Breaking Glass

By Alec Cizak

It’s summer, 2016. Chelsea Farmer has awoken from one nightmare into another. Once a call girl with no control over her life, she’s lost even more control, becoming another statistic in the opioid epidemic eating America from the inside out. Shacking up with a woman she may or may not be in love with, and three men unaware of just how useless they’ve become, she participates in home invasions to steal material goods that can be traded for pills or, even better, heroin. In between hits, the gang finds other ways to scrape together money, such as getting paid to march in a protest-turned-riot against presidential candidate Donald Trump. As the habit increases, calls for more crimes to feed it, the boys get increasingly violent with the victims of their home invasions. How long will it be before they actually kill a homeowner who refuses to cooperate? Chelsea must decide whether or not she’s willing to hang around and find out.

Praise for BREAKING GLASS:

“Alec Cizak hits streets we don’t want to live on and he hits them hard. For a writer as good as Cizak, that isn’t enough. Breaking Glass is the story of an addict who stumbles into a chance at recovery only to have her past come back on her. Can she redeem herself while maintaining her newfound peaceful self? This book raises brutal questions and gives the answers it must.” —Rob Pierce

“Alec Cizak continues to tap into the bleakness of modern life that he did with Down on the Street. Breaking Glass is so dark and troubling it will make you cry for mercy as he joins Poe and Lovecraft in finding new ways to disturb you.” —David Nemeth

“In addition to containing the single best death scene—ever, in the history of writing—Alec Cizak’s Breaking Glass paints a condemnation and a begrudging acceptance of our post-PC culture, told through the eyes of Chelsea Farmer, a millennial dope fiend. Part Tom Sawyer and part Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Chelsea takes us on a tour of an America where hardcore violence and sickening sexual predation are givens; yet subliminal microaggressions end careers and the definition of rape is as elusive and fluid as a spoon-cooked tab of oxycontin. I was hooked.” —Grant Jerkins

“Alec Cizak’s writing is clean, full of dark humor and pulpy edge; all of which highlights his fast dialogue and faster plot. His expert use of language allows him to build believable, interesting characters and create realistic, though bleak, situations. Manifesto Destination and Down on the Street solidify his position next to the greatest writers of hard-boiled fiction. Every story he creates is thrilling and compelling.” —Marietta Miles

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABC Group Documentation
• Release date: Sep 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463140185

Book preview

The Document Matters

BREAKING GLASS

Alec Cizak

PRAISE FOR BREAKING GLASS

"Alec Cizak hits streets we don’t want to live on and he hits them hard. For a writer as good as Cizak, that isn’t enough. Breaking Glass is the story of an addict who stumbles into a chance at recovery only to have her past come back on her. Can she redeem herself while maintaining her newfound peaceful self? This book raises brutal questions and gives the answers it must." —Rob Pierce

"Alec Cizak continues to tap into the bleakness of modern life that he did with Down on the Street. Breaking Glass is so dark and troubling it will make you cry for mercy as he joins Poe and Lovecraft in finding new ways to disturb you." —David Nemeth

"In addition to containing the single best death scene—ever, in the history of writing—Alec Cizak’s Breaking Glass paints a condemnation and a begrudging acceptance of our post-PC culture, told through the eyes of Chelsea Farmer, a millennial dope fiend. Part Tom Sawyer and part Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Chelsea takes us on a tour of an America where hardcore violence and sickening sexual predation are givens; yet subliminal microaggressions end careers and the definition of rape is as elusive and fluid as a spoon-cooked tab of oxycontin. I was hooked." —Grant Jerkins

"Alec Cizak’s writing is clean, full of dark humor and pulpy edge; all of which highlights his fast dialogue and faster plot. His expert use of language allows him to build believable, interesting characters and create realistic, though bleak, situations. Manifesto Destination and Down on the Street solidify his position next to the greatest writers of hard-boiled fiction." —Marietta Miles

Copyright © 2018 by Alexander Cicak

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover design by JT Lindroos

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Breaking Glass

About the Author

Also by the Author

Preview from Suburban Dick by CS DeWildt

Preview from Tushhog by Jeffery Hess

Preview from A Taste of Shotgun by Chris Orlet

This book is dedicated to the women in my life

who have allowed their actions, not their words,

to demonstrate precisely how strong, intelligent,

and independent they are.

Part One

In a parallel universe, Chelsea Farmer still attended school. She studied, made grades. She graduated on time and taught H.P. Lovecraft stories to sixth-graders. She’d explain to the children how ignorance of the ways of the universe guaranteed a happy life. At least, she suspected the naïve and unaware enjoyed this grand illusion. In a separate universe, she married Corbin Duckworth, who’d asked her to prom, senior year of high school. Corbin weighed at least three hundred pounds in those days and he smelled like sweaty gym crotch. But he’d gone on to become a cyber security specialist for Eli Lily and now lived in one of those houses on Meridian Street Chelsea sometimes robbed with Heather and the boys. In a different world altogether, she never got hooked on dope, never moved in with her junky friends and, certainly, never got so broke she had to steal other people’s stuff to get through the night without feeling like bad spiders had placed a thousand fishing hooks in her body and threatened to rip them out at the same time.

She’d read about parallel universes in a science magazine once, sitting in a women’s clinic, waiting on an HIV test. Well, she skimmed the article, got the gist. Somewhere out there, in the many folds in the fabric of the cosmos, a better version of her life existed. She just knew it. She distracted herself with these thoughts as Heather and the boys—Heather’s brother Pee Wee and his buddies Crank and Phil—wiped shoe polish around their eyes and carefully pulled black ski masks over their faces. She did the same, though she could never figure out why they insisted she go in the house with them. The boys took care of the nasty work. Heather usually watched over any wives or children. She’d asked once and Pee Wee threatened to kick her out of their motel room.

You think we’re a goddamn charity? He sounded like her father had when he used to complain about them minorities slurping on Uncle Sam’s titties like the milk ain’t ever going to dry up. You don’t share your squish for this shit, Pee Wee had said, you got to slave for it.

Gross. She’d lost interest in sex since trading her love of booze for a love of opiates, but she wouldn’t, in a million years, sleep with Heather’s disgusting brother or his friends. They were, like, at least five years older than her. Phil and Crank, in fact, had once mentioned they were already in their thirties. Phil really looked the part of a junky—tall, stringy, like a walking noodle of spaghetti. Crank tried harder to be hip. He’d grown his curly hair to its natural, chia-afro proportions. Dope had tainted his light caramel hue, however, made him look more pink than anything else. And Pee Wee? At twenty-nine, his ragged, permanently sunburnt skin suggested he should have been on a fishing boat with senior citizens in Florida. No, she’d sworn off fossils. Besides, they constantly had icky, pus-colored cold sores digging craters in their lips. They brought home hookers who’d exchange sex for drugs. Most of the time, the boys couldn’t get it up and the girls would leave with a free fix. When they did manage to hold an erection long enough to fuck, they refused to wear condoms. Chelsea imagined humping any of the boys would lead to an alien life form growing inside her vagina and busting out of her belly like some twisted, unnamable creature she’d read about in a Lovecraft story.

She applied the shoe polish around her eyes. She pulled her mask over her face and put on her gloves and sunglasses. The mask had no holes for her mouth or her nose. She’d never washed it. It smelled like her own, stale breath. She kept quiet during the raids, let the boys have their fun, pretending to be gangstas from the hood. So far, the routine had worked. Any time the news broadcast a story about one of their hits, the description of the perpetrators danced around the implication the thieves were African-American. Normal people, or nubs, as the boys liked to call them, could be relied upon to be both stupid and racist.

They got out of Heather’s crappy, rust-coated four-door car. Pee Wee carried an orange plumbing pipe. Phil and Crank each draped an old hemp mailbag over their shoulders.

Chelsea followed them through a wheat field by the highway. They were near Zionsville, a place called Whitestown. Appropriate for Indiana. The residents were wealthy. Doctors, lawyers, and a handful of Colts and Pacers. This was where the champagne socialists hid from the hungry masses in the city. They’d feign concern, donate money to a few charities, and then slink back to their cookie-cutter mansions far, far away from the people they claimed to care so much about. Any time they got snippy, acted like they could take on the boys, they’d get pummeled until they cowered and did what they were told. Rich folks talked tough right up to the moment they met people who actually were tough. Didn’t happen often, though. The general habit of the wealthy involved turning the other cheek and calling the cops.

They crept into a gated development called The Cheshire Estates. The massive houses within were decorated in a Tudor style, like buildings Chelsea had seen in Harry Potter movies. All panels and fiberglass, no doubt. But they were impressive mini-mansions, nonetheless. She’d been inside several during previous hits and she liked how the women fashioned the interior of their homes to their own liking. Some decorated the walls with modern art resembling finger-painting projects Chelsea had turned in as a kindergarten student. Some made their marks with plush, expensive furniture. They did what they could to convince themselves they weren’t clones of their neighbors.

So, this guy’s a doctor, said Pee Wee. He said he’d met him at the Bellflower clinic the last time he’d needed antibiotics for a fresh dose of the clap. Said he’d talked to the doctor and learned he volunteered at the clinic on his time off from the hospital at IUPUI. He snuck up to a window with light, stained-glass panes overlooking the front yard. He crouched in a patch of wilted tulips and whispered. Couple of kids coloring, or something, by the fireplace.

They moved to the side of the house. Pee Wee peered into an ornate, bow window on the first floor. A round, middle-aged man with an upside-down afro for a beard sat in a computer chair at a large, oak desk. An opened laptop glowed in front of him, though he seemed more interested in a paperback book clutched in his stubby hands. He reminded Chelsea of gentle fathers she’d seen on sitcoms in the early 2000s. The kind of men her dad would have laughed at while cursing them for making more money than he did.

Pee Wee affected his gangsta voice. He said, All right, let’s do this shit.

Chelsea waited for him to smash the glass with the plumbing pipe. The shattering sound took her back to Delphi, Indiana, where she’d grown up. When her hips rounded and her breasts made their first appearance, her dad suddenly took an interest in her. He’d drink Bud all night, shout at her mother, and then pitch the empty bottles into trashcans in the alley behind their tiny house. He rarely hit his target. The bottles shattered against rotting, wooden panels on their garage, or against crumbling, concrete blocks constituting their driveway. After that, he’d sneak into her bedroom and run his hands over her body, thinking she’d already fallen asleep. So, so gross. She finally told her mother and her mother didn’t believe her. When she threatened to go to Child Protective Services, her parents sent her to Indy to live with her vile, disgusting Uncle Sewell.

The music of breaking glass competed with crickets in the humid summer night. Pee Wee cleared the remaining shards around the frame of the window and leapt into the study. Phil and Crank followed. Then Heather. By the time Chelsea climbed through, the boys had the doctor on the floor, his hands behind his head. An attractive, middle-aged brunette rushed into the room. Her jeans had flour stains on them. Chelsea wondered if she had a job outside of the house, or if her husband earned enough to support the entire family on his own. For a moment, she thought she might like that, domestic living. Pee Wee snapped his fingers at her. Get them bitches locked up.

The wife must have seen too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, must have believed she could go toe-to-toe with the boys. She wagged her finger at Pee Wee and then clenched both her fists. I don’t know who you little shits think you are…

Heather grabbed the woman by her long, straight hair and yanked her out of the study and down a wide hallway, toward the front room. Her combat boots made hollow thuds across the polished, hardwood floors. In the living room, two girls, maybe five and six years old, glanced up from a pile of big block Legos. Children often took their time assessing the situation. They studied, made a judgment, and cried once they realized the safety of their home had been violated. Chelsea held their little hands. She whispered when she spoke to them. Come on, she said, you’ll be okay.

Snapping the mother’s head back, Heather did her best to emulate a black woman’s voice—You bitches got a basement?

The mother nodded to a door in the hallway, behind them. Heather said, Let’s go, then. The mother tripped as Heather tugged her backwards. She dragged the mother across the house. The mother’s knees squealed as they scraped the floor. She bit her lip, maybe trying to look tough for her girls.

Anybody else up in here? Heather hadn’t quite mastered her gangsta voice. Occasionally, her tone slipped, got higher, made her sound like the nice, empathetic woman Chelsea had met a year ago, just as her life had fallen to pieces.

The mother refused to talk. Heather leaned over and smacked her. Bitch, she said, you better give me a reason not to rip your tongue out your throat.

"No." The mother choked, no doubt trying to hold back tears.

Heather ripped open the basement door. She shoved the mother down a short flight of steps covered in deep, plush carpeting. The woman made a muffled thud when she rolled to a stop on the first landing. She collided with a bookshelf filled with photographs and various trinkets from, Chelsea assumed, the many vacations the family had taken around the country and maybe the world. A Derek Jeter bobblehead fell from the top shelf and conked the woman on her head.

Come on. Chelsea nudged the girls to walk down the steps. She didn’t bother changing her voice. She never did, in fact. It didn’t seem to stop their victims from describing the entire lot of intruders as African-American. They often got the number of them wrong and rarely noticed that at least two of them were female. Chelsea figured their ordeals were so traumatic, their memories simply failed them. She could relate. She’d blocked out entire weeks of her own life.

The girls held the bannister attached to the wall, approached each step as an individual challenge. When they reached the landing, they collapsed onto their mother, sobbing. She put her arms around them and allowed herself to cry with them. Heather pushed Chelsea onto the stairs and shut the door behind them. Keep moving, yo, she said to the girls and the mother.

The woman pulled herself up by grabbing onto a lower shelf littered with pictures of her and her husband’s wedding. They both looked much, much younger in the photographs. The doctor had still been hefty, a muffin, as the boys might have called him, but the wife was slender and gorgeous. She took her daughters’ hands again and helped them down the second flight of stairs. Toys and exercise equipment cluttered the basement. A full kitchen occupied the middle of the room, and at the far end, more bookshelves surrounded a movie screen. Several couches had been placed in a haphazard manner near the screen. Behind them, an LCD projector hung from the ceiling.

Heather pointed to it and whispered, Bet we can trade that shit.

The mother and her daughters sat on a couch without asking permission. Heather glared at them. I want you bitches on your bellies, she said. She clapped her hands and they dropped to the plush carpet. The mother tried to sooth her daughters. Heather kicked her in her ribs. Did I say you could talk?

The ceiling rumbled as the boys did something horrible to the doctor upstairs. It sounded as though they were rolling the big man across the floor in the hallway. Heavy, fading clomps suggested they’d dragged him up a flight of steps.

Chelsea wandered over to the small kitchen. Plastic bottles of Hawaiian Punch occupied a counter with a sink in the middle of it. An opened package of Oreo cookies teased her. She wanted to pour herself a cup of juice and devour the Oreos. She knew she was hungry, though it didn’t mean much anymore. Like sex, eating had become something of a concept, rather than a necessity. When her stomach threatened to fold inward and collapse, she’d break down and steal crackers or bread from a Denny’s across the street from their motel. If she’d lifted her mask and snuck a few cookies into her mouth, as she so dearly wanted to, Heather would have told the boys and who knew what those idiots would do.

Heather dragged a plastic chair from a play dining room set to the mounted LCD projector. She climbed up and examined it. She twisted a screw holding it in the bracket attached to the ceiling. The screw didn’t make a sound when it hit the carpet. She pulled all the chords in the back of the projector and stepped down with it under her arm.

The door above the staircase opened and the husband crashed onto the steps. He rolled into the shelf on the landing. The pictures and bobbleheads showered him. Pee Wee picked up the shelf, then kicked at the doctor with his combat boots until he flip-flopped down the second flight. Cuts and bruises decorated his arms. His left eye had swollen shut from the beating he’d taken. Chelsea wondered if the boys had gone too far. Heather always insisted they rough up the homeowners without causing any real, permanent damage.

As the doctor attempted to crawl away from Pee Wee, he left several trails of blood from his leaking arms. His wife screamed when she saw him. This earned her another kick in the ribs from Heather. The wife said, Oh, God.

Shit, said Heather. Ain’t no such thing.

They’d left the family weeping there, in their wonderful basement. The doctor spilled his blood all over the nice carpet. Chelsea worried more about the clean up bill than she did the pain the doctor might be going through. At least, she felt that way right after they’d cleared out from the house. The family did as they were told, which prevented the boys from tying them up or doing something worse. Seemed to Chelsea the boys were getting more and more violent with the families they hit. Some of them deserved kicks and punches, some didn’t. She wondered if the dope hadn’t altered the boys in some way. They’d been relatively peaceful when she first moved in with them. Pee Wee told her he hated having to rob people. This is what the nubs gave us, though, he’d said. They gave us shit for jobs, then they took those jobs away from us, then they gave us drugs. Just enough to get us interested. And then they said, ‘Good luck,’ as though we could just walk away from hell, as though this toilet of a city had anything to offer us but shit. And on and on. He believed in tolerance, understanding, love. But dammit, sometimes you just had to bash someone in the face and take his money because the system had been rigged against you. He called his victims privileged, a word Chelsea heard a thousand times in her education classes during her previous life, when she’d been interested in being a part of polite society. The folks at IUPUI hadn’t sounded much different from Pee Wee or his friends. Everyone, it seemed, felt they’d been wronged somehow and the rest of the world owed them. Chelsea had even agreed back then, had jumped right in on Hate Whitey discussions in those sterile, sleep-inducing classrooms. She’d since learned yearning for fairness in a world barely removed from the jungle only led to greater misery. As she sat in the back of Heather’s shitty four-door, speeding down I-65 toward Greenwood, she thought, for the first time in a long time, she’d made a mistake by not finishing her degree. Even with her habit, she could have maintained a steady job, teaching in one of Indianapolis’s dying public schools.

Her rational voice, or, at least, the voice she believed right then to be the most sensible, told her to hush. The boys would trade some of the treats they’d stolen from the doctor’s house for drugs and all her doubts would, thankfully, vanish. Streetlights seasoned neighborhoods the highway passed over with a medicinal, yellow haze. A Nirvana cassette played on the ancient tape deck in Heather’s shitty four-door. Kurt Cobain’s depressing voice crackled through dusty speakers in the front doors. The boys loved nineties shit, grunge crap popular for five minutes when Chelsea was a toddler. Some sort of nostalgia trip, like they couldn’t deal with being adults. They’d bang their heads to the faster songs. Looked liked idiots. She’d tried to get them to listen to Killswitch Engage, but they dismissed it, called it screamo faggot shit, whatever that meant.

They rolled past the monument in the center of the city. She imagined rich folks going to the IRT, listening to the symphony on the circle. As a teenager, she’d dreamt of rising above her fate. She’d been just another white trash Hoosier girl violated by every goddamn male in her family. She’d busted her ass in high school, building her GPA enough to get her into IUPUI. The nubs at Perry Meridian called IUPUI an extended dance remix of high school, but her diploma would have Indiana University written on it, regardless. And that would be good enough to put on her resume. A first-year teacher could make forty-grand a year. Her father never earned that much sweating his ass off in the summer, laying roofs. As far as she knew, she’d even beat her mother’s salary. Her father had croaked while she was a sophomore at Perry Meridian. She hadn’t heard from her scraggly old mother since she’d shown up, uninvited, at her high school graduation five years ago. Bitch had the nerve to ask if she needed help with tuition. Thanks, Chelsea had told her. I got this far without you. Her mother had waddled off, crying. Sometimes, Chelsea felt sorry for her. Mostly, though, she remembered how the woman had done nothing to protect her from vultures.

Pee Wee got off the highway at County Line Road and swerved through dark streets filled with one-story houses. Broken, chain-link fences and grass grown high as baby cornstalks surrounded them. He parked Heather’s crappy four-door in a dirt-paved alley behind a house belonging to a guy named Huey. Large black dude who traded pills for crap he could sell at pawnshops. Heather used to service him, back when she hooked. She said he’d been a brilliant physics student at Purdue who’d stumbled onto crack, then meth, and finally, heroin. She said he’d told her about a theory he had for harnessing gravity and using it as an energy source. Really deep stuff. Like something H.P. Lovecraft might have come up with. The few times Chelsea spoke with the guy, he talked about how much he hated having to pay for the puss. He’d offered her fifty bucks for a blowjob. She politely explained not only had she stopped selling her body, she didn’t even give it away for free anymore.

My vagina’s appetite died, she’d said. Not that she’d ever sleep with a fossil like him. He had gray hair, for Christ’s sake. Gross. The week she’d spent as a call girl, she’d seen so many wrinkled dicks she thought she’d be sick for