"Sorry to be an imposition again."

 

"Are you kidding me?  Even if you weren't about to finally get some goddamn payback for Helen, you know you can always count on me!"

 

"I know, Tay.  I know."

 

“I can’t believe tomorrow is the day.”

 

“You’ve got the other thing handled?”

 

“Yeah.  Everything is set up.  God, we wish we could go now!”

 

“The kid needs some sleep.”

 

Beez was just then trying to settle down on a cot in the next room, but the paper thin walls did nothing to muffle the conversation.

 

“He looks much better than the last time you brought him over here.”

 

“Yeah, he looks ok.  Yanno, for a boy…”

 

“Aw, no, I just meant-” HSST.

 

The boy laid there, eyes widened, as the conversation died.  He was laying right here!  Why hadn’t she come to him?  He wanted to be indignant.  He wanted to be hurt.  Mostly, though, he was hard.  When the floorboards started creaking, he stopped thinking about being mad and just stroked himself.  

 

He wanted to be in the next room.  He wanted to be the one that made her moan.  When he closed his eyes, he was the one.  He was the man.  They lasted much longer than he did, but he had no trouble nodding off after he was done.

 

***

 

Beez felt very uncomfortable as Roxie led him into the crowded bar.  Nobody looked at him more than once though, and he relaxed a little when he realized he probably wasn’t the youngest one there.  A girl of no more than 12 sipped from a shot glass as he walked behind her.  Roxie smacked a barstool and Beez hopped up on it, after which she disappeared into the back.  The boy tried flagging the bartender a few times, but the redhead never more than raised an eyebrow back at him.  

After a few minutes, he turned around and looked over the patrons.  He knew this was supposed to be the place, but there were so many people…   Some people got up and moved around. Someone new walked in.  Someone put a song on the jukebox.  Wait…

 

Through a shattered mirror on the wall, he watched the newcomer pick his way through the crowd towards an empty table.  He looked... familiar?  From out of nowhere, Roxie appeared beside him, and in trademark fashion, released a small cloud of something into the mans face.  He toppled into her arms like a giant baby.  Not one person Beez could see so much as batted an eye as she hoisted him up over her shoulder and carried him into the back.  

 

Beez slipped off the barstool and followed her.  She kicked open the back door and went out into the alley, smacking the unconscious fellows head against nearly every wall, corner, and door frame along the way.  

 

“Where are you taking him?”

 

“Not much farther,” she said, with grim determination.  “Just some place we can have a nice quiet chat.”

 

Beez followed her into the hollowed-out hulk of a warehouse.  She passed row after row of useless and rusted machinery, darting this way and that, until finally she threw him down inside a room.  It was cleaner than the rubble around it, and well lit.  A steel chair and rope were already waiting.  While Roxie busied herself with tying the man down, Beez wandered down the hall.  The next room was identical in preparation, and the next, and the next after that as well.  When Roxie took off towards the bar, Beez stayed.  He didn’t think he was needed for this part anyway, and the bar had been entirely too busy for him.  

 

Over the next hour, Roxie made three more trips, each time carrying an unconscious body over her shoulder.  The last one appeared to be bleeding from a broken nose before arriving.  Roxie’s face was as dark as he’d ever seen it.  

 

Each man was restrained beyond hope.  The first two had awakened before the last one arrived.  Neither cried out or whimpered.  Their hard eyes followed Beez as he walked from window to window.  The second one in particular made him uncomfortable.  He seemed to be smiling underneath the gag.  When Roxie had them all in place, she went back to the first one.  He didn’t cry out any more than the sound of air forcefully escaping lungs.  The boy had seen her shoot people, but watching her use her fists was much harder.  After less than a minute, he walked away.

 

Outside of the factory, he noticed several of the bar patrons set up around the building.  Many seemed to be carrying guns, and all of them were facing away.  

 

“You’re looking well, my son!”  Beez thought he recognized the jovial man walking toward him.  Wheezer?  Something like that?  “I’m glad to see you up on your feet, and not another trophy in that horrid monkey’s inner sanctum!”

 

“Me too, now that you mention it.”  He hadn’t meant to be funny, but the man he was increasingly sure had pulled a bullet out of his chest just laughed.

 

“I hear we all have you to thank for this?  The Maker works unexpectedly, inscrutably, but justly.”

 

“ ‘we all’ ?”

 

“Everyone you see here lost someone that day.  Each of those 15 souls had a family, a husband or a wife.  A few even had kids.”

 

“Is everyone gonna take a turn in there then?”

 

“Oh no.  The Maker herself couldn’t talk Roxie into letting anyone help her with this part.  We couldn’t do better than her anyway, and most of us wouldn’t want to.  We just want to know that it’s done.”  

 

Beez wandered around the outside of the warehouse with Wheezy for hours.  Several of the makeshift guards came over to shake his hand, and Wheezy handled introductions.  Their gratitude didn’t help the empty feeling he had inside.  The whole thing felt too... small.  Yes, those men inside there deserved every welt, bruise, and cut Roxie doled out, but there was so much desolation around him.  This was a small victory.

 

From deep inside the warehouse, Roxie screamed   He started towards the nearest door, but Wheezy grabbed his shoulder.  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, my son.”  Beez shrugged loose and ran inside anyway.  

 

Roxie was pacing back and forth in the hall in front of the four rooms.  Blood covered her arms from her hands to well past her elbow, and dotted everywhere else.  As he got closer, she screamed again and clawed her fingers through her hair.

 

“Roxie?  Are you-”

 

“It’s not enough!”

 

“What?  What’s not-”

 

“It’s not enough!!!”  Her fury echoed through the building.  “They took too much from me.  It’s not enough to just bleed them…”  The men in rooms one and three were unconscious.  Room four was sobbing, but room two remained defiant.  “They took so much from me, and I gave up everything to get them here!  Everything!  And it’s still not enough!!!”  She punched a concrete support beam, and the whole building groaned fearfully.  Roxie seemed unaffected as she paced and clawed again.  The blood from her hands was matting her hair.

 

“Roxie!  Roxie!  Why isn’t it enough?”

 

“You!”  Beez tried to backpedal, but she was too fast.  She grabbed his jacket by the lapel and threw him into the wall.  He tasted blood.  “I was perfectly fine with my sacrifice.  I knew what the stimulants were gonna do to me.  I traded it all, and I’d do it again.  But then you had to show up and start putting Humpy Dumpy back together.  Well I don’t have anything to offer you now, kid!  I’m fucking sterile!  If I live 5 more years, I’ll be LUCKY.”  She punctuated the final word by turning and throwing Beez down the hall.  He rolled and skidded to a stop, and resolved to lay on his side until his breath returned.

 

“It’s not enough, it’s not enough, it’s not enough…”  Over and over, she paced the hallway muttering to herself.  Beez struggled up to his knees, and then crawled over to the nearest wall to steady himself as he stood.  The man in room 2 had one eye swollen shut but had lost none of his steel.  Roxie took one of her guns out, and scratched at the back of her head with the barrel as she continued her tirade.  “...not enough, it’s not enough, it’s not enough, it’s not…”

 

As Beez and the man stared at each other, a pit began to form in his stomach.  A really, really dark pit.  

 

“I have an idea.”

 

“What have I told you about thinking,” she said, breaking her mantra only momentarily.

 

“It’s a...a bad idea.”  That got her attention.