kitchen on the right.  The wall in front of which he had been standing disintegrated, snowing the house with white plaster and paint fragments.  Rocco’s arm flared in pain as he landed on the hard ceramic tile.  He slid a few feet further stopping against the dead body of the nanny, in the pool of her blood.

With the sound of an elephant stampede, the mother rumbled around the corner confident in murder, but slipped on the slick tile and lost her balance.  She grabbed onto the door frame and let slip the shotgun so that it was pointed at the floor in front of her.

Rocco fired two rounds in quick succession.  The first bullet caught her in the right shoulder.  A puff of red sprayed out the back of her green sweater.  The second round hit her square in the chest.  Her finger jerked as the bullet propelled her backwards firing the last shell into the floor.  Rocco’s face and hands stung as hundreds of tiny, razor sharp ceramic fragments exploded through the room.  A cloud of white dust spiraled through.

The blood from a dozen small cuts traced red