Rockaway Beach, fiction by Nick Kolakowski

When Jonsey said the five of us should pool our money to rent a place on Rockaway Beach for the summer, it sounded like a cool idea. He’d found a glorified shack off Beach 98th, so weathered by the sea air that you could stick a pencil through the wooden walls without much resistance. But at least it was cheap, and we could spend three months surfing in the morning and smoking weed all afternoon before heading off to our respective night shifts.

That summer, I worked as a hospital orderly at St. Vincent’s, down in the Village. You might think that spending most of your waking hours stoned would make you terrible at such a fast-paced job, but believe me, it was a necessity for staying upright and functional in that red chaos. Especially if, say, a Martian got you in a vicious headlock and threatened to break your neck like a wishbone.

Which is exactly what happened. It was a sweaty Friday in August and I was looking forward to a weekend of nothing but waves and sunburns and a soft high that would dissolve all memories of the week’s blood and misery. Before I could reach that nirvana, though, I needed to survive a shift hit by three gunshot victims in its first twenty minutes, on top of the usual tide of psychos, barfers, screechers, and bleeders.

Oh yeah, and a bushy-haired psycho hit me in the back of the skull with a full bedpan. This was right after I changed into fresh scrubs, when I made the cardinal night-shift error of stepping out of a supply room without looking in both directions first. An isolation-room escapee, they told me later. He laughed as the cops handcuffed him and dragged him off, probably to a brutal beating behind the dumpsters out back.

Do you think a fresh coating of shit and a head-wound cut me any slack with the charge nurse? Oh, hell no. Not on a night with a full moon. I was bandaged up, then told to wipe myself down and get back on the dance floor, which I did. And that’s where I met the Martian.

He was lying on a gurney in the corridor, in a torn gray suit, his face slick with sweat. His right wrist handcuffed to the rail. He smelled like trash, which wasn’t the worst part, no; it was how his pupils seemed to jitter and quake like drops of oil on a hot skillet. He was definitely flying first class on Lunatic Drug Airways.

“Change that,” one of the nurses told me, pointing at the Martian’s forehead, covered by a thick bandage sopping with blood.“He dangerous?” After my little incident with the bedpan, I was no mood for another skull-bashing.

“Of course he’s fucking dangerous.” The nurse laughed. “But he’s cuffed, okay? So stop being a little bitch and get in there. We’re all swamped.”

I followed orders, fetching a fresh bandage and a few other items before approaching the gurney from the head, which I figured would allow me to more easily dodge the guy’s fists if he tried anything. Those insane eyes tracked my movements. When he spoke, his voice warbled from low to high and back, like he had trouble controlling his vocal cords.

“Ronald Reagan,” he said.

“Ronald Reagan,” I parroted, peeling back his existing bandage. The wound beneath was long but not deep, its edges slightly ragged. A dull knife, in my professional opinion. I began to clean away the blood.

“He’s responsible for this shit, you know.” The handcuff rattled as he waggled his fingers toward the broader chaos of the ER. “He’s the motherfucking President of these United States. You don’t think he couldn’t pick up the phone, order the whole government to do something about a virus? Send in, I don’t know, ten thousand guys?”

“What would those ten thousand guys do?”
“Hell if I know. Whatever it takes. That’s not the point—Ronald motherfucking Reagan is my point. I know he was already shot once, but given how bad he’s failed on this AIDS shit? My prescription is, when he finally dies however many years from now, we dig up his sorry ass and shoot him all over again.”

I hesitated. “Do you have AIDS?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I’m not into guys. And I don’t do that drug shit.”

I doubted that part about the drugs. “Not a lot of AIDS tonight. This is the ER, it’s mostly gunshots. Knife wounds. Like yours,” I said as I went back to cleaning the wound.

“It wasn’t a knife. Concrete floor. The bastards were torturing me.” His eyes rolled again, but his voice sounded more normal now.

“What would that accomplish?” I asked. “Digging up Reagan, I mean.”

“I guarantee whoever pulled that trigger would never have to pay for a drink south of Delancey again, believe me.” He laughed.

“You’re probably right.” Cleaning finished, I re-bandaged the wound. Stepping away, I was about to snap off my bloody gloves and proceed with my night when he jabbed a finger at me.

“What?” I asked.

He waggled his eyebrows. “One last thing.”

“What?”

“Come closer.”

“You can tell me from here just fine.”

He shrugged like it didn’t matter to him, and that made me relax a little too much, slowed my reflexes by that crucial quarter-second, because in the next eyeblink his uncuffed left hand shot up and gripped my shoulder, his whole body rolling behind it, and he was upright and his left arm was around my neck and he was pulling me against him, his foul breath loud in my ear.

I froze. I panicked, of course, but to this day I thank the weed in my system for keeping me at least halfway composed, because otherwise I would have screamed and tried to fight back, and he probably would have broken my neck. The Martian was a very dangerous man, as it turned out.

“You got the key to these fucking cuffs?” he shouted—not at me, but at the two cops who appeared out of nowhere, marching down the corridor with their hands on their holstered pistols. They seemed tense, and why not? Further down the corridor, a man with a knife buried to the hilt in his left eye was screaming something about the mayor. It was distracting, even before you factored in the hostage situation.

“Robbie, calm down,” said one of the cops, an enormous black dude with a faint scar tracing his right cheek. “It’s not good for your blood pressure.”

“My blood pressure.” Robbie the Martian chuckled. “Give me the fucking key, or I swear I will snap this little jerk’s spine. You know I will.”

“Go ahead, kill the kid,” said the other cop, an equally big white dude with a porn-star moustache. “We’ll just kill you next.”

“Thanks, asshole,” I told him. Usually I was pretty deferential to cops, but my equilibrium was starting to slip a little.

“Why you do think everyone wants me dead?” Robbie hissed in my ear.

“I couldn’t give less of a fuck,” I replied, wondering if I could grab a nearby sharp—a needle, a scalpel—and jam it into this guy’s forearm before he sent me to the morgue.

“Pity.” His arm tightened on my windpipe as his voice rose: “The key! Now!”

The giant white cop sighed and rolled his eyes. “Fine.” Plucking the handcuff keys from his belt, he added, “Kid, you’re going to catch these, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

He tossed the keys underhand. As I snatched them, I noted how everyone in the ER was staring at us—not with fear or concern for my well-being, but with the vaguely interested gazes of people following a halfway-decent baseball game. Even the man with the knife in his eye had paused his hollering to watch us. I hated working in this place.

“Uncuff me from that rail. Leave the other cuff on my wrist,” Robbie said, rattling his handcuffed hand. His arm around my neck lifted just enough to allow me to rotate slightly and slot the key into the cuffs. A click, and he was free.

“Now we’re leaving.” His arm tightened again, almost lifting me onto my toes as he slapped the free cuff onto my left wrist. Having bound us together, he shuffled forward, driving me in front of him. “Try to escape, and I’ll pop off your head like a champagne cork.”

I tried to curse him out, but all that escaped my lips was a soft gurgle. I hoped the cops would try something. They trained for this kind of clusterfuck all the time, didn’t they? Except these two would-be heroes stepped back, their hands loose on their pistols, as we passed them on our way to the doors.

“Smell ya later,” Robbie shouted over his shoulder, and then we were on the loud, humid, stinking street.

***

At least Robbie released my neck as we charged toward the intersection. He was moving fast now, dragging me along by our cuffed wrists. The crowds cleared a lane for us. Nobody wanted to play hero, not in the Village on a Friday night.

“We need wheels,” Robbie said, dragging me into the street. A battered cab roared toward us, its exhaust pipe farting brown clouds. I tried locking eyes with the driver, to convince him to stop before his front bumper converted us into a bone slurry. His dull gaze suggested that a nice game of chicken with a hospital orderly and a lunatic would only perk up his shift, but he braked to a stop with a few precious inches to spare.

“Come on, man,” I pleaded. “Just let me go. What use am I to you, huh?”

Robbie jerked me toward the driver’s side. Yanking the door open, he gripped the taxi driver by the shoulder and tossed him to the pavement. Instead of squawking or yelling, the swarthy man regarded us with that same coolness. I wanted whatever was coursing through his bloodstream.

“Get in,” Robbie said, shoving me through the open door. At least the cab’s interior was relatively clean. I scrambled for the passenger seat, Robbie right behind me. I had to keep my arm extended so that he had enough cuff-slack to shift into drive. The windshield framed the two cops barreling out the doors of the ER—better late than never, although I figured there was no way they could reach the street before we drove off.

With a grunt, Robbie stood on the gas.

A deep grinding from under the hood, followed by a hollow bang.

The cab jerked forward a grand total of five feet before stopping.

“Shit,” Robbie said, smacking the wheel.

The cops, alerted by car’s massive fart, spun in our direction.

Robbie stomped the brake before trying to gas again. The taxi bucked and rolled forward. Someone behind us honked. I rose in my seat, worried that my new friend would roll over the taxi driver, who I thought was still in the road.

When I peered over the hood, though, the taxi driver was gone. What the hell? I scanned the crowds, figuring he had run off—only to spy him at the gas station across the street, silhouetted by the sickly lights. He was using one of the pump nozzles to fill a soda bottle with gasoline.

“I haven’t had this much damn fun since Khe Sanh,” Robbie offered, jerking the wheel back and forth as if that would somehow make the car move faster than a crawl.

“Where?” I asked, distracted by the taxi driver retrieving a matchbook from his pocket. As he struck a flame, the man maintained that same blank expression, like he was making a sandwich in his kitchen instead of a Molotov cocktail.

Was that the extent of our problems? Don’t make me laugh. A loud pop jerked my attention from the taxi driver to our windshield, which had cracked in a crazed spider-web pattern. Something banged in the back seat. A flash of light from the street, where both cops had their pistols leveled at us.

“Why are the fucking police shooting at us?” I hissed, ducking down again.

“Kid, it’s a long story,” Robbie said as he shifted the cab into reverse and hit the gas. This time, the engine decided to cooperate. We rocketed backward, smashing into the car behind us hard enough to send me flopping into the dashboard. Eyes locked on the rearview mirror, Robbie spun the wheel, trying to reverse us around the wreck. He was so focused on that task that he missed the taxi driver trotting toward us, his outstretched hand trailing smoke and flame.

I tried to shout a warning, but the Molotov was already in mid-flight. It bounced on the hood and shattered, splashing flames across the windshield. The glass protected us a little, but the temperature spiked a hundred-fifty degrees in an instant. Robbie laughed as he whipped into the oncoming lane and took a left onto the avenue, still in reverse, doing his best to stick to the center line as cars around us honked and tried to veer out of the way.

At least the slipstream whipped most of the smoke and flames away from us. I was so frightened, every muscle from head to sphincter so rock-hard tense, I would probably shit diamonds for the next two weeks—if I lived, that is. The weed in my system wasn’t even remotely capable of squishing this kind of major-league fear. If I could only make it back to Rockaway Beach, I told myself, I’m not going to leave the ocean for the rest of the summer. Screw this job. Screw the rest of New York.

We zoomed one, two, three, four blocks in reverse. “You can let me out anywhere,” I said. “Please. I won’t tell anyone.”

Robbie chuckled, ninety-nine percent of his concentration on the road. “The handcuff key’s in my pocket, you idiot. Remember?”

I did not. Maybe he had snatched it out of my hand after I unlocked him from the gurney. “No?”

“At least, I think I have it.” His gaze flicked from the rearview mirror to me, and he winked. “I’m still kind of high.”

“Kind of?”

Through the cracked glass and snapping flames, a burst of red and blue lights: a cop cruiser. It closed in, almost bumper to bumper with us, smoke be damned. The two hospital cops glaring at us from the front seats. At least they weren’t shooting—yet.

“Hold on,” Robbie said, and, before I could retort with something witty (The hell you think I’ve been doing?), swung the wheel hard to the right. I couldn’t see what he was aiming at, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when we smashed onto the onramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything tonight just had to be extreme.

Fortunately, the bridge seemed miraculously free of traffic despite the relatively early hour. There was a straightaway behind us, and the cop cruiser had slowed to navigate the onramp. The flames eating merrily though the hood didn’t seem to have much interest in our windshield for the moment.

“What’s this all about?” I asked Robbie.

“I’m a cop,” Robbie said, jamming his knees against the wheel so he could stick his free hand into his pocket, drawing out a billfold that he flopped open to reveal a bright shield. “A detective, actually. Sorry about your neck, but if I’d stayed in that hospital, they would have killed me.”

“Who would’ve killed you?”

“Those two cops. If not them, then other cops. I’m not giving you too many details, because you really don’t want to end up in the middle of this, but let’s just say there’s a lot of talcum powder in the evidence locker where there should be Bolivian marching powder.”

“Cops stealing drugs?”

“That shock you?” Robbie skewed the taxi around a truck stopped in our lane. The cruiser appeared over the bridge’s midpoint, lights and siren blaring.

“Absolutely not.” I might have been pretty young, but working a year in a Manhattan ER ages you roughly a century in spiritual terms. “I’d be stunned if the cops weren’t stealing coke.”

The cruiser accelerated, its headlights slicing through the swirling smoke, glimmering like diamonds off the cracks in the windshield. The roar of its engine filling the world as it closed the distance. I ducked, in case one of the cops decided to start firing at us again.

Robbie grinned. “Hold on.”

Placing both hands on the wheel, he swerved the cab to the right and, just as the cruiser’s hood came abreast of ours, swung it back to the left, driving his bumper into the cruiser’s left-front wheel. Physics worked in our favor. The cruiser flipped on its side, showering sparks, its engine whining as its roof crunched against the pillars and fencing that bordered the roadway. I didn’t much care if the cops inside were dead or not.

As we roared away from the wreck, Robbie dug into his pocket and retrieved the handcuff key. “Here,” he said, tossing it to me. “Knock yourself out.”

***

Miracle of miracles, we managed to make it down the ramp and onto the dark streets of Brooklyn without encountering another car. Robbie steered the smoldering taxi to a halt at a curb. Across the street, I spied the bright green orb of a subway entrance.

“Hate to do this to you, but you got to take the subway back to the hospital. Or the bus.” He shrugged. “I’m headed south.”

The fire on the hood was dead. The cab’s interior smelled of scorched metal and burning fluids, so strong it made my nostrils curl. Despite that—and despite the violence of the evening—I was rooted to my seat. I didn’t want to go back to the ER. The prospect of yet another shift full of horror left me feeling as drained as a vampire’s victim.

“I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m going home.”

His eyebrows shot up. “What about your shift?”

“They’ll find someone to cover.” Sure, it was a selfish thing to say, especially on a night with a full moon, but it was also true. The cycles of hurt and healing, death and birth, would continue whether I was present or not.

Robbie’s eyes were terrifyingly sane. “I was in that ER because they injected me with drugs. Right when they found out what I was up to. They were going to kill me, call it a drug-fueled suicide or something. But I escaped. I don’t remember how I got to that hospital.”

“Lucky for you,” I said.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Never become a cop. ‘Authority’ is just a word. I’m gonna burn them all down for what they did, but first I need some sleep. Can I drop you anywhere?”

“Hell yeah.” I was envisioning perfect little waves, the grittiness of sand on my bare skin, the warmth of the sun baking my flesh. A summer of blissful obliteration, no bosses, no worries. If I’d ever had an urge to do something meaningful with my life, Robbie the Martian had killed it for good. “As close to Rockaway Beach as you can get.”

Nick Kolakowski is the author of several horror and crime novels, including “Absolute Unit” (Crystal Lake Publishing) and “Love & Bullets” (Shotgun Honey). His short stories and nonfiction essays have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including CrimeReads, Noir City (the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation), LitReactor, Shotgun Honey, Mystery Tribune, Rock & A Hard Place, and more.