Hostages
“Any takers for Lincoln?”
The four people around the table all shook their heads.
“I’ll have five on Churchill.”
“Winston was last week. No way he repeats himself so soon.”
“After Cleopatra it’s always a tree. Ten bucks says he’s a palm tree today.”
“Any other bets?” the bookmaker asked. But before anyone could reply, three masked figures burst in through the open door, holding machine guns. They looked frazzled and kept looking over their shoulders into the hallway. The leader pointed his gun into the room as a signal for the two others to spread out. He stayed in the doorway to keep a lookout.
A wave of admiration washed over the three armed men.
“He’s truly outdone himself. He’s three people at once.”
“OK,” the bookie said. “But who is he? I need to know for the records.”
“The three musketeers?” No. Machine guns are not muskets, contemporary misreadings of the Second Amendment be damned.
Someone offered Bonnie and Clyde but that was quickly followed by a curt, “Learn to count, dumbass.”
“Charlie’s Angels,” rose from the table on which a board game was taking place.
“But they are all men?”
“Oh, get with the times.”
“Charlie’s Angels it is,” the bookie marked in his notebook as conversation gradually coloured the room white.
“Shut up, or we’ll shoot,” one of the men shouted.
A questioning hand emerged from the group seated at the gamblers’ table. “May I go first?”
“Hang on. I’ve been here twice as long as you. You don’t get to jump the line,” another person cut in.
The leader repeated the threat, upon which the remaining men took up their positions: one near the window behind the board game and another overlooking the gamblers. The leader leaned against the doorway, sweeping his gun like a radar. Without the movie beeps.
“What is this place, a nuthouse?” a balaclava asked of no person in particular.
An inmate with a set of Lego figures in his lap replied, “We prefer to call it an insane asylum.”
“And how exactly is that any better?”
“I have a nut allergy. Besides, we are seeking asylum from all the insane folks outside. Nutcase closed.”
He crammed the plastic minifigures into his pocket, pushed himself out of the chair, and walked to the painting behind him. A still life of a bowl of bananas hung on a crooked nail. After a brief inspection of the picture, he removed it from the wall.
A woman at the board game leaned in, “Have you ever met all the crazies out there?”
“You mean normal people?” the nearby gunman queried.
“That’s an oxymoron, with the emphasis on the moron.”
He turned away and propped the machine gun up against his side while leaning against the window frame, when across the lawn he noticed an adult woman in a white gown swinging aimlessly back and forth. On every pass, the hinges squeaked, and the entire frame wobbled under her weight.
“What the hell is she doing?” he barked into the room while keeping his gaze fixed on the woman. She stared inside with large but empty eyes. “She’s freaking me out.”
Leaning with one arm on the back of the chair to twist her torso around, a woman throwing two dice onto the table spoke, “She’s on the mood swing. Must have finished with the quicksandbox.”
“Twelve.”
She moved the token. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
“Wait. Why do you go ahead only six when you throw twelve?” the hostage taker wondered. The answer was surprisingly simple: because they were not worth more than half. He did not, however, care to enquire what they did whenever the dice cast odd sums.
“Whose hotel did I land on? Oh, it’s mine. I guess I’ll then have to pay everyone else, right?”
The nearby hostage taker threw a shadow of disbelief over the board. The obscure rules evaded his intellect. Someone else’s turn. A chance card.
“Go back to square one. Do not pass hope, do not collect $200. Increase your self-loathing along the way.”
“Do you want to use your Get Out of Jail Free card?”
“Nah. I prefer the darkness of solitary confinement.”
The young man near the gamblers removed his mask and threw it onto the table. He wondered why they had been referred to as Charlie’s Angels.
“You’re not Jerry?” the bookie questioned. “You guys are real gangsters?” He stood up and addressed the crowd, “Listen up, people, we have some genuine criminals with us today. All bets are off. By the way, has anyone seen my eraser?”
“If you don’t start shutting up soon, we’ll shoot,” the chief interceded.
“Be my guest.”
“Why are you peop-p-ple not scared?” the one next to the board game stuttered as the sound bumped on a lump of panic in his throat.
There was of course nothing to fear. The men had sought refuge from the police in the self-help group of a mental health clinic. The staff had left for the afternoon, and almost everybody in the room suffered from severe depression. Most had tried to take their own lives. A woman suffered from walking corpse syndrome, there was also a man with sociopathic tendencies who was eyeing the criminals, and of course Jerry, whose dissociative personality disorder had everyone believe he had literally split his person into three.
The trio’s leader jerked his head in the direction of the spooked guy overlooking patients playing the board game. The gesture was subtle enough for the entire room except its intended recipient to notice.
The woman near the gangster pulled on his jacket, after which the spring in his spine released and he bounced around, shoving the gun against the patient’s nose. She calmly pushed it aside and explained, “I believe your supervisor signals he would appreciate a word in private to discuss strategy.”
The criminal stepped backwards across the room, keeping his gun trained on her.
“The cops’ll be here any minute now. We should use these people as ransom and negotiate our way out. What do you say?”
“Good idea, boss.”
“All right, get back to your post and let me do the talking. Go.”
As the gunman marched back to the window, the boss added, “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Just as he turned around, he tripped over a body on the floor.
The three gangsters surrounded the corpse.
“You idiot. You killed her.”
“No, I did not. See, that one is still sitting over there by the window.”
“Look, there’s no blood.”
“I swear, she wasn’t here a second ago.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s dead,” the bookie mentioned casually.
“Don’t worry?! Are you nuts?”
A chorus of “Duh!” erupted.
The leader went up to the man and whispered with revulsion, “You keep a dead body in the room? Doesn’t that stink?”
“No, she showers every day like everyone else.”
“You go into the shower with a corpse every day? That’s disgusting!” Upon seeing the room’s reaction, he placed his hand over the hole in his balaclava to retroactively reduce the volume of words already spoken.
“I’m not going into the shower with her, if that’s what you mean. What do you take me for, a pervert? No, she goes by herself.”
“How?!”
“You know: undress, open the door, close the cabin, turn on the water, and down it pours. You want me to draw a diagram for you?” At that very instant, the cadaver yawned and sat up.
“A corpse can’t rest in peace anywhere these days.”
“Go bitch about it to your union rep,” a man near the television shouted without looking away from the black screen.
The three men’s stares followed the dead woman into the kitchenette.
“Tea, anyone?”
The leader trailed her and could not rip his gaze off her.
“I said: tea, anyone?”
“Hey, if you stare any more at my butt I’ll have to charge.”
“What? No. I. Just. You’re. Dead. Not. How?”
She poked her head around the door, “Hey, who invited the linguistically challenged?”
“We got 99 problems but vocabulary ain’t one,” the room replied.
The woman formerly known as the corpse took down a tin labelled ‘rat poison’, but before she could scoop its contents into the tea sieve, the gangster slammed the tin and spoon out of her hands.
“What did you do that for? Now the tea is all over the floor. Since we mostly walk barefoot around here, it’ll taste of Darjeeling and toenails. Not my favourite flavour, thank you very much.”
Bumping over every entry in the dictionary, he instead pointed to the label on the tin and uttered, “Poison. No.”
“Poison. Yes.” She indicated the dried leaves scattered on the kitchen floor, “It’s where we keep our tea. If you want coffee, it’s in the arsenic bottle. It’s to keep the depressos’ hopes up.”
One such man squeezed past the leader and asked the professional corpse whether the pliers were in the kitchen, upon which he produced two Lego figures from his pocket and presented them as trophies. He needed the tool to twist their necks to hang from the bent nail in the wall. “Otherwise they won’t look realistic,” he explained to the criminal by miming with an imagined rope around his neck. Unfortunately, the pliers were not there, and he returned to the room, asking if anyone knew how to tie a noose for the figure.
“If I knew that, I would not be here. I’d be dangling, happily, in the fresh air of the forest.”
“I doubt,” a fellow patient injected, “the air would be fresh for very long with your bodily fluids oozing out of you.”
“Don’t blame the bodily fluids for his odour,” another quipped.
“Enough already,” the leader stormed into the living room. “You people are going to shut up. Now. You are our hostages and unless someone pays up, we’ll kill you. All of you.”
“Pfft. Again with the empty threats. First, I will not pay for my own release. Second, I have no interest in survival. And third, if you want a ransom, you have to make demands to people other than the hostages. That’s just plain common sense.”
“Let’s all keep calm and have some sympathy for one another,” a man offered.
A gambler leaned over to a fellow hostage, “I think he must be developing Stockholm syndrome.”
“Great! That’s all I need,” the man said, “another mental health issue.”
“If we’re going on a trip,” said a burnout patient who had only heard Stockholm, “I’d better pack the bags under my eyes, too.”
“Be quiet or I’ll slit your throats.”
That was the cue of the group’s sociopath to come forward. “With that knife in your pant leg? I don’t think so. The blade is too short and from the looks of it blunt. You’d make a nasty hickey, but that’s it. No, what you need is a nice sharp and long blade.” He led the gangster into the kitchen and opened a drawer, “Here, see?” He caressed the side of the blade and with bulging eyes looked over its sharp edge towards the criminal.
The head of the three-person syndicate slowly backed out of the kitchen as fright crept up through his tightening chest, “You are completely insane.”
“Yesterday’s breaking news.”
The sociopath returned from the kitchen with a frown and a question, “If you guys are bank robbers, where’s the money?”
“We never said we were bank robbers.”
“But you are, right? You’re armed and running away from the law, so you must have either killed someone in broad daylight, which I think not even you would do, or you fellas triggered an alarm somewhere. Mugging a convenience store takes at most two people. Plus, machine guns are bit over the top for that. My guess, therefore, is you robbed a small bank. Now, back to my question. Where’s loot?”
“We left it in our getaway vehicle.”
The room turned their attention to the main character of dumb and dumber and dumbest.
“Let me get this straight. You robbed a bank, got into a getaway car, and instead of escaping, you drove into a parking lot, waited at the barrier gate, pulled a ticket, and got out of the car to hide in a mental hospital, with the cash still in the vehicle. In full view on the back seat, I presume.”
“Yeah, well,” the capo anxiously tap danced on the spot.
“You do realize you’re supposed to crash through the gate like proper bandits.”
“My mother would kill me if she ever found out I’d scratched her car,” the unmasked criminal mumbled.
The commander-in-thief added, “We did not know this was loony land. Besides, what’s your point?”
The sociopath grinned, walked towards the gunman, and placed a comforting hand on the gangster’s shoulder. “The point, my friend,” he stopped mid-sentence. With a quick motion of the knife, the strap of the machine gun snapped. The weapon was aimed at the villain. “Hooray for the Sheriff of Nuttingham!” the bookie cheered, upon which applause shot from various corners of the room.
The sociopath pulled the trigger. It clicked. Again. Another click.
“What?” both the sociopath and demoted leader wondered.
“I think I must have left the ammo with the dough, boss.”
“We’re really unlucky,” a depresso sighed.
“Unlucky?” the frightened gangster asked.
“Unlucky, the wrong kind of fucked. We’ve been taken hostage by a bunch of amateurs.”
“Look, the police!” the woman at the window noted. Without another word, the hijackers threw off what remained of their disguises and firearms, and bolted with their hands up. “We surrender. Don’t shoot. These people are lunatics.”
Having missed most of what had happened since dreaming about hanging around in the woods, one of the male patients noticed their stuff on the floor. He grabbed a gun, waved it while running towards the door, and shouted they had forgotten their gear. Before he could open the door, the late deceased had jumped him and they both bumped into the wall.
“Are you out of your mind? They could have shot you,” she cried out.
“So?”
After an awkward silence, he glanced at her. “You know, for a stiff you sure have great reflexes.”
“And for a dumb shit you don’t smell too bad.”
Laughter and police lights left and in their place came the daily routine of the patients. A few people continued their board game, the television remained switched off, a deck of cards was shuffled.
“Tadaa!”
“Two more.” “I’m out.” “One.”
“I said, ‘tadaa’.”
The gamblers looked at the door. A giant tube of toothpaste with Jerry’s head popping out of the top stared back at them. They continued their game.
“Uninspired — The New York Times.”
“All the fun squeezed out — The Boston Globe.”
“Fuller of shit than a wheelbarrowful of manure — Cowshed Chronicle.”