Mark Tufo - 'Til Death Do Us Part

“M-240s and M-16s,” I mumbled, possibly drooling on myself as I placed the crowbar in a slight opening.

It was too much to hope that the markings on the box matched the contents. John was a few feet away rubbing the rocks, he was muttering something. Azile was alternating between watching our backs and checking out the contents.

“Holy fucking shit,” I said as the top popped free.

“What is that?” John asked, taking a second to look over.

“John, what I’m holding here is an M-240 machinegun. It’ll shoot in the neighborhood of a hundred to two hundred rounds a minute without blinking and six-fifty a minute if I really want to put the pedal to the metal!” I answered as I hefted the twenty-five pound block of death metal out of the container.

“That’s good then?” John asked.

“What?” I asked him incredulously. “Okay, let’s put this in terms you’ll understand. I feel about finding this like you would if this crate was full of prime California bud.”

“There’s weed in there?” John asked, pushing me to the side. He was mighty disappointed when he realized that wasn’t the case. “Why would you lie to me, man?” he asked with pleading eyes, like maybe I had stashed the find before telling him.

“I was just comparing how I feel about finding this to how you would feel finding some weed.”

“Not cool, man.” He returned to the Rune stones, I suppose for solace.

“Bullets?” Azile asked.

“Shit,” I said. I had been so enamored with the machinegun that I completely forgot about the rounds. Without them, this just became a very heavy club.

“There’s a box next to him that says 5.56,” Azile said, pointing to the left of John.

“No good, this takes 7.62. That’ll work for the M-16s, though,” I said, looking deeper into the truck. “This must be their rolling armory…and now it’s ours. Well if this doesn’t help to change the tide, I don’t know what will.” Nobody was listening, but I was still talking. This was too big a find to keep bottled up inside. We now had a machinegun and about two dozen M-16s.

“Just use more of them,” John replied in all seriousness.

“That’d kind of be like me telling you to just smoke more of the marijuana plant stalk,” I told him.

“The plant stalk doesn’t have any THC. You could smoke it all day long and not get high,” he said. “I’ve tried.”

“Same thing…sort of…with the bullets,” I said as I pulled a tarp to the side. There were three more stones making a total of five and two beautiful crates marked ‘disintegrating metallic split-linked belt (M13 links), 7.62 in a ratio of 3 rounds to 1 tracer.’ “I think I’m going to need some time alone,” I told John and Azile as I gently stroked the box. Azile laughed, which was nice, it was the first time I’d seen any emotion out of her, that didn’t somehow revolve around anger. John started to walk out of the truck. “I was kidding, man,” I told him.

“Wait! Are you sure those are rune stones?” I asked John.

“We should get going,” Azile motioned.

“Sure, you can tell by the markings,” he said as he ran his hand across the raised etchings.

Azile was getting down from the truck. “Hold on,” I told her. She momentarily eyed the doors, maybe figuring if she could close and lock them before I could run to the end. She either figured she couldn’t get it done, or that it wasn’t such a good idea in the first place. “What part do you play in this?” I asked her point blank.

“I was a prisoner,” she told me flatly.

“I gathered that much on my own,” I told her. At first I just figured she was a plaything for a demented, perverted truck driver, but she didn’t have the feel of ‘victim’ on her. “There’s more here,” I stated as I began to wonder. Her name which was unique began to stick in my head. “How do you spell your name?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she shot back.

“Humor me.”

“Is she going to tell jokes now?” John asked.

“Azile!” I snarled. John and Azile jumped.

“A-Z-I-L-E,” she said as she put her head down.

I rocked on my feet, John thankfully caught me.

“What’s the matter, man? That wasn’t even funny.” John asked as he propped me back up.

“There’s more going on here than you’re telling. You just happen to have the same name as Eliza only in reverse?” I asked.

“Whoa, that’s freaky. Who’s Eliza?” John asked.

“My father knew her,” she said, looking back at me defiantly.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said.

“Well, scientists believe that the entire universe—”

“John! Her, not you,” I said.

“That’s just it, Ponch, the beginning is the same for all of us. That’s what makes us all connected,” he said proudly.

“My mother was five months pregnant with me when Eliza turned my father. According to my mother, my father visited her once in those last four months and told her that the only way she could protect me was to name me Azile. My mother was so petrified that she believed him completely. She said she had never seen someone so soulless…that was….until I was seven.”

“Eliza,” I said.

“She and my father came to visit. Eliza killed my mother as my father watched, then she grabbed me.” Azile flipped her hair over to show two long-healed, puckered wounds on her neck. “She had just sunk her teeth into me when something in my father, some vestige of humanity showed itself and he begged her not to kill me…that I was even named after her. She backhanded my father so hard that he slid across the floor of the kitchen.”

***

“What is your name, child?” Eliza said as she stroked the young girl’s hair.

“Azile,” the girl said holding her chin high. Her mother was dead—a small pool of blood by her neck. Her father (in biological terms only) was groaning, his back up against the far wall in the kitchen.

“Azile! How rich!” Eliza said delightfully. “Perhaps I should let you live, if for no other reason than to see what happens.

Azile did not understand the monster’s words. She could see beyond the veneer of the beautiful woman to the cruelty and horror that lay beneath. The twisted, gnarled thing shrank away from that gaze.

“Well if you are not to die, then it shall be your father,” Eliza said as she strode over to Azile’s father. She looked back, waiting for some sort of response. Azile stood defiantly, the only person she cared for in life already dead; her father meant nothing to her. She watched as Eliza ripped the man’s throat open. His gurgled cries for help went unheeded.

“I believe we shall meet again,” Eliza said as she patted the girl’s head and left.

***

“I saw her for what she was and she let me live because of it…because of the horror of it,” Azile said as she covered her face.

“I’m sorry for everything you’ve gone through.” I hopped down off the truck.

“But?” she asked looking up at me.

“You tell me.”

“Group hug,” John said, climbing down off the trailer.

I acquiesced, because if I didn’t, he would have gone on about it for hours.

“After Eliza killed my mother, I vowed revenge. I knew she was something out of a faerie tale, so that’s what I decided I must become to defeat her.”

“A unicorn?” John asked, looking on her head for the horn.

We both stopped to look at him.

“A witch,” she stated. “I studied the Wiccan ways of white light.”

“So you’re more like Glinda the Good Witch?” John asked.

“Glinda wasn’t so good,” I said off-handedly. “I’m just saying, she was happy when Dorothy killed the other witch. She basically told Dorothy to take property that wasn’t hers and then sent her off on a mission to kill another witch that she was enemies with. If she was such a good witch why didn’t she do it herself?”