In Laymon's Terms

“Yo, what’s up in there? Didn’t you hear me? Your. Pizza. Is. Here.” Will said the last bit slowly, as if he were addressing an assembly of special-needs children. “Hell-low-oh?”

The door edged another inch away from the frame. An eye appeared through the crack. The eye was blue and belonged to a girl. He didn’t need to see the rest of her to deduce that. The subtle smudge of eye shadow gave that away.

Then he heard the girl’s voice, a sibilant whisper: “Go away!”

The door creaked.

It was closing.

Will acted without thinking. He jammed a foot through the narrow opening before the door could finish closing. The girl continued to apply pressure to the door, compressing the white Reebok and making his foot hurt. Balancing the pizza on the upraised palm of his left hand, he halted the door’s progress with the splayed palm of his right hand.

The girl’s voice came again: “Go away!”

Louder now, exuding frustration and...what?...fear?

Of what?

“Hey, chill, okay? I’m not a robber. I’m not a rapist. I’m not any kind of bad guy. I’m just a dude with a job to do.”

The girl breathed a sigh of surrender. “I gave you a chance, mister. It ain’t my fault, ya hear?”

Will’s brow furrowed.

Well, this is odd.

“What’s not your fault, baby doll?”

A man’s voice spoke next. “This, motherfucker.”

Then the door was standing open, and a behemoth of a man filled the doorframe. Two beefy hands seized handfuls of Will’s Pizza Zone golf shirt and pulled him inside. His assailant spun around, planted his feet, and launched him into the air.

The pizza box flew away from him, a colorful blip winking in the darkness.

Will glimpsed a blur of motion behind the hulking shape of the man.

The girl, a slender babe with dark hair and big boobs, was closing the front door.

It slammed shut at the exact moment Will’s back collided with an ornate grandfather clock. The collision hurt like a mofo. Clattering chimes filled his head with dissonant, anarchic music, little clusterbombs of sound that blotted out any capacity for coherent thought for several moments.

He tumbled away from the clock, then pitched forward with his hands outstretched. His hands met resistance, something solid—the glass door of a curio cabinet that stood opposite the still-reverberating grandfather clock. He experienced a moment of perfect clarity, a nanosecond during which his brain analyzed the situation, came to a conclusion about what was going to happen, and informed him there was nothing he could do about it.

His hands pushed through the glass.

He cried out as broken shards sliced up his forearms.

And he kept falling, still powerless to halt his body’s momentum. He plunged through the curio cabinet, his shoulder struck a shelf, and he dropped to his knees.

Blood rolled in rivulets down his arms.

Fragments of glass tumbled off his back and cracked on the floor.

Will wanted to cry.

The pain was immense.

He was reminded, however, of what his mother used to say in times of great stress (such as when the cocaine fund ran low and she was forced to replenish it with money diverted from his college fund): Be thankful for the little things, sonny.

Will heeded his mother’s words now.

He was thankful for the moment of stillness. He was certain it was to be short-lived, but he was thankful nonetheless. His breath was coming in ragged gasps. A drop of something that might have been sweat—but was probably blood—swelled at the tip of his nose. He watched it fall away and hit the hardwood floor with a wet plip.

Yep, he thought, that’s blood.

He looked up to see his attacker looming over him.

The man was enormous, but that wasn’t the most disconcerting element of his appearance. He wore shiny leather pants, black combat boots, and nothing else. His thighs were as big around as oak trees. He was bald, bare-chested, and more muscular than anyone Will had seen outside of a wrestling arena. A big, distended belly drooped over his belt. A powerfully-built, beer-guzzling psycho motherfucker from hell.

Will felt his balls shrivel.

But the most surreal aspect of the man’s countenance was his well-tended Fu Manchu mustache—well, that or his lack of eyebrows.

Goddamn, Will thought, what kind of freak shaves his eyebrows?

But he didn’t have time to ponder the question any further. Chrome Dome again seized handfuls of his shirt and yanked him to his feet.

Will’s head flopped about on his shoulders.

He didn’t know what the dude had in mind, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. He mentally braced himself to board another flight of Air Hopkins.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, the man relinquished his hold on Will’s shirt. “Goddamn.” He looked Will up and down. “What kinda get-up is that?”

Will blinked moisture out of his eyes, and his head stopped spinning long enough to allow his brain to compose coherent sentences. “It’s a Pizza Zone get-up. I work for Pizza Zone. I deliver pizzas. That’s my job. I take pizzas to people who want pizzas. So, look, if you changed your mind about the pizza, you could’ve just said so.”