Cameron Pierce - Abortion Arcade

“I need to come up with an accident,” he said.

Dan Sr. paused in mid-celebration. “An accident?

You’re seventeen years old and you haven’t staged an accident? Where have you wasted your time? This is the most important day of your life! If Violet saw what a dumbass I’d raised our son to be.”

Danny’s father started to shake all over. He ran out of the room. How the potbellied werewolf lost faith so fast total y crushed Danny. He took off his backpack and left the house as the cry of breaking glass yielded to the howls of his father.

Out on the sidewalk, he watched car after car pass him by. He could jump in front of an SUV, but half the players on his team had already done that. The role of quarterback demanded more flair.

He was so stupid. He’d been so close to regaining his father’s love, but within minutes of standing in the same room together, everything returned to disrepair. “I guess that’s the natural way of things,” Danny said.

The absurdity of hearing himself say such a pitiful thing struck a chord in his mind. If he was too much of a loser to perform an epic accident, then fuck football and Heavy Metal, fuck accidents and all other forms of life.

Wasn’t it the great fortune of every creature on the planet to be born inherently worthless? He resolved to give the metalheads a suicide nobody would ever forget.

He went inside the house again, heading straight for the garage. He thought about Barbetta. He doubted that snuffing himself out would make her give a rat’s ass, but he no longer cared.

He switched on the garage light and found a chainsaw and some rope. He climbed inside his father’s truck.

He slipped his walkman from the pocket of his cutoff jeans and plugged it into the stereo. He took the spare key from a plastic clip on the sun visor.

He chose Sunset Superman from Dio’s Dream Evil to kick off his farewell soundtrack. The rest of the mix consisted of songs from Rainbow’s Rising, Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, and the entirety of Holy Diver, the greatest album of all time.

He fashioned a noose and turned on the truck before slipping the rope over his head. To die by the dual means of choking and decapitation would require expert timing.

The chainsaw sat beside him on the bench-style seat.

He ran his fingers over the blade, fearless and without any regrets. He laughed a bit, thinking how everything in life worked out so strangely. He never viewed himself as the suicidal type, although maybe that was how others saw him. Danny never felt safe in his judgments of himself.

Petting the chainsaw, he lost himself in the scripture of Sunset Superman. “ A shadow without a name, but when he wakes up in the morning, he just won’t know he was a hero… trying to hide his burning heart before somebody cuts it all away. ”

Tightening the noose, he lost himself in the crunchy sweet guitar of Craig Goldy.

It felt like the truck was rising, levitating beyond the 88 roof of the garage to meet the black pixels of space.

The noose constricted his breathing.

He rasped for air. He struggled to lift the chainsaw. So heavy, oh so heavy . The blade spun round and round.

Sunset Superman!

The door leading to the garage opened. Danny’s father stood in the doorway. He shouted, but Danny heard nothing, for the music and the chainsaw were so loud. He knew he must prevent his father from foiling his suicide.

His father staggered toward the truck and pried at the driver’s side door. The drunken man balled his hands into fists and punched the window, first with a left and quickly following with a right, but the glass held strong under the drunk man’s blows. Danny balanced the whining chainsaw between his legs and shifted the truck into reverse.

He slammed on the gas pedal. The truck pummeled through the garage door. Danny loosened the rope around his neck. He breathed deeply, relief filling his lungs. He killed the chainsaw’s motor and sped out of the neighbor-hood to the cue of Sabbath’s Die Young, heading toward the highway. The bustle of rush hour could ensure him a glorious death.

He hit the highway going ninety and only pushed it harder from there. The tape player did a weird thing. It stopped playing Die Young and switched to Dio’s Holy Diver .

Some sort of ghostly transference. Real metal shit.

Danny couldn’t fuss with the tape right then. He only learned to drive recently and he had a chainsaw between his legs.

He merged into the middle lane and honked at a puttering Chevy. He sped up to within a foot of the truck’s bumper and swerved into the left lane, too late to avoid forcing a black VW bug into oncoming traffic. Danny overcorrected, briefly returning to the center lane before losing control and following the bug through a web of southbound vehicles.

Out of fear, he let the chainsaw slip from between his legs. Falling to the floorboard, it quickly spun out of control and severed his legs at the ankles.

Danny screamed. He realized he would have his accident now, but it was no longer a prize he wanted. Did he ever want it in the first place? He no longer knew.

He followed the bug as it bee-lined against traffic at nearly one-hundred miles per hour. Danny didn’t realize those little piece of shit cars got up so fast.

He was losing blood. He felt the blood puddle reach the bottoms of his pants. It soaked his shins and low-hanging knees. All to the nightmare hymn of Holy Diver.

When the blood filled the cab up to his neck, Danny undid his seatbelt. With his left hand, he fumbled around for the window knob-a-majig, then remembered it was broken. He returned his left hand to the wheel and racked his brain for ways to avoid drowning in his own blood.

The blood rose to his chin, his mouth, his eyes. He squinted through red now. The black VW looked like a real insect.

All Danny could think was, I must squash it. Squash that bug.

He slumped down in his chair until his right stump pressed against the gas pedal, accelerating his father’s truck above one-hundred miles per hour. He crept up on the bug and soon flattened the car into a dark pancake.

He let out a scream and lost the last of his breath. In a final desperate attempt to get free of the truck, Danny flailed his arms at the chainsaw on the floorboard. The chainsaw buzzed his arms from his torso and propelled his hands out the side windows in opposite directions. They stuck there, like the truck had arms.

Danny no longer had control of the truck and couldn’t reach the brake pedal. He glanced in the rearview mirror.

Holy diver!

The flattened Beetle had ballooned into a real six-legged insect and it followed him.

The chainsaw floated through the truck’s blood-filled cab. It sat in the passenger seat. The chainsaw leaned over and turned up the volume on the stereo. Holy Diver blared through the crimson flood. You’ve been down so long in the midnight sea….

The glass-and-tin insect scuttled down the highway on rubber legs. They were still heading into oncoming traffic and cars in the carpool lane had to swerve to avoid them.

Unable to steer, Danny stared at the chainsaw and said, in muffled underwater screams, “What do we do?”

A steel grin split open on the blade. The chainsaw stuck out a tongue that resembled a squid tentacle. “We crash,” the chainsaw said. The smile disappeared as the chainsaw leapt across the seat.

Danny ducked. The chainsaw narrowly missed giving him a fast lane lobotomy and sheared off his left ear. For a few photo-still seconds, the ear floated in front of Danny’s face like a hairy seahorse.

The chainsaw broke into a smile again. It flapped that awful tongue and laughed and foamed yellow bubbles from the steely mouth. The truck rolled end over end.