53
The sight of the cargo van pulling into the corroded service yard threatens to ignite the greasy air in my chest. The pole lamps cast twisted shadows through wrecked boxcars and abandoned machinery, forming nebulous jagged monsters guaranteed to terrify any six-year-old. My pulse ignores my wishes and climbs right back up. My hands—are they shaking? And I’m sweating. Dammit.
I deliberately empty my lungs and draw another deep breath, willing stillness and only partially succeeding.
This isn’t normal pre-gig tension. I feel like an abused mastiff straining at the end of its backyard chain, obsessed with ripping out the savage mailman’s bowels. Except this mailman murdered my father. The forty-round clip in my MP-7 isn’t enough. I want a forty hundred round clip, forty million, enough
