James Maxey - The Prophet and the Dragon

Dragon Sighted in Natural Habitat!

2012-01-30T18:33:00.001-08:00

Cheryl's coworker Lisa Vlastellica spotted Greatshadow today on display at Quail Ridge Books on Wade Avenue in Raleigh and was kind enough to snap this photo. This is the first reported sighting of this book in its natural habitat of a book store.

As one might discern by looking at the photo closely, I'll be at Quail Ridge on Friday, February 10 to sign copies of Greatshadow. While the book is officially released tomorrow, I'm calling the tenth my book launch. There will be dragon cookies and possibly a cake with the book photo.

It's a relief to see the book in a bookstore at last. I've been a bundle of nerves all week about the release tomorrow. I started working on Greatshadow back in the summer of 2009. It both exciting, frightening, and a little surreal to know that the book is finally out in the world for readers to find.

The Year of the Dragon!

2012-01-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

I wish I could say I was clever enough to have arranged for my Goodread's Greatshadow giveaway to have purposefully ended yesterday so that I could announce the winners today at the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Dragon. On the other hand, I'll take the serendipity of the development as a good omen.

I'm going to be doing my best to be making this my own personal Year of the Dragon. I'm still tapping out chapters on my first draft of Witchbreaker and am already daydreaming heavily of books that follow it. I pretty much wake up thinking about dragons and go to sleep thinking about them. Perhaps I even dream of them, but I seldom remember my dreams. Perhaps my slumbering thoughts are devoured by nocturnal dragons. Imagination would be an appropriate diet for a primal dragon of nightmares. Hmm. I could totally turn that into a book.

Back to Greatshadow: One week from tomorrow, the book hits shelves. I'm weirdly nervous about it. I mean, this is my fifth novel to see print, and at any given time there's at least one or two anthologies in bookstores that contain a story by me. I've reached a point where it's entirely possible for me to go in and out of a bookstore without looking to see if my books are in stock. But, there's something different about Greatshadow. I've taken some real gambles with the book in terms of style and subject matter. I feel like I should take some gambles with selling the book. I just want to go stand in the isles of bookstores and shove copies into the hands of anyone who makes eye contact and say, "Here! Read this book!"

Which, actually, is kind of what I'll be doing on February 10 at 7:30 at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. I'm having a book launch for Greatshadow. I'll read a little from the opening, take some questions, then sign books. Also, I'll be bribing the audience with dragon cookies. (Did you know you can buy dragon-shaped cookie cutters? I didn't until quite recently. Is this a great country or what?)

Anyway, back to the giveaway: I launched the giveaway hoping I might interest a few hundred readers. Some of the other epic fantasy novels that had drawings going on had 400-500 entries. I told myself I'd be completely satisfied if I got 300 entries.

I wound up with 807 entries. Yowza. I'll give thanks to both Gerard Miley's cover art and, of course, the positive energy that flowed throughout the universe as the Year of the Dragon approached.

The winners are:

Cristen Ferguson
Heather Fourman
Brandi O'Bannon
Randy Smith
Ambereen Khan
Norma Navarrete
Melissa Alles
Margaret Scheiner
Ashley Keith
Donna Montgomery

Congrats, all! I'll have these in the mail to you tomorrow!

Goodreads Greatshadow Giveaway!

2012-01-13T08:48:00.001-08:00

At last! I arrived home yesterday and found a case of Greatshadows! I was starting to worry I wouldn't see any actual copies of the book before it turned up in bookstores. With the release date only a little more than two weeks away, I'd hoped to start giving away copies weeks ago, but better late than never!

For advance readers who were promised copies last month, be patient, I'll start mailing out those copies next week.

For anyone who would still like to get their hands on a free advance copy, I'm pleased to announce my first ever giveaway through the worlds largest website for book reviews and recommendations, Goodreads. Ten copies will be given away through Goodreads from readers who sign up for the give away by January 23. This particular giveaway is limited to US readers; I'm investigating arranging a giveaway in other countries, so if you're one of my international fans, stay tuned!

If you're not a member of Goodreads, signing up is easy and free. To enter the drawing, visit Goodread's Greatshadow page.

Tune in to The State of Things!

2012-01-10T12:51:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow (Wednesday 1-11) I'll be a guest on The State of Things on my local NPR station, WUNC. The show broadcasts live at noon, though I think I'll be on during the third segment of the show, probably closer to 12:40. The show also rebroadcasts each night at 9pm, and can be streamed live from the WUNC webpage. Archives of old shows can also be found there.

I'll be talking about my two latest releases, Burn Baby Burn and Greatshadow, telling the stories behind the stories. Tune it tomorrow!

Nobody Gets the Reviews!

2012-01-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

Back in 2000, when I sat down to write Nobody Gets the Girl, I was unaware of any stand-alone, original superhero novels that had been written since the 1930s. Prose superheroes had a good run in the pulp era, but once comic books and superheroes became almost synonymous the only superhero novels published in recent decades were either liscensed stories featuring comic book properties like Batman and Superman, or else the shared world Wild Card novels.

Nobody hit book stores as part of an early wave of independent superhero novels, but, in 2003, you could have collected all these novels onto a single smallish bookshelf. But, in the last few years, superhero novels have experienced a grand awakening, facilitated in part by the ease of self-publishing on Amazon. Now, dozens of new ones turn up each month, more than I can keep track of.

Fortunately, there is someone out there who is keeping track of these things: Eric Searleman and his website SuperheroNovels.com. And, while his focus is on new releases, I'm honored to report that he today published a review of Nobody! My favorite line from the review is his description of my protagonist, where he captures the fan-boy geek at the core of the character: "The guy is an invisible horndog. And if you think about it, that pretty much describes most of the men who attend the San Diego Comic-Con. They’re all invisible and they all want to sleep with sexy superheroes."

And, as long as I'm talking about reviews for Nobody, a second one also turned up last week at a blog called JohnnySaturn.com. It's just a brief mention on his way to talk about other stuff, but he does say "that this is the best superhero prose I’ve read since August Grossman’s 'Soon I Will Be Invincible.'"

Not a bad way to kick off 2012!

Witchbreaker, 20941

2011-12-25T09:48:00.000-08:00

I've started the third book of the Dragon Apocalypse, Witchbreaker. (It was originally titled Sorrow, but this was a downer of a title.) December is a horrible month for writing, since it seems like every week has two or three evenings where we are going to some holiday gathering or another. I'm not complaining about these events; I like hanging out with my friends and family! But, it does tend to shred up my "free" hours.

Making matters worse, I caught the flu near the beginning of the month, and spent many of my days off sleeping 18 hours a day. I actually had to use three sick days for, you know, being sick. That sucks! Sick days are ordinarily a valuable secret weapon in any writer's arsenal, especially when under a deadline. Fortunately, my actual deadline for this book is July. If I produce 10k words a week through January and February, I'll have a 100k first draft with plenty of time for rewrites.

Witchbreaker follows the young witch Sorrow, who is introduced in Hush. In that book, she taps into the elemental spirit of a dragon, giving her tremendous power, which she intends to use to destroy the Church of the Book in revenge for it's centuries long campaign of wiping out all witches. Unfortunately, the magical forces she's accessed are so strong she's lost control of them, and her quest to destroy the church instead becomes a quest to save her own life. She's joined in this quest by an unlikely ally--a five-hundred year old amnesiac super-warrior who may or may not be the legendary Witchbreaker, the famed knight who almost single-handedly vanquished the once mighty kingdom of witches. Sorrow needs to find the immortal Queen of Witches so she can learn to control her powers. The possible Witchbreaker wants to find the Queen to kill her. But, at least on the finding the Queen part of the job, their are benefits to them working together.

This book builds to the most important battle with a primal dragon yet, one that will forever change the balance of power among the dragons and place all of mankind in the crosshairs of destruction.

And, you only have to wait until January 2013 to read it!

Coming soon: News about new appearances I'll be making once Greatshadow is released. Cons! Classes! Discussion panels! Book launches! I'm going to have a busy start to 2012!

The first six chapters of Greatshadow, now available on Goodreads!

2011-12-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Want to get a headstart on The Dragon Apocalypse? Interested in seeing what all the fuss is about? My publishers have graciously supplied me with a preview of the first six chapters of Greatshadow, now available as a download from Goodreads!

Most standard previews Solaris provides are just one chapter, but I lobbied hard to get a six chapter preview because the first six chapters form a more or less complete story arc, introducing most of the cast and building to the books first big dragon battle in chapter five, and revealing Infidel's secret origins in chapter six, as the stage is set for the most dangerous mission of her life. Goodreads only allows the preview in epub format for download, but even if you don't have an epub compatible reader, you can still read the whole excerpt online!

Enjoy!

Greatshadow

Your Browser Does Not Support IFrames. Click here to read the e-book on Goodreads

Final Greatshadow Cover

2011-12-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

Behold! The final cover! The back text reads:

The warrior woman known as Infidel is legendary for her superhuman strength and skin tough as chain mail. She’s made few friends during her career as a sword-for-hire, and many powerful enemies. Following the death of her closest companion, Infidel finds herself weary of life as a mercenary and sets her eyes on one final prize that will allow her to live out the rest of her days in luxury, the priceless treasure trove of Greatshadow.

Greatshadow is the primal dragon of fire. His malign intelligence spies upon mankind through every flickering candle, patiently waiting to devour victims careless with even the smallest flame. The Church of the Book has assembled a team of twelve battle-hardened adventurers to slay the dragon once and for all. But tensions run high between the leaders of the quest who view the mission as a holy duty and the super-powered mercenaries who add power to their ranks, who dream only of Greatshadow's vast wealth. If the warriors fail to slay the beast, will they doom mankind to death by fire?

Greatshadow is the first book in an exciting new adventure series from a master of dragon fantasy.

Greatshadow is now available for preorder on Amazon! But, for followers of my blog, if you're willing to write a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Goodreads, and don't want to wait until January 31 to get your hands on a copy, drop me a line at nobodynovelwriter(at)yahoo.com. I have ebook editions available now, and will soon have a small supply of actual books.

Buy, Baby, Buy!

2011-11-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Burn Baby Burn is now available on Kindle! Nook users, don't despair, the book has been uploaded to Barnes and Noble as well, and should go live in the next day or so.

Burn Baby Burn is my first real "indy" novel. While I'm still pursing a traditional publishing path for my fantasy novels, BBB is the first of what I hope will be a long run of fast paced, funny, and unapologetically geeky superhero novels that I'll be self-publishing as ebooks.

Burn Baby Burn is the product of long, long years of daydreaming. Perhaps something is wrong with my moral core, but for all my life any time I've walked into a bank, I've looked around and thought, "Man. This place would be so easy to rob if I had superpowers!" In this book, I bring my most felonious fantasies to life in a superpowered crime spree that threatens to end civilization as we know it. Of course, since it's a supervillain novel, you can count on superheroes showing up to try to save the day. The book is chock full of superhuman slugfests, mixed together with musings on life and death, hatred and love, and what kind of wisdom chimpanzees could offer if they wrote books. At the core of it all is a romance for the ages. I promise you will not be disappointed. A bargain at $4.99. You know you want it!

HUSH IS FINISHED! Also, a peek at the cover...

2011-10-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! I just emailed Jonathon Oliver at Solaris Books with my complete draft of Hush, the second book of the Dragon Apocalypse! I started working on Hush around the first of March, so it's taken eight months to bring it to fruition. At one time, eight months would have seemed pretty fast, though having cranked out Burn Baby Burn in a week, the pace seems a bit laid back.

Of course, writing an epic fantasy is a LOT more labor intensive than writing a superhero novel. For epic fantasy, you have to create every last aspect of the universe. With a superhero novel set in modern times, I don't need to stop and spend two pages describing Richmond, Virginia, or explaining how a car works. On the other hand, to create my fictional city of Commonground I have to devote thousands of words and figure out all sorts of mundane bits like where people get thier food, what they do with corpses, who makes the clothing, etc. And in Hush the heroes travel around the world (and several chapter outside the world) via clipper ship, a vessel that also comes with a high word count to make it vivid and plausible. I'm not complaining about this extra work, mind you. Indeed, it's one of the most entertaining aspects of writing fiction to try to bring to life unusual settings.

Above is a sneak peek at the cover design for Hush as sketched out by Gerard Miley. I love the action of this sketch and can't wait for the finished product!

For most of November, I'll be taking a break from producing new fiction. I'm getting married November 11, so that's obviously where my time and energy will be devoted for the next couple of weeks. But, I do promise a few blog posts during this time, and hope to have a big announcement in the next few days regarding Burn Baby Burn.

Greatshadow Preview: Bone-Handled Knife

2011-10-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my novel Greatshadow, due out January 2012 from Solaris Books.

Greatshadow is the primal dragon of fire, spying upon mankind through every candle flame, watching for any moment of carelessness to strike and feed by burning barns, houses, or even entire towns. To confront this ancient evil, the Church of the Book assembles a team of twelve battle-hardened adventurers to seek out the dragon his his lair. Half of the team regards killing Greatshadow as a sacred duty; the other half dreams only of the beast's priceless treasure horde. Will these warriors learn to put aside their differences and slay the monster? Or will a weakened force merely wound the dragon, and trigger a world-wide inferno?

Greathshadow Preview: Bone-Handled Knife

When Infidel grabbed me by the seat of my pants and charged toward the window, I didn’t protest. Partly this was due to the speed of her action, but mostly due to my inebriation from the sacramental wine we’d stolen. Plus, it wasn’t the first time I’d been defenestrated by her. Of course, this window was five-hundred feet up, in a lava-pygmy temple carved into the sheer cliff face of a volcano

In my semi-drunken haze, I admired the view as I departed the temple, surveying the landscape around me. The night sky was bright orange as the bubbling caldera above reflected against belching steam. Far below, the dark, vine-covered canopy of trees draped like a casually tossed blanket down slopes stretching to the moonlit ocean. A lovely tropical night, one might even call it serene, save for the steady pulse of war drums and the nerve-jangling pygmy battle cry. It’s difficult to relax when five-hundred waist-high men are barking in unison, “Yik-yik-yik-yik-yik!”

I reached the apex of my arc and began to fall. The pygmies were drowned out by the whistling wind and a deafening, high-pitched shriek tearing from my throat.

I don’t know why I was screaming. If experience was any guide, Infidel had aimed me toward a particularly bushy looking patch of forest. While my brain had faith in her, my vocal cords had doubts. I quickly saw that my brain was correct as I fell toward a living net of blood-tangle vines. I threw my hands over my eyes. My leather gauntlets spared my face from the worst of the thorns as I punched into the canopy, the vines popping and snapping beneath my weight. I bounced from branch to branch on the trees below. Even with my leather armor, the beating was as bad as anything I’d ever received at the hands of a mean-spirited bouncer.

Seconds later I jerked to a stop, completely tangled. I spread my fingers and found my face inches above a jagged obsidian boulder. The sobering realization I’d just escaped a messy death negated the effects of the stolen wine. I reached for the steel flask in my back pocket and took a quick gulp to restore myself. As much as I wanted to hang in the vines until my nerves calmed, I knew that the pygmies wouldn’t need long to find me. I reached for my bone-handled hunting knife and chopped at the tendrils, my body lurching, until I slid onto the boulder and tumbled to the ground.

I looked up at the hole I’d punched in the canopy. Far above, a dark speck shot from the window through which my hasty exit had been facilitated. The speck quickly took on the shape of a woman as she hurtled toward the gap in the trees.

Infidel was laughing. She had both hands wrapped around the dragon-skull, hugging it to her chest like an oversized watermelon. Her long blonde hair trailed out behind her. She was still wearing the loose-fitting white blouse and navy breeches from her recent stint as a mercenary in the pirate wars. She was barefoot, the soles of her feet black as coal. The orange light caught the string of yellow beads around her throat, a necklace of human molars that she’d kept as a sort of diary while she’d served aboard the Freewind.

If she’d been aiming for the hole I’d left in the vines she missed, overshooting by several yards. I lost sight of her but heard curses and grunts as she bounced from branch to branch, the blood-tangle snapping as it slowed her fall.

I managed to find my feet as she stumbled out of the darkness. Her blouse and breeches had been torn in a dozen places, but there wasn’t a scratch on her enchanted skin. She had blood red flowers jutting from her hair, and thorny vines draped over her shoulders. She held the dragon skull above her head one-handed, as if it was carved from balsa. With her other hand, she used her cutlass as a machete. Her lips were pressed together tightly as she spotted me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Nothing’s broken,” I said, my voice trembling. I took another swig from the flask. “Your aim’s still good.”

She giggled. “I’m glad you’re fine, because I’m looking forward to teasing you for the next ten years about that scream. Even I can’t hit a note that high.”

I held a finger to my lips and whispered, “You can laugh later. The pygmies won’t be far behind.”

“We’ve got a good head start,” she said, looking up at the temple. She plucked a few flowers from her hair and flicked them away. “You worry too much.”

For most of my life, I’ve earned a reputation as a man who doesn’t worry enough. It’s only around Infidel that I play the role of responsible adult. She’s been magicked up to be as strong as ten men, with skin as tough as dragon hide. Her supernatural gifts have left her fearless, an aspect of her personality that draws me like a moth to a flame. Like many a moth, I sometimes get singed.

She held the dragon skull toward me, admiring it in the dim light. “The Black Swan’s going to slip in her own drool when she gets a look at this.”

Since I was presently in hock for a life-endangering sum of money to the Black Swan, I hoped that would be the case.

I whispered, “Let’s get going. The pygmies know this jungle better than we do, and –”

There was a tapping sound, like raindrops hitting a leaf. Infidel looked over her shoulder, stretching out her long, slender leg. Three porcupine quills were caught in the torn fabric of her pants. Suddenly, the air around her was thick with flying quills, some tangling in her hair, some bouncing off her impervious forehead. My own armor sprouted a dozen of the missiles. None made it through the leather, which was good. Lava-pygmies tip their darts with poison.

“Follow me!” Infidel shouted, slicing at a wall of vines with her cutlass and leaping through, the dragon-skull balanced on her shoulder. She could have stayed and fought without risk. By running she was protecting both me and the pygmies. We’d come out here to rob them, not to kill them.

I ran as fast as I could, slashing out with my bone-handled knife to better clear the path. In the darkness, I focused on Infidel’s bright hair bobbing before me like a ghost. The pitter-patter of pygmy feet echoed in the canopy. Darts tapped across my shoulder blades as they continued to fire.

I kept falling farther behind. I was only a week away from my fiftieth birthday, too old for this profession. Once this was over, I swore I would find a safer, more gentlemanly way of earning a living. My breath came in ragged gasps. A stabbing pain ran up my side. I could barely raise my knife to chop away the remnant vines Infidel left in her wake. I felt sure that if I pulled off my boots, sweat would pour out like stale beer from a pitcher.

I wiped the perspiration from my eyes and when I pulled my hand away, Infidel was gone. I kept running. The darkness in front of me had an Infidel-sized hole torn from it, and beyond I could once more see the rolling clouds of the eerie orange sky. There was a bass rumble ahead, a sound like a waterfall. I skid to a halt on the lip of a cliff and looked down into a deep scar in the earth. Infidel dangled from a mass of roots just beneath my feet. She was still carrying the dragon skull, but her cutlass was nowhere to be seen.

“I know where we are!” she yelled, her voice nearly drowned out by the rushing water beneath her.

I knew as well: the southeast slope of the volcano is cut through by a whitewater river that cascades all the way to the sea, about ten miles distant.

“We’re practically home!” she shouted.

I was of a different opinion. Many years ago, a palm-reader in Commonground told me I’d die of drowning. More poetically, she’d told me, “The sea will swallow your bones.” It had been one reason I hadn’t joined Infidel on the Freewind. I extend my caution by never imbibing anything weak enough for a fish to live in.

“Jump!” Infidel yelled.

“Let’s weigh our options!” I shouted back.

Of course, arguing was pointless. Infidel pulled herself up on the thick root she held, clamping onto it with her teeth. With her now free hand, she punched the cliff wall. The root-draped stone beneath me crumbled.

As I dropped, Infidel grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me toward her. She wrapped her arm around me, pressing me tight against her unbreakable body. Her breasts flattened against my back as she spooned me, curling us into a ball with her powerful legs. Her breath was hot against my neck. We fell through darkness, weightless.

I couldn’t breathe. Partially because Infidel’s arm across my belly was as gentle as a python, but, even more, because I so often dream of Infidel’s embrace. She’d been a mere teen when I met her; I a worn-out drunk twice her age. I’d watched as she’d ripped the arm off a bold warrior two feet taller than her who’d pawed her lithe body as she’d stood at the bar of the Black Swan. I wasn’t the only man to witness this that quickly decided an attempt at seduction wasn’t worth the risk.

I was, however, the only one who bought her a cider that evening and told her tales of the ruined cities hidden in the jungle. I’ve always been quick to make friends. Fate has brought me many fortunes over the years, and I’ve spent those fortunes making sure the patrons of the Black Swan never go thirsty. Yet, I’ve never had a friend quite so true as Infidel. Her lightness balances my darkness; her recklessness makes the ongoing foolishness of my life look like sage wisdom. The two of us laugh together freely, and trust each other with our lives. I’m the one person who would never betray her for the obscenely large bounty on her head. She’s the one person who never abandons me when my money runs out and I’m suddenly begging for drinks.

Never once in ten years of friendship has a night passed in which I didn’t fantasize about her touch. I’ve never spoken a word of my secret passion. She means too much to me. It’s not my arm I fear losing; it’s her company. Our time together is so much sweeter than our time apart.

As dreamlike as her embrace might be, there was the unfortunate reality that we weren’t in a bed, we were hurtling toward a dark, raging river. With a horrible jolt, Infidel’s shoulder cracked a boulder. We bounced into the torrent and her grip loosened. I inhaled, a bad move since my head was under water. We slammed into another rock and I slipped from her grasp. My face popped above the surface for a second and I coughed, water spraying from my lips. I sucked a cupful of air and croaked, weakly, “Infidel!”

She didn’t answer as I bobbed along, careening from rock to rock. In moments of panic, the mind can latch onto the most trivial details, and I noticed I’d lost my knife. Infidel either misplaced or broke her weapons on a daily basis, but I’d carried this knife for forty years; it had been a gift from my grandfather. For a fleeting second, finding the knife felt like a priority. Then, from the thunder ahead, I realized that I was about to be swept over a waterfall, and my new priority became not to do so. I clawed desperately at boulders, but my hands had no strength. I still could only gulp small mouthfuls of air. The rocks pummeled me like the fists of giants. The knife-sharp pain that had torn my gut while running sliced me from groin to gullet. The water pushed me under and I went numb.

I slammed into a rock face-first. Stars danced before me, changing to snowflakes as they showered down in the darkness.

I was swept over the lip of the waterfall. The drop proved to be the shortest distance I’d fallen that evening, a trifling fifty-foot plunge into a broad pool. The water at the base of the fall roiled. In the turbulence, I couldn’t even guess which direction was up and which was down. The shallow gulps of air I’d gotten bobbing in the river were exhausted in seconds. My leather armor was heavy as steel plates. The pounding water pinned me. Yet, the pain and pressure felt distant. The water was warm, heated by the volcano, almost pleasant. The polished gravel beneath me was as comfortable as a feather bed. I went limp, all my weariness flowing from me like bubbles from my lips. There were worse ways to die.

As I was about to discover.

Just as I was on the verge of sleep and surrender, a strong hand grabbed my hair. I was tugged into the air and tossed over Infidel’s left shoulder like a sack of sodden potatoes. She was still carrying the dragon skull, her fist shoved inside the base. She waded through knee-deep water as I draped across her back, my eyes at the level of her heart-shaped buttocks. Water poured out of my lips and nose, but I couldn’t muster the will to inhale.

Infidel laid me on a beach of black sand, dropping the skull beside me, then straightened, shaking her head to get the hair from her eyes. She looked as soggy as a drowned rat; her torn pirate blouse hung from her arms like flaps of skin on a once-fat man. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, knotted so horribly that she needed a razor more than a comb. At some point, her necklace of molars must have snapped. The only evidence it had ever been there was a single tooth wedged between her hip and the top of her broad belt. Despite her sorry condition, her waterlogged clothes revealed the magnificent paradox of her body, the sleek and sultry curves that sat atop angular, iron muscles.

I spotted something amiss on her flawless form. A dark red stain glistened atop her left shoulder. I sucked in a spoonful of air, the effort making me tremble, and whispered, “You’re bleeding.”

She frowned as she followed my gaze to the crimson circle that seeped out across her blouse in ever-lightening shades of pink. Her face turned pale as she pushed the remnants of her pirate blouse down her shoulder, revealing streaks of red across her ivory skin. She wiped away the blood with her fingers, leaving behind smooth, unblemished flesh.

She looked back at me, her face turning whiter still.

I looked down. I understood why I couldn’t breathe.

The good news was, I’d found my knife.

Progress Report

2011-10-12T17:30:00.000-07:00

October has been a productive month. I've completed a polishing draft of Burn Baby Burn and sent the manuscript to Rick Fisher with e-Quality press for proof reading and final formatting. I can't wait to get this book out! It's the first thing I've ever written directly for ebook publication, and if it does half as well as Nobody Gets the Girl has done as an ebook I'll be thrilled. My biggest concern is whether I should market it as a sequel to Nobody, or present it as a stand alone book.

In spirit, it stands alone. It takes place seven years after Nobody, and features a different cast. You can pick up Burn Baby Burn if you've never read Nobody and have no problem at all following the story. However, if a person were going to read both books, it would make more sense to read Nobody first, since Burn Baby Burn takes place in a world that's been changed by the events of Nobody, and this inevitably produces spoilers.

Of course, BBB is only one novel I've written this year. The second is Hush, and I'm now producing the final polished draft to turn into Solaris. I technically have until the end of November to complete the book, but my goal is to have it turned in my the end of October. Of course, today I finally bothered to look at a calendar and I really only have four free days left in the month to focus on the book. Eeep! It's still doable, but I'm stunned at how quickly a month gets away from me these days.

After that, I'm taking November off, since I'm getting married November 11 and want to enjoy my honeymoon without worrying about word counts. But, on December 1, I'm back in the chair to start work on Sorrow, the third book of the Dragon Apocalypse. This year will definitely set a record for how many words I've produced in a year. Over the course of the next 15 or so months, I'll have four new books out, doubling the number of novels I've had published to date.

If you needed some further sign that the world really will end in 2012....

Class Outline on Getting Past the First Chapter of Your Novel

2011-10-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I taught a class on How to Get Past the First Chapter of Your Novel at the Orange County Library. I promised the class I'd put the full outline I used up on my blog, so, here's the promise kept. It's sketchy, since this was mainly used to prompt me into regurgitating the contents of my brain. Still hopefully it will be of some use for those who were in the class, and may be of some interest to other as well.

HOW TO GET PAST THE FIRST CHAPTER OF YOUR NOVEL

Part One: Okay, Brain, let’s do this.

The Most Dangerous Thought: One day, when I’m a writer, I’ll have time to write.

Three Empowering Thoughts
1)To write a good novel, you must first write a bad novel.
2)The worst novel you put onto paper is better than the best novel in your head.
3)“The artist must maintain his swagger. He must, he must, he must be intoxicated by ritual as well as result.” Patti Smith, “High on Rebellion”

Part Two: How to write a novel.

Three ways to write a novel
1)Lightning in a bottle.
2)The architectural approach.
3)The hybrid engine.

The hybrid method
1)Lightning arcs.
2)To catch lightning in a bottle, bring a bottle.
3)Arcs are built from scenes. Scenes are built from characters, settings and events. Characters, settings, and events are built from nouns.

Lightning Arcs
An arc is an extended series of events that move your character from one state of mind to another.
One trick to making an arc is to work backward from the desired final state. If you’re writing “A Christmas Carol” and you know that Scrooge has to be loving and generous at the end of the book, you could deduce that in the beginning of the book he should be spiteful and stingy. Once you know the middle and the end of a characters journey, the middle is easy.
(In a pulling teeth, sweating blood kind of way.)

To Catch Lightning in a Bottle, Bring a Bottle
Switching analogies, writing a novel is a bit like working a jigsaw puzzle. Your imagination will keep bringing you little squiggly pieces that intrigue you, but leave you wondering where they fit. But, like a jigsaw puzzle, the key is to build the edges first. To do this, you need to figure out what the major sections of your story are going to be.

Examples:
Burn Baby Burn
1)Let’s rob some banks!
2)Hounded by heroes!
3)Sanctuary! (The false solution)
4)Doomsday! Oops!

The Wizard of Oz (movie version)
1)Kansas sucks!
2)Let’s go see the wizard!
3)Let’s go get the broom! (The false solution.)
4)There’s no place like home.

A Christmas Carol
1)Scrooge sucks!
2)The ghost of Christmas past
3)The ghost of Christmas present.
4)Whose name is on the stone?
5)Scrooge redeemed!

Exercise:
For your own novel write down three, four, or five major parts. Be vague! You don’t need full sentences. Try to keep things under 25 words.
A generic, multipurpose outline:
1)Problem.
2)Gather info and allies.
3)The false solution.
4)Problem solved!

Plots are made of arcs, arcs are made of scenes, scenes are built from nouns. (And, okay, other stuff)
Scenic thinking is the key skill in writing a novel that immerses the reader in the world and creates a sense of immediacy. Your story is going to be about big, abstract things like love and honor and grief. But, to get to the abstract, you must guide the reader there via the concrete. For this, you need nouns. Good nouns go off in the mind like flashbulbs. If you are building a good scene, you can read a list of only the nouns and they will be enough to hint at the story.

Exercise:
Imagine the opening scene of your novel. Make a list of interesting nouns that will hint at where and when the story takes place. Some categories of nouns to get you started: Clothing, creatures, constructs, containers, food, foliage, body parts, and knick-knacks. Try to think of nouns that provoke sensory reactions, like porch swings, bacon, and Vaseline.

Part Three: Butt in chair.

Writing Mantras
1)Here. Now.
2)Never look back.
3)Little by little, the work gets done.

---
If you were in the class, thanks for coming! I had a great time. If you weren't in the class, don't despair. Everything I went over in class has been developed over the years on this blog, and I promise to continue posting about writing for many years to come. Stay tuned!

Hush update, plus Link-O-Rama!

2011-10-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

I just finished the third draft of Hush! It's now 104,500 words long, not much longer than the second draft, but that's because I chopped the old final chapter, which really was more of the first chapter of the next book in the series, Sorrow. I decided that the old last chapter didn't sufficiently focus on the core characters of Stagger and Infidel, and I now end the novel as Stagger's story comes to an end.

Next step: Ignore the book for a week, then launch into draft #4, which is where I really start focusing on polishing the style. I'm happy with the current shape of the story and doubt I'll be tinkering with it much further. There's a few more dangling threads than I'd normally leave in a book, but since this is part of a larger series I'm hoping these threads are tipped with effective hooks. Gotta sell that next book, after all.

While I've been hunkered down typing, the great interweb has continued to spin. I have for your clicking pleasure a variety of links.

First, I'm teaching a class this coming Saturday, October 8, at the Orange County Library in Hillsborough called "How to Get Past the First Chapter and Finish Your Novel." Details may be found here.

Second, Alethea Kontis with IGMS has just posted a review of There Is No Wheel.

And, speaking of IGMS, did you know that all back issues are now available as kindle downloads on Amazon? I'm not going to link to all 24 issues, but if you're a fan of good SF and Fantasy, it's definitely worth checking out.

Finally, check out the two most recent "The Future and You" podcasts from Stephen Euin Cobb. These two episodes, one on the ethic of Cryonics and one on the future of Alternate Energy, are actually live recordings of two panels Stephen and I were on at ConCarolinas back in June. Lively discussions, both.

Halfway through Hush, V3

2011-09-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Just finished my rewrite of chapter 10 of Hush, third draft. My calendar calls for me to finish the draft by the end of the month, and since the end of chapter 10 marks the middle of the book, I'm well on track to hit my target.

Third drafts are where I try to fix problems my wise-readers have brought to my attention. They are also a draft where I try to catch continuity errors. Usually, it's just trivial stuff. In chapter 9, there was a fight scene and I rather vividly describe one of the characters involved as being red in the face while she's screaming. But, in chapter 10, Stagger says of the same character that when he'd seen her last, her face had been pale. Simple enough to fix, but also the type of error that most terrifies me. It's easy for me to keep track of the big picture and avoid continuity errors in the plot, but my cast has a dozen or more named players and trying to remember small details about them from chapter to chapter like what color shirt they are wearing can really trip me up. In the grand scheme of things, these details aren't really important. The plot will unfold exactly the same whether the captain of this ship is wearing a white shirt or a black shirt. Unfortunately, tiny contradictions can bug a reader and cause them to lose focus. At the same time, you can't leave out these minor details, since they add the sensory detail neccessary for a scene to come to life. I know some people keep "bibles" where they write down all these details, but I've never found that all that helpful. I do have a notes file where I jot down small points I know I'll reference later, but I find that I almost never look at it except to put new stuff in.

Wheel winners, and some fine short fiction

2011-09-07T13:43:00.001-07:00

We have winners! I fired up my steam-powered, robotic prize picking monkey, Robo-Bobo and had him thrust his razor-sharp claws into the vast hat I use to store my contest entries. At first Robo-Bobo wouldn't release the winning entries, demanding increases in his rations of bananas and coal, but I distracted the poor devil with a firm blow from a two-by-four and liberated the winning names. Negotiating with unruly monkeys only encourages them.

And the winners are: Jeff Domer, Jr.! Edgar Mason! and Nathaniel Lee! All sent in 100 word or less short stories that I thought did the flash fiction genre proud. And, luckily, I have permission to share these stories:

ONE PUNCH
by Jeff Domer Jr.

It started with a punch. One punch too many from a bully named Red.

Revenge was on Nick’s mind. Not the revenge that brings a gun to school and makes a bully a martyr. The kind of revenge he wanted was the kind that took time and research.

Time, Nick thought to himself. Nick was close to knowing how to bend time back on it’s self. When he broke the mystery of time, he would go back. Red would not be remembered. Red would not be a martyr. Nicolas Knowbokov would make Red a nobody.

*

BINDINGS

by Edgar Mason

When the pages began to fall out of The Collected Short Fiction of William Faulkner, she knew it was over.

She undid every strap in the apartment. She untied all the laces onher shoes. She unbound her hair from its many braids.

Gently, she lowered his body down from where it had hung since the night he had decided he would die. She broke the webs the spiders hadcast over his eyes, and kissed him for the last time.

And then she left, with no more bindings on her – nor on him.

*

VERISIMILITUDE

by Nathaniel Lee

It's the small things that make a life. A chipped diamond ring foundon a table tells a story. A sprinkle of glass and tire marks at an intersection tell a different one. Or the receipts in a library copy of "The Prince": lifts for shoes, a power tie, strawberry yogurt, andTaco Bell. Stained.

It's these tiny details that count, that make someone real. I thinkas many as half the people in the city are my creations, now.

Oh, don't look at me like that. I know you don't believe me. I know everything about you.

My child.

*

I should also note that Nathaniel is something of a pro at this 100 word fiction. He posts a story daily at the site Mirrorshards.

You can find out more about Edgar Boyles at the site saturdayradio.blogspot.com.

Interview at Futurismic

2011-09-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

Luc Reid has interviewed me about my experience writing Burn Baby Burn in one week. The article can now be read at Futurismic. A teaser quote from the interview:

"I wasn’t aiming for epic fantasy. I was shooting for a page-turning pulp
adventure featuring atomic supermen and space aliens drifting along dark desert
highways. This is the sort of novel I used to devour on a single summer
afternoon when I was a teenager."

And, speaking of quotes, I am far too modest and also a bit too lazy to sit around collecting all the pithy nuggets of wisdom I spread across the internet. But, the Codex website has a thread called "quotedex" where participants can quote other members when they say something that strikes their fancy. Luc has lately been collecting some of these quotes from individual authors, and has just recently posted some of my quotes from the forum. For a sampling, check out the article here. A teaser quote:

For me–and I can’t speak for anyone else–my formula was stupid stubbornness. I
kept plugging along despite rejection letters and harsh critiques because I was
too dumb to understand that I really was no good at what I was doing and it was
time to give up and move on to something else.

Finally, don't forget that the drawing for signed copies of There Is No Wheel ends next week! Send in your 100 word or less short stories to enter at nobodynovelwriter (at) yahoo.com.

There is No Wheel.... Wait! Yes, there is! And you can win one!

2011-08-23T12:19:00.001-07:00

It's my great delight to announce that my short story collection, There is No Wheel, has just been published in a print edition by Spotlight Publishing. It's now available on Amazon. I originally self-published this collection as an ebook, and it's done pretty well to date in that format. But, I still have a fondness for actual paper books, so when Spotlight approached me about releasing a physical edition, my answer was an enthusiastic yes!

I got a few contributor copies out of the deal, so it's time for a giveaway! I've got three signed copies that I'm prepared to mail anywhere in the universe. This is a chance for all you Venusians to get your hands on some free fiction! Since this is a collection of short stories, all I ask is that, to enter the drawing, you submit a short story. Like, really, really short. Under one-hundred words, including title. If you give me permission, I'll post your story in a future blog post. All entries will go into a drawing for the free copies. I'll announce the winner September 7.

Email your entries to nobodynovelwriter (at) yahoo.com with the subject line, "Wheel Giveaway."

Good luck!

Five tricks for writing a novel in a week

2011-08-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I wrote a novel in a week. Now that I’ve had a week away from that task, here are a few key tricks that made it possible:

1. To capture lightning in a jar, bring a jar.

I had a stack of note cards filled with significant plot points for Burn Baby Burn. By the end of chapter one, I’d rendered half of them useless. But, while my efforts at outlining in advance weren’t terribly useful in the details, I did happen to create a structure that I maintained throughout the writing. I realized, based on my rough outline, that the book would unfold in four major acts. In part one, I’d introduce my supervillain protagonists and have them go on a crime spree. In part two, a team of superheroes would come after them. Part three would involve the supervillains trying to escape by finding sanctuary in a foreign country that had no extradition treaty with the US. In part four, the heroes would come after them anyway, and the resulting battle would place the world in danger. For reasons of simple symmetry, I decided that each of my four major acts would be built out of four chapters, and the target length for the chapters would be four thousand words. This would produce a novel sixty-four thousand words long.

By keeping this structure in mind, I never had moments where the immensity of the project overwhelmed me. I could just focus on the development of my current four chapter arc. Breaking the story telling down into these manageable components was a key factor in making me feel as if the work confronting me wasn’t particularly formidable. Deciding on the structure provided edges for the jigsaw puzzle of story I was going to assemble.

2. Now what? Then what? Then what?

This one is so simple I’m almost embarrassed to put it on the list. But, lots of times during the week I was writing Burn Baby Burn, I’d run my imagination dry. I couldn’t keep typing because I didn’t know what would happen next. On most of my previous novels, if I reached this point, I could just walk away and come back another day. By the third day of BBB, I was walking away, then waiting for twenty minutes while my brain answered the question, “Now what?” Then I’d go back and write the one event I’d imagined, and be stuck again. On days 4-7, I got past the horrible sensation of constantly running dry on ideas by walking away, thinking, “Now what?” and then, before I would go back to write, I’d figure out the next two “Then whats?” It worked! Thinking three events ahead is actually a rather modest goal, but it reduced the demoralizing moments when my imagination felt empty.

3. It can’t be that easy.

Another really obvious one, but probably the most important thought I had all week. It was fairly early in the book when I finally had the good guys face off with the bad guys. I was really happy to reach this chapter, since I’d already figured out how the bag guys would escape. So, I just cranked out the whole fight as I imagined it… and had 1000 words. Eek! I’d planned to fill a whole chapter with the fight! So, just when it looks like the heroes are thwarted and the bad guys are getting away, oh no! The toughest superhero, who’d had to run off to take an wounded civilian to a hospital, races back onto the scene. The fight continues! They run over him with a truck. He shakes it off! Etc., etc. The key thing to take away is that, for the rest of the book, any time I’d get a good idea for getting my protags out of a jam, I’d figure out how this good idea would go horribly wrong. It creates much more suspenseful action scenes, and, more importantly, it gets more words onto the page.

4. Never look back.

This is advice I always offer for first drafts: Never stop to read what you’re writing. If you’re writing fast, you’ll be making mistakes, and the temptation will be to stop and fix the mistakes. This will kill momentum. Obviously, correcting your errors and polishing your prose is key to producing a professional manuscript. But, the first draft isn’t the time to do this. The only thing you need to focus on is what comes next.

5. Take your foot off of the brake.

The most perverse fear a writer can possess is this one: “What am I revealing about myself?” If you’re dragging fifty thousand words out of your brain in a short period of time, it’s almost impossible to pull them out with out snagging a good bit of yourself. My characters, being human beings, have lusts and fears and crazy beliefs. Scrape aside the thin film of fiction, and you find my lusts and fears and crazy beliefs. But, I’m writing a book about people who can fly, or are bulletproof. I’m firmly in territory where an average person might justifiably think, “Well, that will never happen.” Fancy lies will catch people’s attention, but can only hold it for so long. Eventually, you have to put something true on the page. But putting true things on the page is risky. In order to function in society, most people spend the majority of time not being open and truthful. There are categories of things we regard as private and don’t want the world to know about us. But, in fiction, readers want to see these private moments. You could follow the safe route and simply recycle fictional private moments you’ve seen in movies or read in books. Plenty of writers do. You simply write cautiously, advancing carefully across the most dangerous terrain, your foot on the brake. But, when I was writing Burn Baby Burn, I didn’t have time to search my mental catalog for appropriate fictional moments to mimic. I just had to take my foot off the brake and write what I knew. What I really knew.

Was it worth it? I think so. I suppose readers will be the ultimate judges.

Crop. baby, crop!

2011-08-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

Here's the cover cropped more tightly. Better?

Burn Baby Burn, the possible cover, and a few thoughts.

2011-08-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

So. I've written a complete first draft of a novel in the span of a week, starting Monday 7 am, finishing Sunday, 5:30 pm.

I really don't know if this is happy news, or terrifying news. I've kind of shattered my comfortable expectations of how much writing a person could reasonably accomplish and still be productive.

Can't really think about it right now. My mind is numb.

Whipped up the cover before I ever started, in case I self pub on Kindle. Any thoughts or criticisms?

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Sixteen 3190 words. The end, baby!

2011-08-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

She hasn’t moved since I got here. She just hangs there, a little sliver of the sun, shining down on us goats and chickens and fools.

Used to think that one bullet was for her. But, I’m starving. So thirsty I’ve drank my own pee. I’ve been here so long even my pubes have turned white. I bet I’m a hundred years old. Hell, maybe older.

Nothing here rots, but I age. I age because I’m human.

And so was she.

And she’s dead. Starved or died of thirst, or maybe her air burned up. Probably thought she was all alone.

And I guess she was. I guess, in the end, we all are.

The revolver is cold and heavy in my hands.

Typing out these little scraps of memory used to keep me from blowing my brains out. We all want our stories told.

But my story has come to an end.

Chapter Sixteen
Burn Baby Burn

Sunday’s cleaver had long since melted. Her arms ached. Her hands were numb. She had trouble feeling the ceramic knife in her hand.

She wasn’t keeping count. She wasn’t even thinking now. She was flying faster than she’d ever flown, far to fast to think, in utter, eerie silence, all the whispers of doubt long since left behind.

She climbed back toward the stratosphere. She wasn’t sure how she was still breathing. The shockwave of compressed air that had formed when she’d gone supersonic had spared here from her most morbid visions of wind ripping off her flesh. The high pressure air seemed trapped even when she pushed up to the very edge of space to find her next target. They were getting harder and harder to spot, both because they were fewer in number and because they were now back in daylight.
There.
She dove, pushing to speeds she couldn’t even estimate. Mach six? Mach seven? Mach eight? Photons were flying out of her at the speed of light. Was there any limit to her speed beyond the ones Einstein had written down?
She slowed as she raced up behind her target. She readied her knife and went in for the kill.
At the last second, the drone spun and pushed Sunday’s arm away. A few of the other drones had spotted her and shown similar rudimentary defenses, but she’d fought those before her arms turned to lead.
The drone kneed her in the belly and they both went into a tailspin. The drone kept her hands clamped on Sunday’s knife hand.
If this was the last one, it didn’t matter if they both plunged into the ocean. If it wasn’t….
She eyed the camera cluster where the head should be. Why didn’t these things burn? The chimps were geniuses, and were developing a reputation for building advanced materials that were stronger, lighter, and tougher than anything humans had whipped up. But, this was still just matter. Even if the Sundancer body was immune to solar radiation, this thing had to have a melting point.
She set out to find it. The ceramic knife suddenly warped like a vinyl record, then vanished in a spray of droplets. She felt the old pressure building in her gut as they raced toward the ocean and with a sudden release the wormholes surrounding her doubled, then tripled. The webcam vaporized and the drone went limp.
Sunday never reached the surface of the ocean, because the surface of the ocean moved as she approached it, boiling away in a flash. She pulled from her spin and climbed.
She tried to close the wormholes, to reduce her intensity.
She couldn’t find the invisible switch in her mind that controlled them.
With so much power channeling out of her, the second she switched off, she was going to die.
And she didn’t want to die.
A blue blur flashed across the corner of her vision. It was Skyrider, racing toward her much faster than the drones had moved. She was carrying a ridiculously large rifle, which she aimed at Sunday. She pulled the trigger when she was only a few hundred feet away.
Whatever came out of the barrel vaporized as it came within a dozen feet of Sunday. Skyrider veered to avoid a collision, but passed close enough that her rifle turned to putty in her hands. Suddenly, her flight suit caught fire, including her helmet.
Skyrider slid to a hover and yanked her helmet off, gasping for breath. Her face was covered in a silver mesh. As the flaming fragments of her suit fell away, the silver mesh proved to cover her whole body, sheer as pantyhose.
Skyrider squinted as she stared at Sunday. “You’ve got a head!”
“I’m the original,” Sunday shouted back.
“There are only three left,” Skyrider shouted. “But we’ve got radar locks on all of them and missiles in the air. Time to draw the curtain on your little doomsday play!”
“I didn’t want this!” Sunday screamed. “I tried to stop it!”
“Then stand down,” said Skyrider. “Turn off your flames and surrender.”
“I can’t!” she screamed. “I think… Dr. Trog pumped the drones full of adrenaline so that they would be living bombs. I’m running on nothing but adrenaline now!” She swallowed hard. “I think… I think I’m going to explode.”
Skyrider said, “You don’t have to explode! Just turn down your flame and wait. The Covenant employs the finest scientific minds on the planet. We can fix this!”
“Call them!” screamed Sunday. “I surrender! Just do what you can to save me before I take half the planet with me.”
“Um,” said Skyrider. “I can’t call them, actually. My radio was in my helmet.”
“I don’t have time to wait for you to go get help!” said Sunday. She looked down at the glimmering blue ocean. She saw a few patches of white sand in the distance. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Just north of Midway atoll,” Skyrider shouted. “The island is empty except for a research station. Don’t move! I’ll go use their radio to call Covenant Command.”

Pit couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Ap was still pumping his fists in the air.
“We’ve won?” he asked.
“Servant ambushed a drone over Nevada and Chinese jets just shot down the last one!”
“I thought Servant was dragging the island?”
“How could you…?”
“Dr. Trog said so.”
Ap shrugged. “We Covenant move in mysterious ways.”
“Right,” said Pit. “Space machine.” He rubbed the hole in the back of his skull. “I probably would have got that if I hadn’t just pulled damned metal spike out of my brains. Anyway, if the drones are finished, what happened to Sunday?”
“Not sure,” said Ap. “Skyrider had visual contact, but then we lost her signal.”
Pit shook his head. “Sunday fried her.”
“Don’t think so. The lab boys have outfitted her with some fancy thermal underwear.”
“What have long-johns got to do with anything?”
“Not that kind of thermal underwear,” said Ap. “It’s a silver mesh networked into the space machine. It detects highly energized particles that collide with it and automatically cut and paste them into the earth’s core. Sarah can’t even get a tan.”
“Hold on,” said Ap. “I’m getting a message from Simpson.” He grabbed Pit by the wrist. “You wouldn’t be a World War Two buff by any chance?”
“I spent most of the war years drunk,” said Pit.
“Too bad,” said Ap. “We’re about to be tourists!”
Then Pit experienced the familiar sensation of being folded by the space machine. His backs of his elbows twisted to slide along under his nuts as his eyeballs bent to stare directly at one another. Then he dropped to his knees on a beach of white sand.
Ap was by his side, and Servant and Skyrider were standing in front of him. It was high noon, with the sun directly overhead. Except, as he looked to the west, the sun was also down on the horizon.
“What’s he doing here,” Servant growled, staring at Pit.
“You want me to just leave him?” asked Ap.
“I want him in a cell!”
“He’s eaten himself out of every jail he’s ever been thrown into,” said Skyrider. “He’s probably safer in our custody.” Pit tried not to stare, but he could see all of Skyrider’s lady parts through the mesh of her thermal underwear.
“Here’s the situation,” said Skyrider. “Sundancer says she feels like she’s about to explode. She’s putting out enough radiation that if she were over a population center right now, people would already be dying. I’ve already had Simpson cut and paste the researcher here to safety, but safety isn’t what it used to be. If she experiences the sort of exponential flare up we witnessed in some of the aborted drones, she could carve a hole out of the planet that would rival the comet impact that killed off the dinosaurs. Nowhere is safe.”
“Cut and paste her out into space,” said Ap.
Skyrider shook her head. “We never got any targeting nanites into her. And, with the radiation she’s putting out, satellite sensors just go blind when we try to get a lock.”
Servant shook his head. “Is this a joke? Let’s just break her neck.”
“The problem with that—” Skyrider never finished her sentence.
“Up one mile, Simpson,” said Servant. He vanished.
Suddenly the sun overhead began to fall toward them.
“Ghost mode!” shouted Ap.
Sand and seashells flew all around them as Sunday and Servant slammed into the island half a mile away.
“Breaking her neck might trigger the explosion!” Skyrider shouted.
“Servant!” Ap screamed. “Stand down! Stand down!”
A volcano began erupting where the two had crashed. Beads of flaming lava rained down, sizzling as they burned little holes into Pit’s clothes and the flesh beneath.
“He’s not answering!” Ap said, sounding panicked.
The heat and light pouring of the spit of land were almost unbearable. Even here, the sea was boiling. Hurricane force hotter than a furnace winds nearly knocked Pit from his feet.
Pit lunged at Skyrider and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Strip!” he said.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Take off that fancy underwear! I need it. I’m the only one who can stop her!”
“Johnny, if you record a single frame of this I will murder you,” she said, eying Ap.
“You’re going to do it?” Ap asked.
“I don’t have a better idea!” she said, lowering the invisible nanozipper that sealed the front. Pete averted his eyes. It was what a good cowboy would do. She shoved the suit into his hands and said, “Ap. I can’t stay here without protection. You’re safe in ghost mode. It’s up to the two of you!”
Ap nodded.
Then, she was gone.
Pit struggled to pull on the flimsy garment. He didn’t know what the hell it was made of, but it was tough. Real panty hose would have ripped as he pulled them on over his jagged toe-nails. Not that he’d ever actually tried that, mind you. The springy fabric stretched over his clothes, but he felt like his balls were being pulled up into his belly as he tried to yank the suit tight and pull the hood over his head. When he finally had it on, Ap pointed out the zipper, which Pit would never have found on his own.
“I’m coming with you,” said Ap.
They marched into the inferno across bubbling earth, along shores now completely dry as the ocean was pushed back a mile in every direction. Once or twice Pit fell, and had to crawl in the face of the horrible winds. Even protected from the heat, his mouth and nose and eyes went completely dry in air where every molecule of water had been torn asunder.
They reached the crater where Servant and Sunday had fallen. It was now a sheet of glass. In the depth beneath, a naked man with an ogre’s face was frozen in mid scream, though he looked more angry than in pain. He’d been trapped in the molten sand like a fly caught in amber.
And further down the beach was Sunday. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, staring at the sunset.
He slogged through magma to reach her. He placed his hand on her shoulder.
She looked up. “Is there hope?” she asked.
Her eyes had already answered the question.
He dropped to his knees and wrapped his arm around her. She rubbed her cheek against his cheek. They kissed once again. Her lips were completely dry.
“I can’t stop burning,” she whispered.
“Then don’t,” he said, his voice trembling. “Just… do what you do best. Burn, baby. Burn.”
And then he opened his other mouth and closed his eyes. There was a familiar tickle at the back of his throat, a familiar fire. And when he opened his eyes she was gone.
Ap stumbled as the hurricane force wind suddenly stopped. “What just happened? Did… did she just get away?”
“Naw,” said Pete.
“Is… is the world safe?” Ap asked, scratching his hair, or trying to. In his ghost mode, itches apparently were impossible to relieve.
“Naw,” said Pete. “No more than it ever was. Nobody gets out of here alive.”
Ap glanced back to the crater that held Servant. “You think he’s still alive?”
“Couldn’t care less,” said Pit.
“Let me get Simpson online,” said Ap. “Let’s go home. Well, my home, at least. Guess you’re going to have a new home.”
“Yeah,” said Pit. “Guess I will.” Then he shoved his fist into his mouth. He swallowed. And kept swallowing.

He’d arrived in a world of trash. A vast ring he couldn’t begin to measure, in orbit around an elongated star that poured out heat and light. He’d pulled off the thermal underwear and shouted at her for days, or what felt like days. There was no way to measure time. She never showed any signs of hearing him.
There wasn’t much gravity. Things in the ring did tend to pull together, though. He’d found a few things to eat in the garbage. Felt like he was dying of thirst until he found an old soda machine and managed to pry it open with a crowbar he’d swallowed back in 1973, along with the arm of the man who’d swung it at him. He drank sodas and ate from a desiccated deer carcass while he watched living chickens and goats cavorting in the distance.
Later, he’d had to go to the bathroom, wiping himself with pages from a Dallas phone book. It wasn’t his first clue, but it felt like proof that he was normal again. Whatever Eleven had done to freeze his body in time no longer had any effect on him.
One day he found a typewriter. An old one, a Remington, completely manual. Just like the one he’d written his screenplay on. To keep from going crazy, he’d started typing, filling up scraps and bits of card and any thing flat he could roll through the machine. He thinned out ink from a ball point pen he found in his own urine and soaked the ribbon to refresh it when the letters had finally faded to nothingness. He was surprised when this actually worked.
He was always worried that one day he would run out of paper.
But, in the end, he ran out of memories. He ran out of things to say.
So he’d placed a pistol against the roof of his mouth.
And then, for a time, he’d been dead.

It was nighttime when he woke up. He’d been resting on short, thick green grass, like what you’d find on a gold course. He sat up, and saw a glimmering sea in the distance.
He could tell from the air that he was back on Pangea.
Eleven floated before him.
“I’ve completed my mission. It is time for us to leave.”
“Oh,” said Pit. “Hmm. What mission was that?”
“I came here to catalogue the sentient beings of this planet. I’ve finished my recording of the beings of this world, as well as the five sentients of this world that currently reside on Mars.”
“There are men on Mars?”
“You’ve met two of them,” said Eleven. “As for their offspring, I’m unsure you would classify them as men.”
Pit looked at his hands. They were young and strong again. Well, not young. He looked like he had when he was in his forties or fifties.”
“Was I dead?” he asked.
“You had regressed to your lowest biological threshold,” said Eleven. “Only the bacteria in your gut were still active.”
“Do they count as part of me?”
“Who else would they count as?”
Pit looked up at he stars. “You left me in there for a long time.”
“In the relative time frame of your four dimensional existence, you were only gone two weeks. I saw no need to retrieve you prematurely.”
“Two weeks? It felt like decades.”
“Then it was,” said Eleven. “There is no precise formula for reconciling times between the two realities you inhabit.”
Pit stood. It was then he realized he was naked. “You couldn’t pull me out some clothes?”
“They will serve no purpose where we are going. If there are sentient beings in the Centari system, it is highly unlikely they will care if you are wearing pants.”
“How are we getting there?” he asked.
“We’ll walk,” said Eleven. “But I know a short cut.” Then Eleven splintered apart and splashed against Pit’s chest. Pit looked down and found himself covered with triangular stripes, like a tiger.
“Ready?” Eleven asked.
“No,” said Pit. “I can’t leave without… without knowing what happened to Sunday.”
“She perished,” said Eleven. “Due to the time variance, by the time you followed her inside, she had long since failed to receive the primitive but necessary chemical fuels that powered her life functions.”
“You fixed me,” he said, holding up his hand, staring at the stripes that now coated it. “Fix her.”
“We’ve been a braided life-form for a long time,” said Eleven. “I can restore your cognitive abilities because your thoughts are my thoughts. Even if I could reassemble Sunday’s material form, she would not be the person you knew. For now, her presence within our dimensional hold is most fortuitous. The solar radiation she emits will provide plentiful power for our travels. Were it not for her, you would need to devour a mass the size of Mount Everest to generate the required energy for us to escape this planet.”
Pit nodded. He crossed his arms across his chest.
It wasn’t fair. But that wasn’t the way of this world. Some travelers reach the end of their journeys while those who loved them traveled on. And like every other person, all he could take were memories, and the warmth of knowing that he carried some part of her inside him.
Only, less metaphorically.
He stepped forward, and was gone from earth.
And on a world with green skies he gawked at unfamiliar stars, and laughed.
He’d gotten out alive.
3190 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter 15 3684 words

2011-08-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

Raw first draft.

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(Note: In the previous scene of the chimp restaurant there is a chef with a huge cleaver who hacks up a lemur. This scene will be modified in the next draft to show the chef pulling out a white ceramic butcher knife after he’s killed the lemur and butchering it further.)

Had to punch a new hole in my belt today. Just used a nail I found stuck in a two by four. I was skinny when I got here, but I’m now four belt hole’s thinner.

Almost completely bald now. When I got here, I still had some dark hair in my beard, but now it’s all gone white. I found a little round mirror on a stand, the kind you use for shaving. I look like someone’s grandfather.

Spend most of my days sleeping.

Haven’t eaten in three days.

Funny, given that I’m surrounded by meat. Hundreds of severed human hands, some arms, a few feet, over a dozen heads. Still look as fresh as the day they got here.

I’ve collected them as I found them. One body, I pieced back together, like the world’s goriest jigsaw puzzle. If memory serves, he was a lawyer from Kansas City.

Some people say we taste like chicken.

I don’t guess I’ll find out.

I might be a man-eater, but I ain’t no cannibal.

Chapter Fifteen
Boom Boom Boom

Sunday’s kiss lasted barely a second. She pulled her lips from his mouth and pressed them too Pit’s ears. “Close your eyes and duck,” she whispered.
Pit ducked, covering his head, as Sunday pointed her hands over her head. Her fingers almost reached the low ceiling.
The green beam reached the tips of Pit’s knees as he squatted, his hands over his head. The fabric of his jeans vaporized as the advancing light reached him.
There was a whoosh and heat washed over him, singing his hair. There was a sound like every kernel of popcorn in the world firing off in the space of a second. Flakes and fragments of concreted rained down onto him. The green light fizzled out as it cut a raw hole in his right kneecap the size of a quarter.
He stood up. Sunday was on fire from the tits up.
He said, his voice cracking, “You’ll—”
“Hush,” she said. “It only hurts when I turn my powers off. That’s never going to happen.”
Dr. Troglodytes looked unflustered by Sunday’s destruction of his disintegration grid. He calmly reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out a gun the size of the derringer that looked like a miniature version of the regeneration ray. A red targeting light cut through all the dust in the air to land on Sunday’s left breast. Pit shoved Sunday and jumped as Troglodytes pulled the trigger. The beam took off his right ear and a chunk of his shoulder before he opened his mouth and swallowed the chimps hand, gun and all, to the mid point of his forearm. With his remaining arm Dr. Troglodyte punched Pit in the cheek. Pit was knocked to the ground, stars in front of his eyes. He spat out a molar as he tried to rise. Then he fell once more, too dizzy to rise. The chimp punched like he had a horseshoe hidden in his glove, if he’d been wearing a glove.
Fortunately, the ape didn’t press his attack. Instead, he ran with inhuman speed, shouting, “Regeneration Mode!” as he veered suddenly to hide behind a concrete pillar. A ball of glowing plasma hit the ground where he’d just stood, sizzling away, leaving a black scorch mark.
Even though she’d missed, Sunday’s splattering plasma must have caught Dr. Troglodytes at least a little, since the chimp gasped in pain as the smell of burnt fur polluted the air.
“Foam Mode!” the chimp screeched from behind the pillar.
Then, Dr. Troglodytes whipped back around the column, the shaving cream like substance bubbling from his skin. He vomited a torrent of the goop at Sunday, forcefully enough that she was knocked from her feet like she’d been hit with a water hose.
The chimp leap upon her and thrust his long canine teeth toward her throat. She twisted at the last possible second and he sank his teeth into the meat of her shoulder rather than into her jugular vein.
Sunday screamed, blowing the foam that covered her lips into the air in a spray of white bubbles. Pit rose to his hands and knees, blood trickling from his mouth. He reached for the chimp in a motion that was half a lunge, half a fall. He grabbed the ape’s foamy right ankle.
An inhuman growl tore from Pit’s throat as he summoned every bit of strength he had left to yank the ape off of Sunday. Fortunately, the foam provided lubrication, helping slide the super-intelligent chimp off. Dr. Troglodytes rolled to his back and opened his foaming jaws, pink with Sunday’s blood, inhaling to shout another command. Pit shoved the monkey’s foot toward his jaws, and took the ape’s leg off all the way up to the hip. Blood spurted from the severed limb as the ape screamed. Then, once more the ape sucked in air. Before he could say anything, Pit punched him in the testicles.
The doctor arched his back and opened his jaws. He looked like he was screaming, but no sound came out. Pit dragged himself closer to the ape, sucked in, and the ape’s hairy belly vanished as a tornado of entrails and organs spiraled into Pit’s mouth. Blood and bile and things Pit didn’t want to think about flecked Pit’s cheeks.
He closed his mouth. The stupid ape was now gone from the rib cage down. Everything that should have been inside the hollow of his ribs had vanished. Pit sat up, wiping his face on his shirt.
His back grew hot as Sunday baked off the foam that had smothered her. He looked back, squinting, and found her staggering to her feet, her hand clamped over her injured shoulder.
“Just sit still,” he said. “You’re hurt. One of them monkey doctors upstairs can stitch you up.”
“Give me the disintegration pistol,” she said.
“What—”
“You just ate it!” she screamed. “I don’t have time to argue! Give me the damn gun!”
Pit reached in and grabbed the gun, with the black leathery hand still attached.
Sunday’s whole body was now glowing, save for her right hand, which was a dark spot against her radiance. She reached for the gun. Her hand was thin and wrinkled. Blood oozed from around her nail beds.
“Your hand—” he whispered.
“Will you just the fuck up?” she screamed as she snatched the gun away. “I’ve got to stop an army of cyborg Sundancers from destroying the world!” She ran toward the door her duplicates had left through. “You start eating computers! Something down her must be guiding them!”
She jumped into the air and flew through the door, leaving behind only a tornado of sparks.

Sunday burst from the tunnel she’d followed for half a mile to find herself in bright sunshine. She’d completely overestimated how much time had passed; she thought by now the sun would have set.
Spinning around, she found it had set. The false day was being created from the hundred duplicates of herself who stood at attention on a low hilltop off to her right. The headless women looked like some cryptic modern sculpture as they stood aligned in ten perfect rows of ten, each precise one arm’s length away from each other. They were pumping out enough heat that the hilltop beneath them had fused into black glass.
Sunday didn’t know what they were waiting for. She didn’t care. She suspected that no amount of heat and radiation she could throw at them would have any effect. Her own powers had never even made her sweat, though she was sweating now. Her heart was beating like she’d run up the tunnel rather than flew. Her fight or flight instinct had kicked in at full power.
So, she did both, flashing toward the grid of bodies firing the disintegration pistol almost blindly. Bodies began to topple as she swept the beam across the cyborg army. In seconds, she’d killed or seriously maimed over half. Could things really be this easy?
Then, the remaining bodies lifted their arms to her, and suddenly there was nothing in the world but fire. Sunday felt as if she was suffocating as the combined blasts of the assembled drones tore the molecules of air surrounding her into a slurry of elemental particles. She raced upwards, out of the blast zone, gasping as she reached intact air. She looked down at the army and point the raygun. But when she squeezed the trigger, it was like squeezing clay that oozed between her fingers. The barrel of the gun drooped like a spent penis. Whatever its melting point had been, the drone attacked had gone over that line.
She looked down at the remaining drones. They had stopped targeting her, and now stretched their arms out stiffly to their sides. The dust and dirt flew up in a ring around them as fire shot out from their palms and feet, thrusting them heavenward like rockets. They lifted slowly at first, but accelerated so swiftly that they reached Sunday, hovering a quarter mile above them, in only a second. She shook her hand to clear it of the molten gun, then clenched her fists, braced for their attack.
Only, they weren’t attacking her. They flashed past without even seeming aware of her. One passed less than a yard away and on pure instinct Sunday kicked it in the gut. Her stomach tightened from the impact; she’d somehow expected the thing to have a hard gut, filled with robotics. Instead, it was warm and yielding, disturbingly… human. But, human or machine, the fortunate effect of the kick was that it knocked the drone off it’s trajectory, causing it to crash into a sister drone that rose only an arms length away. That drone spun out, and in a game of aerial dominoes, three more drones were knocked off balance by the veering bodies. As the naked women bounced off one another, lights on the camera atop their head turned red. The affected drones went into tailspins as their robotic navigation systems lost control. The raced down to messy endings on the ground below, but Sunday had no time to waste watching them. She pushed her self higher, in pursuit of the surviving drones. She didn’t pause to count, but there were still close to thirty.
Then, BOOM BOOM BOOM! Sunday was hit in the chest by a shockwave as the drones above her accelerated past the speed of sound. Now it was her tail in a spin. The ground raced toward her with sickening speed. But, she clenched her teeth and took control of her fall, leveling off a few feet above the ground, leaving a trail of burning earth behind her as she raced toward the chimp city nearby. She blazed down the main street, setting convertibles ablaze, then whipped down the side street where the lemur sushi bar had been situated. She was doing 200 miles an hour when she neared the restaurant, crowded with two dozen chimps having dinner. The chef in his leather apron had his arm raised over his head, the cleaver gleaming with her reflected light. She grabbed his apron and his arm as she sped past him. Unleashing a blast, she ripped the monkey’s torso apart, leaving her holding a hand holding a cleaver, which she pried free. She had the apron draped across her arm. She turned toward the sky as she fished the white ceramic carving knife free.
Years of practice had taught her how well certain materials held up to heat. The cleaver would warp and turn to putty at a paltry 2500 degree Fahrenheit, but the ceramic knife was good to twice that heat, maybe even three times depending on its specific elemental components.
The drones were spread out in the sky in a straight line, just little dots of light. How could she ever catch them? She’d never been able to go past the speed of sound.
Or had she just never had the courage to go past the speed of sound? Those were copies of her up there. Anything they could do, she could do.
With the knife in her hottest hand and the cleaver in the hand she’d cooled to carry the gun, she inhaled deeply, and felt tightness build in the pit of her stomach. If she flew that fast, the wind would peel the skin from her face. If she flew that fast, she couldn’t breathe. She was still clinging to the tiniest fingernail ledge of hope that she’d survive this. Exhaling, she let go, and shot off like a white hot bullet.

As Sunday raced up the tunnel, Pit ran to the computer terminal Dr. Troglodytes had used to activate the drones. He stared at the screen, then stared at all the cables around him. His orders were to destroy everything.
But he couldn’t. These computers held everything there was to know about Sunday’s body. She seemed ready to die, but couldn’t they just build her a new body, then swap her brain into it? It seemed like an idea from B-movie science fiction, but he was on a floating island of talking chimps with robot servants, and the woman he loved was out doing battle with an army of headless clones. No idea sounded dumb at this point.
He tried tapping the computer keyboard. Dr. Trog had left the screen up, so he didn’t need a password. The only thing he needed was a genius IQ and about a decade of advanced training in robotics and genetics and making sense of what he was looking at would be a snap.
Then, either he hit something or Dr. Trog had planned to watch his army launch, because the screen switched to a camera shot from the top of the hospital to a nearby hilltop where the army was gathered, glowing brightly. He watched as Sunday charged, and cheered as she mowed down the army with her disintegration ray. Then his voice caught in his throat as the drones fought back. He watched as, a few seconds later, the remaining drones launched like rockets, rising above the frame of the shot. Then, for reasons he couldn’t guess, a half dozen of them rained back down from the sky and smashed into the burnt ground.
Without him pressing a button, the screen switched to black and a scroll of white words rolled up the screen.
Tokyo: Aborted
Seoul: Aborted
Mexico City: Aborted
New York City: Active
Mumbai: Active
Jakarta: Aborted
Sao Paula: Active
Delhi: Aborted.
The list continued. Pit didn’t even recognize half these cities. A handful of American cities stood out to him: Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Washington, Dallas, Detroit. All were active except for Houston and Washington
Pit left the terminal and ran up the tunnel. He emerged beneath a darkening sky with a row of glowing stars spread out above him. An even brighter light raced up from the center of Goodall, blazing like a comet. He squinted but couldn’t tell if there was a human figure at the center of the light, let alone whether or not it had a head.
All around him were severed body parts. A woman. Lot’s of women, actually. Bloodied breasts everywhere he looked.
No heads.
Sunday wasn’t part of this field of death.
He ran back toward the hospital, taking the above ground path. “Space donut!” he cried out, panting. “Space donut! Eleven!” That was right. “Eleven!” But, there was no answer. Hope that the alien thing that was turning him into a space ship might help him lift off and chase after Sunday began to fade.
He made it into town. Robotic firetrucks were rolling down the main drag. A dozen convertibles were on fire. Burnt chimps were laying on the sidewalks. Pit leaned against the wall of the parking deck catching his breath.
There was a kind of a whistling sound from somewhere, followed by a thump. He lurched forward but didn’t fall. He couldn’t feel his legs. He looked down and found he was now pinned to the concrete wall behind him by a four foot long shaft of steel a quarter inch around. He looked like a bug on a board.
Without warning, a shadowy form that almost looked like a man grabbed his right arm and pressed it up against the concrete wall. Ffffip! Thump! A second steel rod now emerged from his wrist, trapping his arm.
The shadow man punched his hand under Pit’s chin and slammed his head back into the wall. Fffffip! Thump!
“Ow,” said Pit, going cross-eyed as he tried to see what had happened. He couldn’t move his head at all. His thoughts felt scrambled. Was there really a long steel rod jutting out of the top of his forehead?
His eyes focused on a woman floating in the air a hundred feet away. Skyrider? She was holding an enormous rifle. She squeezed the trigger and suddenly he couldn’t move his other hand.
“God!” the woman shouted. “This job is so much easier when you have the right tools!”
“End Shadow Mode,” said a voice he’d heard before. He could just see the top of Ap’s head.
“Pit Geek, the vessel known as Pangea has just entered American waters. We have been authorized by the proper authorities to seize the ship.”
“Ship?” Pit was confused. “This is an island!”
“It floats. It has anchors. I believe that any court of law will accept the argument that Pangea is little more than an oversized garbage barge. Everyone on board will be taken into custody until the finer legal matters have been resolved. You will be treated a little differently, however. Because, for the crimes you’ve committed against humanity, you’re under arrest. You have a right to remain silent.”
“I’ll talk,” Pit said, firmly. “You listen. A couple of dozen copies of Sunday just rocketed out of here like bats outa hell and are going to explode over the most populated cities on earth. A couple of hundred million people are gonna die if you don’t stop them.”
“Sundancer is next on our agenda,” said Skyrider, floating closer.
“No, dammit!” Pit shouted. “Sunday ain’t the problem. Dr. Troglodytes has sent a whole army of copies out to wipe out humankind. Stop them first! I can show you where to find a list of their targets!”
Skyrider looked at the stars. The Sundancer Legion was now very far off. “I wondered what all those lights were,” she mumbled. Then she turned to Pit. “I’m going to give chase.”
“They’re pretty far away,” said Ap.
Skyrider nodded and said, “Simpson, can you cut and paste me about twenty miles due west and about a mile straight up? I need to catch up to some fleeing suspects.”
Suddenly, she was gone.
“Double-density mode,” said Ap. He yanked the steel rod holding Pit’s head to the wall free.
“Christ almighty, that smarts,” said Pit, squeezing his eyes shut.
“You’re going to show me the list of targets,” said Ap. “These rods are coated in nanite tracers. Simpson can now fix on their signal and grab you with the space machine any time he wants. Fuck with me, and he’ll drop you inside a volcano. We clear?”
“Clear,” said Pit, rubbing his wrists as Ap freed his arms. “I won’t be no trouble. I need… I need your help. Sunday’s dying. Dr. Trog said he’d used your belt technology to make the copies of Sunday. You’re supposed to be a hero. Save her! Make her a new body!”
“Hold on,” said Ap. “I’m not following you at all. Who’s Dr. Trog? What does my belt have to do with anything?”
Pit explained it as best he could as they ran back to the tunnel. Ap nearly tripped and fell when Pit said the name Code4U.
“She was a chimp?” he screamed, recovering his footing to keep up. He shook his head. “Man, you can’t trust anyone in a chat room.”
Back in the basement, Ap whistled as he looked around the room. “You know, it’s been something of a mystery why used game systems cost so much these days. I think I just figured out where all the old boxes are going to.”
“These are just old game boxes?” Pit asked.
“I’m sure they’ve been modified,” said Ap. “But they’re nothing to sneeze at. The graphics on one of these has more computing power than was available to NASA when they put men on the moon. String together a couple of thousand like this, and you can crunch some serious numbers.”
Ap plopped down in front of the system. Enough time had elapse for the screen to go blank. As he tapped the keys, it asked for a password.
“Try ‘banana,’” said Pit.
“That’s racist,” said Ap. But he gave it a shot anyway.
“Ha,” said Pit as the screen returned to the list of cities.
“Simpson!” said Ap. “I just activated my retinal camera. You’ve got a list of a dozen cities in front of you that are being targeted for destruction by individuals who have the same powers as Sundancer. Like her, they are small enough and fly low enough that most traditional defenses won’t spot them. We need jets in the air defending every target ASAP!”
Pit couldn’t hear Simpson answer, but Ap gave a nod that looked as if he’d just gotten confirmation of his orders.
Pit said, “There were more than a dozen.”
Ap said, “Well, now there’s only eleven. Skyrider doesn’t mess around on this saving the world stuff. She’s been doing it a long time.”
“So’ve me and Sunday,” said Pit. “Except. You know. On the opposite side.”
3684 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Fourteen 3047 words

2011-08-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

Raw first draft.

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I learned to type back in 1939. Started writing a screenplay, tapping it out with two-fingers. I’d make a mistake and tear the paper out and toss it in the can. I curse a lot and drank a lot over the course of a summer, staying up all night.

The Stick-Em-Up Kid Gets the Girl.

The Stick-Em-Up Kid never had a real name in the movies, but in the script it was Pete Green. He’d come west to mine for gold but fallen in with a bad crowd. Took to robbing stagecoaches, but he never killed nobody.
The gang leader was named Mick Silver. Silver spotted a young girl named Susie Hart inside the stagecoach and dragged her out, telling her she was going to cook and clean for the gang. But Pete tells Silver to leave her alone. They wind up fighting. Pete kills Silver, and has to flee. Susie rides away with the handsome and mysterious outlaw, since she doesn’t want to be left alone in the desert.
They flee into Indian territory. After overcoming a series of obstacles (a swollen river, a pit of snakes), they meet a good Indian named Black Wolf. He warns Pete that a band of bad Indians is headed to the Gold Hart Ranch to kill everyone and steal the cattle. We discover that Susie’s father owns the ranch. Pete rides his faithful steed Lightning to save the day. He kills all the bad Indians and saves Susie’s father from scalping.
As a reward, he’s allowed to ask Susie’s hand in marriage.
They ride into the sunset, living happily ever after.

Because in the movies, one good deed erases a lifetime of crimes. No one demands justice for old sins.

I sometimes stare at the revolver, thinking about the remaining bullets.

Thinking about old sins.

Thinking how sometimes, in the real world, nobody gets the girl.

Chapter Fourteen
A Terrible Actor

Pit didn’t bother to button his shirt as they ran toward the elevator banks. Unfortunately, the shaking of the building had disabled the elevators.
“There stairs?” Pit asked.
“Our legs aren’t really built for stairs,” Cheetah said, opening a door a few yards away from the elevator. Inside was a series of parallel ladders. “We’re more comfortable climbing,” he said, leaping onto the bars. He descended, shouting “Dr. Troglodytes has an office on the first floor. We’re on the sixth floor. Hurry!”
Sunday leaned into the ladder bank, staring at the long drop too the first floor. “It would be quicker if I flew,” she said.
“You know what the Doctor’s said. Using your powers even one more time might kill you.”
“Don’t nag me,” she grumbled. Then she grabbed the rungs and started to go down. “I don’t like feeling helpless.”
“You ain’t helpless,” said Pit, grabbing the rungs. “You’re still my better half. Hell, I’d still be on that bed talking to a space donut if you hadn’t figured this all out.”
“Where did Eleven go?”
“Damned if I know,” said Pit. “Just sort of disappeared once all the shaking started.”
When they arrived at the lobby, the place was in chaos. Chimps on stretchers were screeching loudly as hairy orderlies raced them out to the streets.
Dr. Cheetah was halfway across the lobby, running on all fours. He spun and called to them, “Hurry! The whole building may collapse upon us if this continues much longer. This structure was built to withstand typhoons, but the designers never planned for an earthquake. They simply can’t happen here!”
Pit and Sunny ran, following the doctor deeper into the building, weaving through a stream of chimps heading in the opposite direction.
They followed Dr. Cheetah around a corner and found him shaking the handle of an office door.
“It’s locked,” he cried.
“I’m on it,” said Pit. Then, even though he was barefoot, he ran at the door and put his full weight into a kick. The door splintered at the lock and swung open.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Pit said, hopping. It felt like he’d cracked every bone south of his knee.
“Why didn’t you use your powers?” Sunday asked.
“Aw, this way was more cowboy,” Pit said with a grin.
“It was rather manly,” she said approvingly, looking at him with goo goo eyes.
Except for the fact that the desk was only two feet tall, the office looked like it could have belonged to a used car salesman, just a modest box of a room barely big enough for the three of them.
“This isn’t a very fancy office for your top oncologist,” said Sunday.
“We spend very little time in our offices,” said Dr. Cheetah. His voice was nearly drowned out as the building groaned.
“That was ominous,” said Sunday.
“We should leave the premises,” said Dr. Cheetah. “The value of interrogating my colleague no longer exceeds the value of the risk.”
“You go on,” said Sunday. “We’ll keep searching.”
“But where will you even begin?” he asked.
“I’m thinking this secret door is a good place to start,” she said, moving behind the desk.
Pit squinted. The lights were flickering, but Sunday might be onto something. The pastel green drywall behind the desk had a rectangle four feet tall and three feet wide that had a small seam around it. It looked like it had fit perfectly flush until the twisting of the building had set if slightly ajar in the concealed frame.
Sunday pushed on it. When it didn’t open, she leaned back and kicked it. The door bounced back after the blow. She pulled it open and revealed a shaft with a ladder heading down.
She crouched and hopped on. Pit followed, looking back. Dr. Cheetah stood in the doorway.
“The danger…” he murmured.
“We ain’t asking ya to get yourself killed,” said Pit. “You go on.”
Dr. Cheetah hung his head shamefully as he slinked through the door.
The shaft was dark, light only by the flickering light from the room above. The air in the shaft was cool and dank, smelling of damp concrete. The light grew dimmer and dimmer as they descended.
“I’ve found the bottom,” Sunday announced.
Pit stopped. Her voice was so close, he was worried he might accidentally step on her.
“There’s a door,” she said. “Steel. We’re not kicking this one down.”
“Step aside,” he said. “I can—”
“I’m not a cripple,” she said. There was a sudden flash. Pit squeezed his eyes shut from the painful intensity. There was a hiss, followed by sharp, sour metallic smoke. Pit coughed, and peeked downward. Sunny’s right hand was glowing as she cut around the lock of the steel door. With a clatter, the handle fell out on the other side of the door. Sunday pushed the door open. Pit dropped down.
The light around Sunday’s hand faded. She frowned as she looked around the room. With her other hand, she rubbed her wrist.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“It’s just all this ladder climbing and door kicking,” she said. “Flying all these years has made me a little soft.”
The room beyond reminded Pit of a parking garage, a vast space filled with pillars sandwiched between to slabs of concrete. Only, instead of cars, the room was packed with row after row of video game consoles and what looked to be at least a hundred refrigerators. If they were refrigerators. They were a little tall, and seemed to be made entirely of dark glass. In the dim light, he couldn’t make out he contents.
“The good news is, when the hospital collapses down on us, we won’t feel any pain,’ said Sunday.
However, Pit noted that the shaking and vibrations had calmed down considerably. Whatever force had set the building in motion seemed to be dying off. Either that, or the building above ground just shook more than the building below ground.
Sunday jumped as there was a noise from the door to the ladder. Pit stepped in front of her, ready for whatever came out of the door.
It was Dr. Cheetah. “Sorry if I startled you,” the chimp said, softly. “I was halfway outside when I changed my mind.”
“What changed your mind?” asked Sunday.
“When I represented Pangea, I had to monitor human media for what was said about our countries. It galled me to hear radio talk show hosts say that chimps could never display traits such as love, or honor, or courage, since these were purely the reserve of humans. As I was running from danger while you were pressing on in search of truth, these words were like burrs digging into my pride. I can’t live with myself if I think that two mere humans have displayed greater bravery than I have.”
“What if it’s just greater stupidity?” asked Sunday.
Dr. Cheetah shrugged. “Let’s move forward,” he said.
They walked toward the nearest refrigerator with Dr. Cheetah in the lead. Suddenly, a row of green lights lit up on the ceiling in front of him. He swung forward in his four limbed gate and the front half of his body suddenly vanished in a display of bubbling lights. His belly fell to the ground leaving his rear end sticking up. Bright red blood poured out of him. Where it flowed forward, it turned into bright sparks and vanished. A line beyond which nothing could pass was clearly demarked.
Pit looked around. They were now standing inside of a ten foot square marked by the green ceiling lights.
“How regrettable,” said a voice to their left. Dr. Troglodytes stood there with his hands behind his back, just on the other side of the green line. Unlike when they’d seen him last, he was wearing clothes. He wore what looked like a lead apron, the sort x-ray technicians might wear. And, he sported a wide black belt. He was gazing at the remains of Dr. Cheetah with a look of genuine sorrow. He sighed. “I suppose it was a bit fantastic of me to think I could accomplish this without the death of at least a few chimpanzees. And, if someone had to die, he was a worthy candidate. Pangea will be better off with one fewer human sympathizer.”
“What did you do to him?” Sunday growled, letting her right hand flare up.
“Be careful, human,” said Dr. Troglodytes. “You’ll lose that hand if you aren’t careful. From the data I’ve gathered, the degradation of your physical structure accelerates with each use of your powers. Every time the wormholes damage your cells, they produce further mutant cells that generate defective wormholes.”
“I’ll take my chances,” said Sunday.
“As you wish,” said Dr. Troglodytes, gazing up at the green square above them. “The lights on the ceiling are scanners for a teleportation beam. At least, the portion of the teleportation beam that tears matter apart. Alas, I have not installed the sensors needed to capture the data to restore my colleague. These beams are purely for destruction, meant to finish off unwanted visitors.”
Dr. Troglodytes turned away, waddling toward a computer monitor and keyboard hooked into the networked game systems. “Curiously, I didn’t design it to serve as a cage, and yet it seems as if it will serve that function perfectly.”
“You made the regeneration ray, didn’t you,” Sunday asked.
Pit took this as a cue. He reached into his mouth and produced the weapon once more.
“Of course I made the ray,” said the chimp as he turned the monitor on. “But I wouldn’t waste time training it on poor Cheetah. His brain is gone. You could build a new body based on his DNA, but it would be a soulless, mindless copy.”
“Why did you build this ray? Was this an elaborate plot to kill me? What had I possibly done to harm you?” asked Sunday.
Troglodytes bared his teeth and hooted. “You flatter yourself to think I gave even a seconds thought to you. No, my interest in teleportation technology long predates you. I was aware that Rex Monday had once designed and tested a teleportation belt that proved more effective at tearing matter apart than it did in putting it back together. I coveted the technology. The small size of Pangea’s population makes us vulnerable. But imagine how feared we’d be if the robots we employ for our defense were armed with disintegration beams!”
“So when you downloaded my father’s data, you learned how to duplicate the technology.”
“Even better!” said Troglodytes, sounding delighted. “I had some data, true, and had made significant breakthroughs. I have no doubt that, in five years, I would have perfected the technology. But then, to my astonishment, the original source code and schematics for the belt were posted on the internet!” He patted the belt he wore. “I’ve adopted an online persona of a young human female named Code4U and have been corresponding with the clueless hero Ap to perfect the technology. I was wrote his preferred Regeneration Mode code. It was a simple matter to transfer the technology to the gun you bear.”
The chimp began to type with both his hands and feet. He kept talking. “Among your father’s data, I found the dates and locations he was to use to contact you. I had quite a bit of information about your abilities from your father’s notes, but craved further data. The possibility of weaponizing your abilities was too tempting to ignore. The regeneration ray has recorded your genetic make up in detail and transmitted it to me. Now, you will be pleased to know, your physical form is effectively immortal. I need merely provide the raw materials and my teleportation beam can build a carbon copy of you. A soulless, mindless copy, to be certain. But also a copy in full possession of your abilities.”
He glanced at Pit Geek. “Your mate, alas, was not as interesting. Whatever the source of his curious consumption and regenerative powers may be, it does not seem to spring from his DNA.”
Pit looked down at the concrete floor. It wasn’t sparking. The disintegration beam was apparently calibrated to stop at this point. Could he eat a tunnel out of here?
Sunday asked. “So you can duplicate me. But my duplicates would have the same flaws that I have now. Their powers would kill them.”
“True,” said Troglodytes. “Fortunately, they will only need to use them once.”
With a click, lights inside the glass refrigerators clicked on all at once. In every direction, they faced the horror or Sunday’s nude, decapitated body, the head replaced by a small bank of webcams.
“I now command my own legion of Burn Babies!”
“Baby Burn,” Pit correct him.
Troglodytes paid him no mind. “I had told myself I was building these purely for deterrence, but in truth, I always new the day would come when I would unleash these on the earth’s largest human cities.” He tapped a few more buttons. “When these have accomplished their mission, Pangea will be the dominant world power! It shall be humans who live as animals in the forest!”
“I’ve never had the power to blow up a whole city,” said Sunday. “You’ll kill some people, yes, but then the armies of the world will strike back! You think a hundred headless copies of me are stronger than even a single nuke dropped on this place?”
“Most definitely. You’ve never unleashed your full power because your fears hold you back. My army has no such fears.” With a tap of the button, robotic arms moved inside the containers and brought a syringe to the arm of each duplicate. With a jab, dark blue fluid flowed into the bodies.”
“This is pure adrenaline,” said Troglodytes. “It will prime the cells for the fullest release of power. The cities of the earth shall be reduced to ashes!”
“Don’t do this!” screamed Sunday. “The humans haven’t attacked you. They’ve done nothing to deserve destruction!”
“Have you not felt the ground shaking?” asked Troglodytes. “We are currently under attack. The Covenant member called Servant seems to be dragging us into US waters. I have no doubt this is a prelude to war. The navy of the United States no doubt prepares to fend off our incursion. The truth of how our nation wound up moving across the open sea will almost certainly never be reported by human media.”
“The Covenant doesn’t want war with Pangea,” said Sunday. “They want us! You can stop all this destruction just by turning us over to them!”
“She’s right,” said Pit, his shoulders sagging. “It is us they want. We should have known we couldn’t just run away.”
“I assume this is a trick of some sort,” said Troglodytes. “The two of you have never shown the least bit of remorse for your crimes.” He pressed a button. The glass door slid open. “But, if it was a sincere offer it’s too late. Perhaps you’ve doomed mankind by coming here. If this is so--” he looked at them with a twinkle in his eye“--I’ll see that statues are erected in your honor.”
The women throughout the basement began to glow. Waves of heat washed across the cement floor. In unison, they all began to march out of a steel door.”
Troglodytes stood up from the terminal and came to the edge of the green line. “And now I face the question of your disposal. I doubt you will voluntarily walk into the disintegration beam.”
“Probably not,” said Pit.
“And the second I leave to deal with Servant, you’ll simply chew through the floor and escape,” said Troglodytes. “This would not be optimal.”
“Aw, we ain’t going nowhere,” said Pit. “What do we care if you blow up the world? We’re terrorists! Good riddance, I say.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are a terrible actor?”
Pit grimaced. Being a terrible actor had sort of been at the origin of every problem he’d had since 1938.
“Fortunately for me,” said Troglodytes, tapping a few buttons on his belt. “The grid array is mobile.”
More of Dr. Cheetah’s body vanished as the green lines on the ceiling closed in on one another.
Sunday turned to Pit. “Just one last time to do this, I guess.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
3047 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Thirteen 4689 words

2011-08-13T13:52:00.001-07:00

Raw first draft, fresh from the gray matter. See chapter 1 for other disclaimers.

---

Unless I find more bullets or a different gun, I’ve killed my last goat. A chicken, every now and then, can be pegged with a rock and stunned. Goats just run away.

Two bullets left.

One for her.

One for me.

Chapter Thirteen
The Secret Origin of Pit Geek

The CT scan showed his head was full of shrapnel. No surprise.
What was surprising was when Pit said, “Let’s take it out.”
Sunday wasn’t sure she understood him. “Take what out?”
“All the metal in my head,” said Pit. “I’ve been getting shot in the head on a regular basis for damn near sixty years. It ain’t killed me. But it’s messed up my memory something fierce. So, we cut it out, and I remember who I am.”
Dr. Cheetah scoffed loudly. “Cutting through the required tissue would leave you a vegetable. I might as well run your brains through a blender.”
“If that would get the metal out, let’s try it,” said Pit.
“Pit, I appreciate you want to help me, but I can’t let you cripple yourself,” said Sunday.
“I’ll get better,” said Pit. “I always heal.”
“Brain tissue isn’t like skin or bone,” said Dr. Cheetah. It doesn’t regenerate.”
“Mine might.”
“My oath reads, ‘First, do no harm.’”
“Mine reads, ‘you gotta scramble some eggs if you want an omelet.’”
“Your brains are already scrambled if you think this is a smart idea,” said Sunday.
“Yeah,” Pit said, tapping his finger on the dark black shards that littered the scan. “And all I’m asking is that you unscramble them.”
“It’s amazing you’re alive,” Dr. Cheetah said, as he turned the image back and forth on the computer. “But it’s also possible that these images are corrupted. Look.” He rolled his mouse back and forth, twisting the image of Pit’s brain from side to side. He tapped some of the black shapes. “See? This shard is plainly visible from the front. But, it vanishes when we turn the image thirty degrees. Then, when we turn another thirty degrees, it’s back! I’m getting a similar effect on a dozen fragments.”
“Aw, just go in and poke around,” said Pit Geek. “You don’t need no fancy gadgets. Just a good knife and maybe a sifter.”
Dr. Cheetah shook his head. “If you were anyone else, I’d never do this.”
“You’re not doing it to him!” said Sunday.
Dr. Cheetah sighed. “I understand your reservations. But, Pit is now my patient as well. He plainly has serious, chronic injuries. He has a symptom that greatly reduces his quality of life, in the form of his fractured memories. And, his curious biology does give him a better than average chance of surviving this procedure.”
“You’re both crazy,” said Sunday.
Dr. Cheetah shrugged. “Why don’t you both sleep on it? If you wish to have the surgery, I can perform it tomorrow.”
“You’d perform the surgery yourself?” asked Sunday. “I thought you were more of a general practitioner.”
“My dear, I am a surgeon, an architect, a computer programmer, an attorney, and a novelist. And, until recently, a diplomat. Pangean’s are few in number. We must wear many hats.”
“I haven’t seen any of you wearing hats,” said Pit.
“It’s a human idiom,” said the doctor. “I confess, our language is riddled with them. Until recently, all literature was human literature. Perhaps after a century of chimpanzee literature, humans will begin to adopt our idioms.”
“Like what?”
“For instance, when we face difficulties in reaching a goal, we say, ‘the fattest ants are always lip biters.”
“Okay,” said Sunday. “I’m not sure it will catch on, but I get it.”
“The dung you fling at your enemy sticks beneath your own nails.”
Sunday nodded. “Makes sense. I can almost imagine it catching on.”
“In estrus, even the dominant female has a slick anus.”
She stared at him.
“It means—”
She held up her hand to stop him. “I honestly don’t want to know.”

There were other things she didn’t want to know, but found out anyway. They’d driven to
Goodall, the capital city of Pangea, since this was where the hospital was located. While it was the largest city on the island, it was still small enough to walk everywhere. From one end of the town to the other wasn’t even a mile. The town didn’t even have stoplights.
The hotel had been built with several floors to accommodate humans. The place was stuffy and filled with mosquitoes. Pangeans didn’t like air conditioning; it robbed enclosed spaces of any smell except that of the air conditioner. Dr. Cheetah explained that this would be like decorating a human room with a single unvarying shade of beige. So, windows were left open, and bugs came in, including a spider in the bathtub big enough to have it’s own zip code. Pit Geek chivalrously devoured the arachnid so that she could take a shower.
In the evening, they went out into the streets to see the night life. Every third business was a grooming parlor where rows of female chimps wearing white gloves fussed over their chimp clientele, laboring to pick away all the fleas and ticks that had accumulated during the day. They passed a bar where a chimp band called the Hoot Pants as getting the small crowd to wave their hands in the air as they hooted and panted. These all seemed to be harmless imitations of human businesses until they passed an open air restaurant that resembled a sushi bar. Only, instead of a glass case full of fish, there was wall of small cages holding tiny primates, small monkeys and lemurs no bigger than pug dogs. A group of male chimps were passing a tablet computer around with schematics for some kind of engine. Most chimps spoke in sign language, but these three had the vibrating implants that gave them voices. They were practicing their English by having a conversation where every other word was a number. They were drinking bright red juice from coconut bowls. At least, Sunday hoped it was juice.
But her hopes were dashed when the largest chimp pointed to one of the cages. The chimp stationed at the cage had a leather apron around his neck, with the pockets stuffed with knives and cleavers. He pulled a screaming lemur from a cage and carried to the chimps table. They shoved their computer into a briefcase as the butcher chimp slammed the still wiggling animal down on the table hard enough to stun it. Then he pulled a cleaver with a blade nearly two feet long and a eight inches wide and swung it. The lemur was perfectly bisected I the aftermath. The three chimp’s fought one another to get the two halves of the brain. Two of the chimps hooted as they chewed up their pink prize. Then, one said in buzzing English with a perfectly bland Midwestern accent, "Fast apes eat brain, slow apes suck kidney.”
The chimp who’d had no brain to eat dug the left kidney out of the bisected primate and popped the purple organ into his mouth. He didn’t look happy. He crossed his arms, and sulked.

The next morning, Sunday was covered in welts from mosquitoes. She appreciated the love of smells, especially as a gentle breeze blew floral scents through the room, but didn’t understand why window screens hadn’t caught on.
She pulled her knees to her chest and stared at Pit, who was still sleeping.
Then he snorted, and looked at her with one eye half open.
“Good morning,” he said.
“I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten what happened yesterday?” she asked.
“Probably some of it,” he said.
“How about….?”
“I want the surgery,” he said.
“Fine.” She slid next to him, pressing her body close, drinking in his warmth and his scent. “You better not come out of this a vegetable. I love you, but I’m not changing your diapers.”
“Yeah, you would,” he said.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “I would.”

Sunday chewed her nails as she sat in the surgical waiting room. The surgery lasted hours. A young female chimp passed through the room every hour, offering her bottled water or fruit juice. Sunday wasn’t thirsty.
Which as ironic, since Sunday was certain she was in hell. In the years she’d worked for Monday, he’d engaged in constant mind games designed to leave her contemptuous of other people’s lives. She’d been an easy target. She’d hated every man her mother had brought into the house, and despised her mother for not being a stronger woman. Monday had convinced her that her innate superiority to ordinary humans had already begun to manifest at a young age. It was natural that Sunday felt no empathy for others, because there were no others who were her equal.
Now that she was twenty five, she could see how easy it had been for a fifteen year old to fall for a father telling her she was better than everyone else. He’d been able to take the baseline alienation and rebellion present in any teen and puff it up into full blown psychopathic isolation, where Sunday had been alone as an inheritor of truth and power in a world populated by dull, nameless shadows she would never care to know.
How easy it had been.
How easy it had been to kill.
And now she thought about all cops she’d burned, and all the wives and mothers who’d waited in rooms just like this for word of whether their loved ones would live or die.
If Pit did die….
If….
If Pit did die, she would turn herself into the authorities and ask to be executed.
And maybe, in some small way, this would pay back all those widows and orphans she’d created.
The female chimp came into the room. Instead of offering water, she said, “Dr. Cheetah would like to see you.”

She was led to a brightly lit room where Dr. Cheetah was staring at an array of peanut sized bits of black metal laid out on a blue plastic tray.
“Is he…?” she asked.
“The surgery encountered difficulties,” Dr. Cheetah said, sadly. He shook his head. “His brain tissue… we underestimated his regenerative abilities. His brain tissue was healing nearly as quickly as we could pull out metal.”
“Then is he …. is he … ?”
“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Cheetah. “I didn’t mean to create an air of suspense. The surgery was, perhaps, a failure. But, Pit has survived. We won’t know the state of his mind until he wakes, but he seems strong. He was… we gave him enough gas to tranquilize and elephant yet he kept coming too. We had to halt the surgery before we’d removed all the shrapnel.”
“But you took out all this?”
“We took out far more than this,” said Dr. Cheetah. “I have another tray filled with bullet fragments, shrapnel consistent with a hand grenade, the broken tip of a knife blade, the shaft of a bar dart, and three nails.”
“And what are these?”
“These are eleven of the twelve anomalous fragments we saw on the CT scan. The ones that vanished at certain angles.”
“Okay. But what are they?”
“My dear, since you are the person most familiar with Mr. Geek, I was hoping you could tell us.”
She tried to pick one up. It dropped from her fingers instantly. The fragments looked like lumps of hard coal, but this one had been as yielding and wobbly as a water balloon, and surprisingly heavy. She picked up another one, cupping it in her palm. The rolled it forward with her finger and it vanished, though she could still feel the weight I in her hand.
“The turn invisible?”
“At certain angles,” said Dr. Cheetah. “But more than invisible. From certain angles, they can’t even be touched.”
Which seemed to be the case now. Her fingers couldn’t touch the unseen weight on her palm. So, she shook her hand, and a black lump flew off and landed on the floor.
“Be careful, please,” said Dr. Cheetah, reaching for the fragment with his long arm. “We can’t afford to lose what seems to be a very exotic form of matter.”
“Forget losing it,” she said. “You say Pit still has a piece of this in his brain?”
“One large piece, roughly the size of his thumb. Perhaps some smaller fragments as well. The scan has many mysterious shadows that measure no more than a few millimeters.”
“Fragments?” she said. “Do you think these were once part of something larger? Do they fit together?”
Before Dr. Cheetah could answer, she picked up two bits that looked like inky cheetahs. She jammed the curved bits together. For some reason, they wouldn’t touch.
“What do you think—”
Before she completed her question the two halves flowed together into a ring roughly the size and shape of a mini-donut. It lifted from her palm and floated at the level of her eyes. Then, the donut swelled to the size of a bagel as the fragments on the tray vanished one by one. The whole process took only seconds.
Then the lights went out.

Pit gasped as he woke in darkness. His entire skull was on fire. Sounds and pictures and smells and textures and tastes flashed in his mind too quickly to grasp.
He knew who he was. He knew how he’d stopped being a man and turned into a monster.

1954. Frank Macey stared into the mirror at a face he didn’t recognize. His thick black curls had gone gray and stringy. His square, ruggedly handsome face had begun to sag. His stubble was flecked with gray. He hadn’t bathed in almost a week.
What was the point? He hauled garbage for a living. He was up before dawn every day dumping metal cans full of rot and filth into a truck that smelled like evil, a scent that rose from a black sludge caked into every crevice and cranny of the vehicle, a smell that had gotten into the pores of his skin and would never wash away.
He’d been famous once.
“Stick-em-up,” he said to the mirror, pointing a finger at himself.
He hadn’t come out west to play bad guys. Everyone back home had told him that with his looks and talent, he’d be playing the leading man in every film. And his prophesied success had nearly come true. He’d been hired on the first audition he’d gone to. He’d gone to be cast in the role of the sheriff. The director had said his nose was too big.
“You Jewish?” the director had asked.
“No,” Frank had answered.
“You got kind of a look about you,” the director said. “I can see you as a bad guy. Say, ‘stick-em-up,’ for me.”
Frank did a quick draw with his finger and barked, “Stick-em-up!”
“Not half bad,” the director said.
Frank had been on screen for the first two minutes of the film. He’d come out from behind some bushes when a stagecoach had stopped to move a fallen tree from the dusty trail. He’d fired his gun once overhead as a warning then yelled out his line. The leading lady had screamed and Dallas Smith, Texas Ranger had shot the pistol from his hand and knocked him out.
Audiences loved it. Something about Frank’s face made it a face they enjoyed seeing take a punch. He’d gone to open other films, robbing banks and saloons and trains and riverboats and even a church. He’d gotten more lines. In some films, he’d been able to tack on, “This is a robbery!” In others, he’d shouted, “Dallas Smith!” in surprise and despair when the ranger had popped up from behind some random bit of scenery and shot the gun from his hand.
The job had paid good wages, but Frank never stopped wanting to play the leading man. But anytime he’d try out for another movie, he’d be told that audiences didn’t want to see the Stick-Em-Up Kid get the girl.
Frank hadn’t been able to get the girls in real life, either. His on-screen persona was of a guy who couldn’t take a punch. A punk. A loser. And ladies wanted heroes.
Except, some ladies only wanted money. He’d had to get good and drunk the first time he screwed up his courage to pay a whore. Eventually, the parts dried up, and he ran out of money for both booze and whores, so he chose the booze.
And now it had been ten years since he’d last been in a movie. Ten years since he’d come to Hollywood wanting to be a hero, only to learn he had a bad-guy’s eyes.
He got dressed in the cover-alls he wore to work. They were stained and stiff with gunk. In his pocket was a Colt 45.
He drew it and pointed at the mirror.
He delivered his line.
And then he shot his reflection in the face.

Frank was just starting his garbage route and just finishing a bottle of scotch when he’d turned the truck west and started driving toward Vegas. It was four in the morning. He’d be over the state line long before anyone noticed him missing. In Vegas, people walked around with cash in their pockets. Frank would enjoy some cash in his pocket.
And unlike the movies, his gun was filled with real bullets.
No one was going to be punching him the jaw after he delivered his lines.
And then, just minutes before dawn, on a trackless stretch of highway with not a single car or building for ten mile in any direction, he’d run into…
Actually, he didn’t know what he’d run into. A thing. He’d run into some thing. It had looked almost like an elephant, if you removed the legs and just allowed the elephant to levitate two feet off the ground, balanced on a pencil-thin shaft of glowing green light. It had no trunk or eyes or ears, just a mouth as wide as the bumper of Frank’s garbage truck. It was dark purple, drifting right down the white dotted line divided the highway. Frank was doing sixty, the top speed the truck could handle.
He’d gone through the windshield when his truck plowed into the thing. He should have been killed, but the floating beast had been blubbery. Sinking into it’s body had been like sinking into a bathtub filled with lard and covered with a blanket.
And then the beast had torn apart, and the wheel of his truck bounced past him, and garbage was thrown all over the dark desert.
He’d slid along the asphalt, his cover-alls protecting him from road burn. It had still taken him a moment to recover. By the time he sat up, all the blubbery remains of the beast were bubbling away, evaporating with a smell like ammonia, vanishing into thin air.
All that was left after the accident was scattered garbage and a truck so pulverized that there wasn’t a single piece left bigger than a playing card.
“What the hell?” Frank asked.
His words were answered by a humming sound that released three pulses that matched the cadence of his words.
“Someone there?” he asked.
Again, three pulses of sound.
Then, a black donut had appeared in front of his face.
It hummed three times.
Frank had reached for his gun.
The donut had floated forward and placed itself against his forehead. It was warm and soft, and suddenly there was a voice in his head not his own.
“My apologies,” the unseen voice said. “Do not be al—”
Frank had twisted his arm awkwardly to place the barrel of the gun against the metal ring that touched him. The bullet was aimed straight at his own forehead. It would kill him if it passed through the mystery object.
And he felt as if this would be the best possible outcome.

The donut floated into Pit’s recovery room. Dr. Cheetah and Sunday followed close behind it. Sunday had lit up a single finger to provide light.
“If you use your powers, it will kill you,” said Pit.
“It’s just a finger,” said Sunday. “I’ll be okay unless I really light up again.”
Pit’s focus turned once more back to the floating black donut.
“What the hell is that thing?” he asked.
“I am Eleven,” the donut answered.
Man, woman, and chimp all stared at it, wide-eyed.
“I have learned your language in the years you have hosted me,” said Eleven. “I apologize if my previous attempts to communicate cause you discomfort.”
“You… you were inside me?” Pit asked. “In my head?”
“Yes,” said Eleven. “Part of me continues to reside within you. I thank you all for freeing enough of my form to allow me to reintegrate at least partially.”
“What are you?” Pit asked again.
“I am Eleven,” the thing answered.
“Is that a name or an age?” asked Sunday.
“It equates most closely with the human concept of a name,” said Eleven. “My age would be difficult to convey in your language.”
“You apparently know numbers,” said Sunday. “How tough can it be?”
“I am a seven dimensional explorative construct,” said Eleven. “Time moves backwards in my sixth dimension, and orthogonally in my fifth and seventh dimension in relation to my other four dimensions. If I were to express my age using your constrictive enumerative systems, my age would be expressed as a negative number.”
“Dr. Coco will be most anxious to speak to you,” said Dr. Cheetah. “He recently proposed a unified field theory operative in seven dimensions.”
“This conversation cannot occur,” said Eleven. “I am forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the inhabitants of planets I study.”
“You damn well interfered with me!” said Pit.
“This was never my intention,” said Eleven. “You drove your vehicle into my vehicle. You met my attempt at telepathic communication with an act of violence.”
“Vehicle?” said Pit. “You were driving a damn legless elephant down a dark highway! I wouldn’t have hit you if you’d been in something with headlights.”
“The bioship glows quite strongly in infrared,” said Eleven. “I was not aware of your species limited ocular range.”
“Why have you stayed inside him all these years and never said anything?” asked Sunday.
Suddenly, all the lights came back on. She let her finger fade back to its normal state. She didn’t seem to have any pain.
“My sentience could not emerge while I was fractured,” said Eleven. “I could not heal myself without damaging my new host’s brain even further. Of my ninety-three restrictions, the first is that I shall do no harm.”
“But you did me all kind’s of harm!” said Pit. “You stole my memories. You made me a damn zombie monster!”
“Even in my non-sentient state, core programming required was designed to maintain a bioship. Any damage you have accrued over the years has been repaired. My repair mechanisms strove to keep you in the exact state I found you in. With minor improvements to your fueling systems, of course.”
“My fuel… you’re the reason I can eat anything? And don’t go to the bathroom?”
“Your evolved fuel systems were wasteful and inefficient. You would never build sufficient power for interstellar travel through primitive chemical digestion. All of your world seems woefully underpowered. The rather minimal power I pulled from the environment to rebuild myself was sufficient to damage this structures power systems. You are the most energy efficient creature on this planet, Frank Macey. I have fueled all of your biological needs for over five decades with only the three humans you devoured when you first opened the mass portal. The excess mass you’ve consumed is being kept in stasis until such time as it is sufficient to power your travel through space.”
Pit didn’t really know what to say to this.
Sunday, however, cut to the question that should have been on his mind: “Now that you’re not in him anymore, does he still have his powers?”
“But I am still inside him. I must maintain my hosts systems while I’m still inside him.”
Pit reached into his mouth and drew out the regeneration ray. “You’re in luck, Space Donut. This baby has a ‘remove foreign material’ setting.”
Sunday surprised Pit by jumping forward and snatching away the ray. “No one is removing anything,” she said.
“Th—sk—ha,” said Eleven.
“What was that?”
“My apologies. I was merely stating that it would be wasteful to remove me at this point. Given that my subroutines have already altered your body to serve as my vessel, I’d like to remain within you until such time as I complete my study mission. I apologize that I could not be heard before. The device Sunday is holding is emitting radio waves that interfered with the voice channels I had selected.”
“What do you mean, it’s transmitting radio waves?” asked Sunday.
“I’m unsure how to make my statement any clearer,” said Eleven.
“What’s it transmitting?” she asked.
“Real time data of our conversation. Limited physiological data on the bearer’s body temperature, heart rate, and the ph levels present in sweat.”
Sunday turned to Dr. Cheetah, he voice sparking with anger. “You knew about this, didn’t you?”
“I swear I knew of no such thing.”
Sunday pressed her lips tightly together.
“Dr. Troglodytes,” she said.
“Of course,” said Dr. Cheetah.
“Will one of y’all tell me what you’re talking about?” asked Pit.
Sunday started yanking IVs out of Pit’s arm.
“Ow!” Pit screamed as the needles tore from his veins.
“You’ll survive, you baby. I need you dressed in one minute.” She turned to Dr. Cheetah. “Trog have an office in this hospital?”
“Of course,” said the chimp. “He should be there now.”
“Lead us,” she said. “We can’t let him get away.”
Pit got out of bed, feeling a little woozy from the massive amounts of gas they’d pumped in to keep him under. “Who’s getting away? What are we in such a hurry about?”
“My father is dead!” said Sunday, throwing open the doors of a white cabinet. She said, “Yes!” as he found his clothes. She tossed them to him. “So if Rex Monday didn’t send us a regeneration ray, who did?”
“Dr. Troglodytes? Why?”
Sunday shook her head like she was frustrated by how stupid Pit was being. “He said he’d been studying our biological data! That machine tore us down to our DNA and put us back together. For all I know, he’s trying to give himself our powers!”
“Since your powers are killing you, this seems unlikely,” said Dr. Cheetah. “Still, I would like to discover the truth.”
Pit yanked on his pants and threw off his hospital gown. He grabbed his shirt and headed for the door. “We’ll come back later for my boots.”
Then the floor shifted sideways beneath him and he slammed face first into the wall. He tried to balance himself, but the floor continued to jump and tremble. The IV poles toppled and everything attached to the walls fell off and landed with a crash.
“Earthquake!” Pit yelled.
“Impossible!” shouted Dr. Cheetah, as he clung to the edge of the swaying bed. “We have no earth to quake! Pangea sits atop a fused mass of floating plastic. We cannot be affected by seismic action!”
“Then how the hell do you explain this?” shouted Sunday.

What no one in Pangea could know was that, far below, on the surface of the sea, the anchor chains had all been severed. The central chain, the strongest, was now in the grip of a large man in white tights with a red S on his chest. Servant strained as he pulled the chain northward. He was determined to keep his schedule. In two hours, the northern tip of Pangea would be within 200 miles of the southernmost Aleutian Island, and thus in the territorial waters of the United States. In two hours and ten minutes, Pit Geek and Sundancer would finally face justice.

4689 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Twelve 3622 words

2011-08-12T15:55:00.000-07:00

Another NSFW chapter.

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And then, for a little while, we were happy.

Chapter Twelve
Monkeys and Robots Make Everything Better

They arrived in Pangea in the middle of the night. Sunday was feeling better after a blood transfusion and two days of rest. The sub had run deep, cut off from radio, and Pit had expected that when it finally surfaced they would be surrounded by battle ships and superhuman waiting to take them back to justice.
Instead, they surfaced in an utterly changed world. Pit didn’t have much interest in politics, but as Sunday read news on the internet, she tried to explain things so he’d understand. The US had faced world wide condemnation for the embassy attacks. China took the incident as evidence that the US was planning a full scale invasion of Pangea. A decade ago, the place had been an embarrassing morass of refuge that no country wanted to deal with. Now, Pangea was turning into an island paradise in an enviable location. China had seen the pattern before. The US would claim that a country was harboring terrorists, then use this as an excuse to conquer the country. The US disavowed any attempt at turning itself into a colonizing power, yet countries around the world were falling like dominoes as the US invaded and installed friendly governments willing to give US corporations generous contracts.
The Chinese had finally had enough. If the US used force against Pangea, China would come to the country’s defense.
“Does that mean we’re safe?” Pit asked.
“I think it just might,” she said.
Dr. Cheetah had driven them along a highway that followed the sea. It was a full moon and the water gleamed in the light. The car was a convertible. Later, Pit would learn that 90% of the automobiles on the island were convertibles, since chimps took delight in the sensation of wind rushing through their fur. But, on this evening, all the knew was that he was in the back seat of an open car with the woman he loved pressed up against him and the sea and the sky stretched on forever.
They were provided with a sea-side villa that had been built as an emergency refuge by the notorious African dictator Zesty Manbuto. Alas, Zesty and every member of his immediate family, and a frightening number of uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, and strangers who’d born a mild family resemblance had recently been executed in the aftermath of revolution. The Pangean villa had been built with money channeled through illegal bank accounts. There was no legal document proving it belonged to anyone. It had been built to accommodate humans, so the chimps didn’t want it. (As Pit had discovered during his time on the sub, chimps built their sinks and counters at about the level of his kneecaps, and their toilets barely stood higher than his ankles.) Dr. Cheetah assured them that, for a fraction of their stolen wealth, they could call the place home.
It was nearly morning when they got to the place. Pit thought it looked like a museum with its marble floors and columns. The master bedroom had a bed that looked built to accommodate orgies.
“Zesty had large appetites,” said Cheetah. Then he’d opened the door to the balcony and they’d followed him out. A long lawn landscaped in palm trees and spiky bushes stretched down to a beach white as snow.
The moon had vanished. The sun set the water aflame as it rose to the east. Sunday squeezed Pit’s hand.
“We’ll take it,” she said.
Pit had been unaware they were being given a choice, but he played along. “Sure,” he said. “It’s perfect.”
After Dr. Cheetah had left, he and Sunday lay in bed. He was cautious, worried about hurting her. They kissed gently for a long time, but he made no motion to take things further. He knew she still wasn’t feeling as well as she should.
Finally, in frustration, she grabbed his hand and clambed it onto her breast.
“I’m just dying,” she said. “I’m not dead.”
And then he’d given up on gentleness and caution, determined to test her physical limits. An hour later he was out of breath and too sore to crawl away as she pulled him to her once more.
“I might need the regeneration ray,” he’d said as she grabbed hold of parts of his anatomy that were ready to surrender.
“Or you might just need some extra encouragement,” she’d said, sliding beneath the sheets.
They wound up sleeping until sunset. They awoke drenched with sweat. They’d gotten sweatier for a time. Then they’d gone down to the swimming pool to cool off. They floated around on water lounges while tiny swimming robot butlers brought them pina coladas. Sunday finished her fifth drink and went completely limp in her lounge. Pit thought she might have gone to sleep.
Then she whispered, “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“Naw,” he said.
“I’m so… happy,” she whispered.
“Oh.” He scratched his chin. “I ain’t sure I’d call that wrong.”
“Shouldn’t I be scared?” she asked. “They tell me I’m dying, and it’s like a weight off my shoulders. War is over. I fought the world and the world won. And now I’m just so … so….”
“Drunk?” he offered.
“At peace,” she said. “Maybe it’s endorphins.”
“You ain’t gonna die,” said Pit. “Dr. Cheetah said he’d have ways to treat you.”
“We’re all gonna die,” she said.
“Well, sure. But there’s no need to be in a hurry.”
“I’m not in a hurry. It’s just… I don’t know.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve killed a lot of people. A lot.”
“You keep count?” he asked.
“No,” she said, then laughed. “It didn’t matter to me.” She shook her head. “Those rednecks in the bar. All those cops. Who knows how many people I took out back in LA when I went nova to stop my fall. I didn’t see their faces. They didn’t see mine. I had nothing against them. I was just some force of nature, mowing them down, without asking if they were ready, without asking if they’d had time to do everything they wanted to do, without caring if they were in love, or in pain. I pushed death upon them with utter indifference.”
She motioned for the bar-bot to make her another drink. She let her hand drop back into the water while she waited.
“And now,” she whispered. “Now it’s my turn. Whether I’m ready or not has nothing at all to do with it.”
“I ain’t ready,” said Pit. “I ain’t ready for you to go.”
With a soft whir of underwater jets, the pool-bot brought her next drink out to her.
“Damn, these are good,” she said, after sucking down half the glass. Then she rubbed her temple and squinched her eyes together. “Ow!”
“What’s wrong?” ask Pit, jumping up from his lounge and bobbing toward her in the chest deep water.
“Brain freeze!” she said. “I drank to fast.”
“Oh,” said Pit. “That’s the worst.”
She sighed. “Not even by a longshot.”
Pit climbed back into his floating lounge. Sensor directed jets to stabilize the chair as he positioned himself. “This is pretty fancy stuff,” he said. He laned back and looked up at the stars. “Yeah, the good life.”
Sunday sighed as she, too, leaned back. “Monkeys and robots make everything better.”

A few days later, they met with Dr. Cheetah. They’d spoken on the phone a few times, but he told Sunday he had news he needed to deliver face to face. He arrived with a second chimp. In L.A., the embassy chimps had worn clothes to make their human hosts more at ease. On Pangea, all the chimps went naked. This meant, unfortunately, that when the two chimps arrived, Pit couldn’t tell the two of them apart. He hoped he’d pick up on some clue as to which was Dr. Cheetah so he wouldn’t look like a jerk to the ape who’d saved their lives.
“How are you feeling today?” one chimp asked as he approached Sunday.
“Not bad,” she said. “Borderline normal.”
“The pain has lessened?”
“Some,” she said. “I have some stiffness, and sometimes I get these little needles of pain digging around in my shins. But, I had a hangover the other day that put things in perspective. I don’t want to be a wimp about this. The pain is manageable.”
“Excellent,” said Dr. Cheetah. Then, he turned to the second chimp. “Allow me to introduce my superior, Dr. Troglodytes.”
“Troglodytes?” asked Pit. “Ain’t that some kind of monster?”
“I think not,” said Dr. Troglodytes. “The scientific classification for chimpanzees is pan troglodytes. I’m surprised you wouldn’t know this, given that humans have provided the labels for every living thing. I fear I must question the quality of your education.”
Pit furrowed his brow. Was he being insulted by a monkey? Then he grinned. Maybe the ape had him figured out. “I ain’t sure I had no education.”
“Indeed,” said Dr. Troglodytes. He turned to Sunday. “And you are the metahuman whose powers have damaged her?”
“Guilty as charged,” she said.
Dr. Troglodytes said, “I’ve reviewed your scans and blood work thoroughly. I’ve come to present you with options to deal with your bone cancer. I fear none are very good.”
“Hit me,” said Sunday.
“Ordinarily, bone cancer is treated with drugs and radiation. Unfortunately, your tumors don’t possess the genetic markers that would respond to the most effective drugs. Radiation is normally used to target a few localized tumors. You have tumors throughout your body. My colleague may have used the unfortunate phrasing ‘every bone in your body’ during an earlier conversation. This is no where near the truth.”
“Oh?” Sunday asked.
“The human body has 206 bones. You have tumors in 93 bones, fewer than half.”
“Oh,” said Sunday.
“Of course, this is still to many to make surgery an option. If the bones were confined to a limb, we could consider amputation. Since you have tumors in most vertebrae and in several ribs, this is hardly a practical solution.”
“Of course,” said Sunday.
“We could attempt to treat your tumors with a broad spectrum of chemotherapy not dependent on your genetic markers. However, due to the widespread nature of your disease, the doses would be massive. It is a case where the cure could shorten your life more than simply allowing the disease to run its course.”
Sunday nodded. “If it runs its course, how long do I have?”
Dr. Troglodytes shook his head. “I can’t say. There are no previous cases that quite match your condition. I can’t point to any given tumor in your body and say, ‘Here. This is the one that will kill you.’ With your metahuman physiology, I can’t rule out the possibility of spontaneous remission. However, given the extent to which the disease has progressed in the relatively short time since you first used the regeneration ray, my informed opinion is that you may have only weeks left to live.”
“Will I be in pain?”
“Pain can be treated,” said Dr. Troglodytes.
“I guess we’ll just let the disease go where it goes,” she said.
“I can’t take that,” said Pit.
“It’s not your call,” said Sunday.
“We can just keep using the regeneration ray on you,” said Pit. “Rebuild you every morning. You ain’t gotta die!”
Dr. Troglodytes shook his head. “I fear she’s lost mass with each exposure to the ray. You will only increase her agony with such a course of treatment.”
“I’m done with the ray,” she said.
“This isn’t fair!” Pit shouted, throwing up his hands. “Why is the ray working on me and killing you?”
“My understanding is that you possess enhanced recuperative powers,” said Dr. Troglodytes. “The ray may indeed harm you, but your natural biology mitigates the effect.”
“Then put my blood in her,” said Pit.
“Excuse me?” said the chimp.
“Put my blood in her. Let it heal her?”
“You know nothing of medical science, my good man. Your blood types are incompatible.”
“How do you know that?” asked Sunday.
Dr. Troglodytes said, “It was among the biological information we recovered from the ray.”
“When did you recover information from the regeneration ray?” asked Sunday. “Have you even seen it?”
“No,” said Dr. Troglodytes. “Of course I haven’t recovered any information from the ray. What are you speaking of?”
“You just said—”
Dr. Troglodytes held up his hand. “My apologies. I simply misspoke. We were talking of the ray and the word was simply in my mind. I meant to say, of course, the biological data we gathered from your father’s records.”
“Did those records show why I can heal?” asked Pit.
“Not that I can recall,” said the doctor.
“Then find out. Put me in a machine. Take my blood. You monkeys are supposed to be geniuses! I’m a damn puzzle. Solve me!”
There were several seconds of silence as the two chimps gazed at one another.
“We have nothing to lose,” said Dr. Cheetah.
“It would be cruel to inflict false hope,” said Dr. Troglodytes.
“Think of what we might learn!” said Dr. Cheetah. “Whether we cure Sunday is barely relevant. If we could market a drug that safely cured any wound suffered by humans, think of the fortunes to be made. Think of the prestige that would be due our country.”
Dr. Troglodytes turned from his colleague, waving his hand. “I care nothing for prestige in human eyes. And to me, a drug that cured humans and had no effect on our own species would be a drug I would flush down the toilet. Humans number billions while we number in the mere thousands. Why should we use our genius to save them?”
“Until we understand his powers, we can’t know that they only affect humans. We could be saving the lives of chimps as well.”
“Do as you wish,” said Dr. Troglodytes. “I need fresh air. I shall wait for you in the car.”
Sunday furrowed her brow. “Are you sure he’s doing all he can for me?”
Dr. Cheetah nodded. “He’s a professional. I fear we’ve simply exposed a political rift among we Pangeans. Like humans, we chimps have our factions. I represent a political party who wishes to promote trade with humans. I would like to see humans view our island as a desirable location for tourism. The truth is, our nation needs to establish itself as an economic power if we are to thrive. On the other hand, Dr. Troglodytes represents a faction of chimps who feel that Pangea should become completely independent from humanity.”
“Then he’s probably not fond of seeing us here,” said Sunday.
“No,” said Dr. Cheetah. “And Pit’s use of the slur ‘monkey’ cannot possibly have endeared you to him. But, again, he is a professional. I can assure you his personal feelings do not in anyway influence his ability to provide you with the best possible medical care.”
Sunday nodded.
Pit stared out the window and watched the monkey climb into the convertible. He’d be keeping an eye on this one. If Sunday wasn’t taken care of, well… out of all the crazy stuff he’d put in his mouth, he’d never swallowed a monkey. There was a first for everything.

Ap was in the command center working with Nathan to update the firmware of his belt when Servant came in and walked up to Simpson, who was sitting at the controls of the space machine, reading comic books. When none of the Covenant were out on missions, Simpson really didn’t have that much to do.
The command center was cavernous, half a foot ball field long and several stories high, so from the other side of the room Ap couldn’t hear what Servant said as he handed Simpson a sheet of paper.
But he did hear when Simpson turned, started tapping in the provided coordinates, then said, loudly, “Wait a second. These aren’t the coordinates for Seatle… this is Pangea!”
Servant cringed as all eyes turned toward him.
Servant tried to shush Simpson, but Simpson was a nerd straight out of central casting who’d never really learned to control the tone of his voice. He sounded a bit like Jerry Lewis as the Nutty Professor when he said, “You almost got me! Ha, that’s a good one, Mr. Servant!”
“Oh lord,” muttered Nathan, rolling his eyes. “What a moron.”
Technically, everyone in the room except for Ap and Servant was a certifiable genius, but Ap got the gist of Nathan’s sentiment. Nathan snapped the side panel of Ap’s belt closed. “There,” he said. “Your belt had a vulnerability that could have been exploited by a Trojan application hidden in one of your powers.”
“How likely is that, though?” asked Ap. “You guys run everything through the simulator.”
“Do we?” asked Nathan. “Because I found a couple of vision powers in the buffer that hadn’t gone through the normal review channels.”
“Oh,” said Ap. “Right. Those were from trusted sources.”
“A string of characters in a chat room is not a trusted source.”
“I’ve … uh … I’ve met Code4U. Sort of.”
“And I don’t want to know what the application Swinging Pipe does.”
“No, you don’t,” said Ap. “But I’ll uninstall it at once. The vision stuff as well. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Good,” said Nathan. “Then we’re done.”
Across the room, Servant and Simpson were done as well. Simpson was grinning, laughing at a joke only he was getting. Servant exited the room with a furtive glance over his shoulder.
Ap used his belt to trigger his Shadow mode. He hadn’t yet found an invisibility program that actually worked, but Shadow got him to 95% transparency. With Servant stewing in his failure to get to Pangea, Ap had little trouble slipping past him by hugging the wall and dashing around the corner. He leaned up against the wall, casually crossing his arms.
Servant turned the corner and paused when he saw him.
“Well that went well,” said Ap.
“Shut up,” said Servant.
“You were going to provoke an international incident,” said Ap.
“It wouldn’t be an incident if no one found their bodies,” said Servant.
“Woah,” said Ap. “No more Mister Nice Guy.”
“Right now there are two known mass murderers living like they’re royalty. You can just sleep at night knowing that we could solve this problem for good?”
“By my scorecard, they’ve kicked our butts twice,” said Ap. “Why would this time be any different?”
“Because last time we swept in pretending to be heroes, intent on capturing them. This time, I’m going in as a rogue agent. No one is authorizing my mission. The president can condemn my actions and launch a manhunt for me. I won’t even resist if they find me. I’d gladly spend the rest of my life in jail to bring these two monsters to justice.”
Ap pushed off from the wall. He’d expected to playfully tease Servant. He hadn’t expected quite this level of seething rage.
“Look,” said Ap. “I’m not happy about this development. But, orders are, unless Pit Geek and Sundancer show up on American soil again, we can’t touch them.”
“There are things more important than orders.”
“Yeah. Like the law.”
“There are man’s law. And then there’s God’s law.”
“I’m not a Biblical scholar, but isn’t that eye for an eye stuff Old Testament? If you’re really a Christian, shouldn’t you be a turn the other cheek kind of guy?”
“Don’t question my faith.”
“Fine. Then I’ll question your brains. You aren’t Ogre any more. You’re trying to be better than that. We’re all trying to be better than that. You saw the line of toys they Mr. Knowbokov is putting into Walmart. There’s a little Servant doll! How cool is that?”
Servant sighed. “Pretty cool I guess. Did they make the doll of you where the head blows up like a balloon?”
“Yep. And a Shadow Ap made of clear plastic. Another Ap where you can swap out the feet and hands for various bio weapons. Honestly if there’s anything cooler, I can’t think of it. And yet, somehow, I still can’t get any dates.”
“Code4U came on pretty strong.”
“You know the fundamental problem with that equation.”
“Really want to try that Swinging Pipe mode, huh?”
Ap’s cheeks burned. “You heard that?”
“Everyone’s heard it. Nathan told Sarah and Sarah’s told everyone.”
“Great,” sighed Ap.
“Everyone knew your secret any way.”
“Code4U didn’t.”
“Maybe she was borne without gaydar.”
Ap crossed his arms. “Maybe it shouldn’t be a secret.”
“Whatever,” said Servant. “I hope, on day, you’ll come around to the truth and let me introduce you to some people who can cure you.”
“Why am I talking you out of going to Pangea?” Ap asked. “Wouldn’t my life be better if you were a wanted fugitive?”
“I am already a wanted fugitive,” said Servant.
“Oh, right.”
“But there aren’t any dolls made of that guy. I guess I’ll play by the rules.”
“It would be a shame to bring the value of our collectables down,” said Ap.
Servant chuckled. “Who knows? Maybe we could put out a Sundancer doll. Maybe she’d come back to the US to demand her royalties.”
“Light bulb mode!” said Ap. Suddenly, a glowing egg bulged up from the top of his head, glowing brightly.
“What the hell is that?” asked Servant.
“I just had an idea!” said Ap. “We wouldn’t break any laws at all if we could drag them back into US waters.”
“You’ve got an idea how to do that?”
“Maybe,” said Ap. “Exactly how strong are you again?”
3622 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Eleven 3611 words

2011-08-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

The first murders were by accident. But in Tijuana twenty years later, I wasn’t hurting nobody. I don’t remember how I’d got my power under control, but I only ate what I wanted to by then. I don’t even think I remembered those first guys I killed, but it’s difficult to remember when you forgot to remember a memory.
They threw me in a well in Tijuana. They’d point a spotlight down the hole. Faces I couldn’t make out would lean over the well and watch as my handlers shot AK47s down the hole. “Zombie!” they’d scream, and laugh as I flailed around, not dying. “Zombie!”
There was a man with no left ear who used to show up drunk in the middle of the night and pour gas on me then toss in a burning newspaper. He wasn’t charging people to watch. He just liked to hear me scream.
I was down there for years. One day a rope got tossed down. Don’t know who did it, or why. They didn’t stick around. I couldn’t have asked when I climbed out; I’d been shot in the head so many times I’d lost the capacity for speech. Took months to get it back.
Took hours to kill everyone in a five block radius. Men, women, children. I didn’t know who had paid to see the zombie. I didn’t care.
I wonder if the person who threw me the rope had any regrets.
I wonder if I killed them.

Chapter Eleven
Hollow

When Pit had pressed his face to the elevator, it looked to Sunday like the whole box had warped and curved like a fun house mirror. There was a high pitched whistle that caused her molars to vibrate. Then the whole elevator had shattered into tiny fragments. Pit’s face sort of tore away, his lips splitting in half a dozen places, the wound’s racing up his face. When the blast of wind hit, the skin just peeled back like a banana, leaving his skull staring at the vanished door with a look of wide-eyed surprise.
Skyrider’s helmet slammed into Sunday’s coccyx half a second later. Sunday had apparently been standing directly over her, and when the floor tore apart, collision had been inevitable. Sunday’s wound up sitting on Skyrider’s shoulders, with the lowe rim of the faceplate of the woman’s helmet cutting into her pubic bone.
A huge, ugly naked man flashed past her, limbs flailing as he tumbled down, following Pit Geek’s path toward the ground at least a mile below. If they were a mile up, he had thirty seconds before he hit the ground. When she’d first learned to fly, she’d educated herself rather thoroughly on these things.
She tilted her head back, gazing at the sun, and released her self to it. Heat and light exploded from her. Before, Ap’s foam had prevented her from really blasting Skyrider. Now, Skyrider took a dose of energy that should have reduced her to atoms. Instead, the two women were thrown apart by the energy burst. Sunday quickly regained control of her flight. Skyrider spiraled downward, trailing smoke. Her outer garments had been burned away, revealing a skin tight mesh like pantyhose woven from silver covering the woman’s body. Her helmet crumbled as she fell, but by now she was too far away for Sundancer to focus on her face. The woman had spiky red hair and, judging from the limpness of her limbs, the blast had left her unconscious.
Sundancer arced downward, blasting the air behind her to accelerate. She assumed Pit could survive having his face torn off, but wasn’t as sure that he could shake off the damage that would be done if the hit pavement after falling for a mile. She’d studied this subject. She’d seen pictures. At this speed, the human body effectively turned into a water balloon.
Servant had now fallen past Pit Geek. He was once more dressed in white. He had his feet pointed downward, cutting his wind resistance. Why would he want to fall faster?
Sunday reached Pit a quarter mile above the ground and cooled her right hand so she could grab his collar. She felt like her arm would rip from her socket as she tried to slow his fall. She went into a dizzying spiral as the ground raced closer. As the landscape spun, she caught a glimpse of Servant hitting the pavement in the middle of the parking lot, feet first. Asphalt flew everywhere. Then, the hero bounced back into the sky as if he’d had springs on his heels. He flashed toward Sunday and Pit. She screamed as she tried to pull out of her dive.
Servant drove his shoulder into the small of her back. She was certain her spine had snapped as her legs went numb. The impact tore Pit from her grasp. He was limp as a corpse as he fell.
As she tumbled through the air, she saw Servant fall as well. Apparently, while he could jump, he really couldn’t fly. He landed on the pavement feet first, turned into a white blur that ran thirty feet to his right, held out his massive arms, and caught Skyrider like a football, hugging her to his chest, crouching to absorb the impact. The rescue flowed so smoothly couldn’t help but grudgingly admire Servant’s versatility.
Now only yards above the ground, pure instinct kicked in and Sunday flared to a higher brightness. The ground beneath her vaporized. Cars all around her suddenly exploded. The radiation pouring down from her skin acted like a giant pillow and her fall suddenly stopped. She shot back into the sky, once more in control of her flight. While her lower spine felt like it had been his with a sledgehammer, she could once more feel her legs. She looked down. Her survival action had filled the air below her with smoke and dust. She spun 360 degrees as she spun to find where Pit had landed.
Only, Pit hadn’t landed. Instead, he was dangling in a net like the world’s strangest fish. The net, in turn, was hanging from the strangest aircraft she’d ever seen. Dr. Cheetah turned his face toward her and gave her a salute. His wheel chair had been transformed. The wheels had folded down perpendicular to the body of the chair and now whined as they spun like rotors, providing the chair lift. The handles on the back of the chair had folded out to form a tail. Dr. Cheetah piloted the whole thing with a joystick held in his left hand.
He spun the heli-chair around and pressed a button. Two missiles shot out from beneath the vehicle. An instant later, Servant and Skyrider vanished in a small mushroom cloud.
Sunday flew closer to the Doctor. “Good shot!” she shouted.
Dr. Cheetah pointed a finger at his ear then made a few hand signals in sign language. Sunday didn’t know ASL, but she gathered he was saying he couldn’t hear her.
The mushroom cloud cleared. Servant was flat on the ground, face down. Skyrider was nowhere to be seen. Then, Servant rose on his hands and knees, revealing Skyrider underneath him, looking unharmed by the blast.
Directly underneath Dr. Cheetah’s chair, a flesh colored balloon was floating up. Sunday squinted, unsure she was seeing what she was seeing. It looked like Ap dangling from the bottom of the balloon. And the balloon was made from the top of his scalp? She was fairly jaded when it came to physical abnormalities, having spent years in the company of a giant baby doll with a revolver for a head, but this… this was just disturbing.
Dr. Cheetah scooted the heli-chair backward, away from Ap. He pressed another button and a second nylon net shot out from underneath the chair, trailing a steel cable. The well aimed net wrapped itself around Ap’s body, pinning his arms. Dr. Cheetah began to reel him in. Then, Ap’s head deflated with a farting noise and the net fell right through Ap’s body as if it wasn’t even there. Ap spread his limbs like a skydiver as he fell toward ground at a ten the speed a normal body would have fallen.
“Dr. Cheetah!” Sunday screamed, as Servant suddenly leapt for his chair. Fortunately, the chimp’s reflexes were as superhuman as his intellect. He nudged his joystick to the left and Servant’s grasping fingers closed on empty air as the heli-chair scooted away.
Dr. Cheetah pointed west. They weren’t far from the ocean. He tilted his joystick forward and raced toward the sea. Sunday followed. She saw Pit struggling in the nylon netting that hung from the bottom of the heli-chair. She hoped he’d regain his wits enough to fish out the regeneration ray. Only, what if his powers didn’t work if he no longer had lips? And just what had caused the explosion? Her father had said that Pit’s mouth seemed to warp space. Servant had been warping time to keep the elevator intact. Had the competing warps both catastrophically failed?
They reached the beach. Sunday looked back over her shoulder, wanting the satisfaction of seeing smoke and flames pouring up from the mall area. But instead of satisfaction, she felt a chill as the white blur left by Servant’s uniform dodged among cars on the crowded boulevard in hot pursuit of Sunday. He dove into the waves and proved to be just as fast of a swimmer as he was a runner. Sunday could definitely outrace him, but Dr. Cheetah’s heli-chair’s struck her as relatively pokey. If he was pushing it to top speed, that speed was a hundred miles an hour, top. They were almost a mile up. From what she’d seen, Servant couldn’t jump this high. But what did that matter if he simply hounded them until Dr. Cheetah was forced to land? The heli-chair didn’t look as if it were designed for long distance travel.
A direct attack was useless. Servant’s force fields had taken everything she’d thrown at him. But, she had to discourage pursuit somehow. Maybe she could blind him? Could he see through steam?
Even better, could he swim through it?
Sunday raced out a mile in front of Servant, then dropped so that her feet nearly touched the water. She waited ten seconds. Then she let loose with the same level of heat she’d used to melt the West Virginia mountain top. The water formed a bowl beneath her as she vaporized the ocean for a quarter mile in every direction. Servant shot out of the waves in front of her, his arms and legs flailing as he suddenly swam in empty air. He fell toward the muck below.
She shot toward the heavens as the ocean shuddered and uncountable gallons of water roared into the hole she’d left. Servant hit bottom. He raised up, shielding his eyes as he gazed at Sunday. Then, the water crushed in on him, tidal waves hundreds of feet tall dropping down from every direction.
She lowered her intensity as she gave chase to Dr, Cheetah. She gasped. It suddenly felt as if a thousand ice cold needles had been driven into every joint. She jerked erratically across the sky as her limbs began to tremble. It was the same weakness she’d felt back in West Virginia. What was wrong with her?
Clenching her fists, she drew on pure will power to bring her flight back into control before she hit the water. They were several miles off shore now. Geography wasn’t her strong suit, but the closest shore of Pangea had to be at least fifteen hundred miles away. Could she make it that far? Could the heli-chair?
Then, as if she didn’t have enough problems, a large pale shape began to rise through the water beneath her. It had the outline of a shark, but even great whites weren’t this big. It had to be at least two hundred feet long.
A gray fin knifed up from the water. The mega-shark kept rising, until its back was completely out of the water. Waves churned around it as it slowed.
Dr. Cheetah piloted the helichair down toward the broad flat area behind the creature’s head. He gingerly set Pit down, then deftly guided the heli-chair to a gentle landing a few yards away. A hatch suddenly lifted up from the shark’s back and three chimps scurried forward. One slung Pit over his shoulder while the other two assisted Dr. Cheetah.
Sunday dropped onto the back of the shark.
“What’s going on?” she asked as she let her flames flicker away.
Before anyone could answer, she fell, her body slamming onto the sharkskin. It felt like rubber stretched over steel. Her limbs shook uncontrollably as a million invisible dentists drills dug into her teeth and bones. She vomited, unable to lift her head. The front of her thighs grew hot as her bladder emptied.
Dark spots danced before her eyes. The last thing she saw was a chimp’s handlike feet running toward her.

She opened her eyes in a hospital room. She winced as the whiteness of the surrounding stabbed at her eyes. Turning her head, she saw an IV stand with a bag of red fluid and a bag of white fluid.
The acute pain she’d felt when she’d landed had faded, leaving her with a diffuse, hollow ache that ran from her toes to her scalp.
Pit was sitting next to her. He was slumped over in his chair, his face pressed into the sheet on the edge of her bed. His fingers were draped over her left arm. He was drooling.
“Pit,” she said.
His eyes cracked opened. He sat up, rubbing his face. Once more, he was clean shaven.
“You used the regeneration ray?” she asked. Her voice sounded very faint.
He took her hand, clasping it in his grasp. “I was gonna try it on you, but Dr. Cheetah said it weren’t a good idea.”
She nodded. “I’ve felt funny ever since I used that thing.” She sighed. “After it takes me apart, I’m not certain it’s putting me back together right.”
Pit shook his head. “The gun don’t hurt me none. I’m probably to blame for your problems.” There was a look of genuine remorse on his face.
“How are you to blame?”
“You’d been in hiding all those years,” he said. “Not using your powers. Then I talked you into robbing all them banks. I wore you out.”
“Maybe,” she said, though she was almost certain that something was going on beyond mere exhaustion.
“Where are we?” she asked.
The door opened. Dr. Cheetah poked his head inside. “Am I interrupting?”
“Come on in, Doc,” said Pit.
“I was just asking where we were,” said Sunday.
“We’re aboard the Megalodon,” said Dr. Cheetah. “It’s a prototype submarine that will form the foundation of our naval forces.” Then his eyes flickered around the room. “Your more immediate surroundings, of course, are the medical ward of said vessel.”
“I picked up on that, thanks,” said Sunday. “Any theories as to why I need to be in here?”
“Some, yes,” said Dr. Cheetah. He produced a large tablet computer from a drawer at the foot of the bed. He held it forward to reveal an ex-ray. Against the black and white bone, thousands of little white holes could be seen. Dr. Cheetah panned in and these proved to be computer generated circles highlighting tiny pits in Sunday’s bones. He handed the tablet to Sunday so she could look closer, but she really didn’t understand what she was looking at.
“We’ve spent many years reviewing your father’s data, and—”
“How?” Sunday asked.
“How?” Dr. Cheetah furrowed his brow. “We read them, mostly.”
“No, I mean, how did you get the data? My father used to have a shadow network hidden through computers all over the world. I could tap into it from anywhere, until he disappeared. Then the network just vanished.”
“Ah. Yes. That would be our fault.”
“How so?”
Dr. Cheetah waddled around to the side of her bed on his short monkey legs to check her IVs. “We Pangeans worked closely with Dr. Knowbokov for several years to establish our new homeland. However, our true loyalties remained with Rex Monday. He had, after all, given us the gift of mind. Our agents stationed at the Knowbokov compound reported the death of both Dr. Know and Rex Monday. The two men had acted as if they were the gods of this world, but in the end, neither could survive a bullet to the head.”
“So my father is dead,” she said, softly.
“Such are the reports,” said Dr. Cheetah. “Immediately following Monday’s death, we Pangeans back-up all the data on his shadow network, then wiped all traces of it from the various servers that had hosted it. We didn’t wish this information to fall into the hands of others. The advanced technological designs stored in his data bases provide the foundation of our current industries.”
Pit was staring at Dr. Cheetah with a focus that made even Sunday a little uncomfortable.
“Is something wrong, sir?” Dr. Cheetah asked.
“You can walk,” said Pit. “I thought you needed a wheel chair.”
“The chair was merely the foundation of a disguise that allowed me to move freely in human society without drawing attention. If I’d walked, human’s would have been instantly mindful of the differences in my gait.”
“Let’s get back to my problem,” said Sunday, staring at the tiny pits on her bones. “You said you have data on me?”
Dr. Cheetah nodded. “Since puberty, you’ve manifested the ability to generate tiny wormholes that channel solar material. It’s an amazing ability. If we could somehow duplicate it mechanically, it would provide all of earth with limitless, abundant power.”
“And you could make one hell of a bomb,” said Pit.
“Yes. That.” Dr. Cheetah looked satisfied with the state of the IVs and turned his gaze once more to the tablet that Sunday held. “The cells of your body that generate the wormholes originate within your bone marrow. From what I can glean from your father’s notes, when you shut off your powers when you were younger, the wormholes collapsed in under a pico second. While we need to run some tests to verify this, the pattern of damage to your bones suggests that, for the faintest fraction of a second, the spin of the wormholes are inverting before they vanish. Instead of material from the sun flowing out through you, material from you is flowing back into the sun. When you turn your powers off, you are, effectively, flushing blood, bone, and marrow down very very tiny toilets. This is the cause of your current pain.”
“The regeneration ray,” she said. “Did it—”
“Possibly,” said the Doctor. “Mr. Geek informs me that your problems began after you’d used the gun on yourself. It’s possible that your restored cellular structure has slight variances that are the source of your condition. But, we can’t rule out the possibility that this effect has always been present in your powers. It’s not reflected in your father’s data, but we have much more sensitive instruments than he had available ten years ago.”
“My powers didn’t hurt me ten years ago,” she said.
“You were younger and more resilient,” Dr, Cheetah pointed out. “And, please note that the effects we are talking about here take place on scales far smaller than can easily be imagined. It may simply have taken a long time to for the damage to accumulate to critical levels. You’ve only ever had the power to channel a very tiny percent of the suns total energy through your wormholes.”
“What?” asked Pit Geek. “Like, one percent?”
“Like one billionth of one percent,” said Dr. Cheetah. “If she could channel one percent, she would reduce the earth to cinders.”
“As long as I keep my powers burning, I don’t get hurt?” she asked. “In theory, I would never have any pain as long as I don’t shut the wormholes down?”
“In theory,” said Dr. Cheetah. “Though I suspect such a course would have a deleterious effect upon the quality of your life.”
“Can you fix her, Doc?” asked Pit. “Could we just use the regeneration ray?”
“That ray caused my problem,” Sunday said.
“The good news is, the body is capable of regenerating lost tissue,” said Dr. Cheetah. “With some rest and good nutritional practices, your pain should abate and your strength should come back. For most of the time you have left, you won’t always feel as bad as you do now.”
“Most of the…” Sunday’s voice trailed off.
“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Cheetah, shaking his head. “But you’ve exposed your body to massive doses of radiation for nearly a decade. Your cells are growing back. Unfortunately, some are growing unchecked. We have tried to mark the location of all the tumors in your bones. Some may be benign. Some are almost certainly malignant. I fear they are innumerable.”
“Cancer?” asked Pit.
Cheetah nodded. “Once we are in Pangea, we can discuss treatment options.”
Sunday turned her face away from Pit. The last thing she wanted to hear at this moment was some stupid speech about running toward the Grim Reaper.
“You can’t let her die, Doc,” said Pit, squeezing her hand. “I love her.”
And so he did. And she knew she loved him. And, oh, what cruelty it was, at the moment she learned she would die, that she finally felt as if she had something to live for.

3611 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Ten 3557

2011-08-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

Raw first draft. Sorry about the formatting. See chapter 1 for more disclaimers.

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I woke up on the side of the highway in the middle of the desert. I was buck naked; the sun was beating down on me something fierce. There was an ambulance parked next to me, and a man in a uniform leaning over me, his hands pressed against my neck.
“You just lie still,” he said.
I looked around. There was a highway patrol car behind the ambulance, its lights flashing. A cop was standing at the open door of the ambulance, talking to another medic.
“Where am I?” I asked. I remember the ground around me was all covered in trash.
“You’re about twenty miles outside of Las Vegas,” the man said, as he pointed a small flashlight at my eyes. “You been drinking?
“I don’t remember,” I said. “Where are my clothes?”
“We were wondering the same thing.”
“So hot,” I said, putting my hands over my eyes to block the sun. I tried to sit up. The man helped me.
He held a green canteen to my lips. “Have some water,” he said.
I opened my mouth. He suddenly toppled over, his arm gone up to his shoulder. He fell to the ground in shock and began to bleed out.
“Tommy!” the other medic screamed, running toward his partner.
“What just happened?” I asked. But, when I opened my mouth, the scraps of garbage around me began to swirl, rising in a tornado, the point aimed right at my mouth.
The second medic stumbled as he saw this. His right foot fell into the edge of the vortex.
In utter confusion, I opened my mouth even wider as I screamed. His fingers clawed at the ground as the lower half of his body began to stretch like strands of spaghetti.
Not knowing what to do, I closed my mouth. The man’s legs vanished. He didn’t live but a second or two after that.
The cop emptied his pistol in me as I stumbled toward him, desperate for help, completely out of my mind with panic. One of his bullets caught me in the left cheek and wound up in my inner ear, leaving me with the worst vertigo imaginable. His death was the worst of all, as I fell against him, and sucked the skin right off his face.

I found the rear door of an old ambulance in the rubble today.

I think of all those years I wandered around, longing for memories, hungry to recall what had happened the days before, let along the months before, or the years before.
If only I’d known what a gift my forgetfulness was.

Chapter Ten
Monkeys with Robots

Pit parked on the fifth floor of the mall parking deck. It was lunch time and the place was packed. He and Sunday rode the elevator down to the second floor, where there was a walk way to the food court. The walkway across was crammed with people.
“Look at them,” said Sunday, sounding contemptuous. She shook her head.
“Look at who?” he asked.
“All these people!” she said. “My father said that the Nicholas Knowbokovs of the world got away with their crimes by providing the masses with bread and circuses. Crimes of the highest magnitude can take place in plain sight as long as the citizens have stores full of flashy goods and easy credit to buy whatever they wished.”
“What crimes?”
Sunday shook her head. “The greatest theft of all is the theft of minds. From birth, these people are brainwashed by televised propaganda telling them that their surest path to joy and fulfillment is to buy the right toilet paper and wear the right brand of jeans. They can never stop and think about the higher purpose of life because they are distracted from cradle to grave by the lowest common denominator types of entertainment. The world could be changed into utopia if these people pooled their intellects to pursuit grand goals. Instead, the spend their days thinking of how much they want their next can of addictive soda and spend their evenings laughing at fart jokes. This now passes as the human condition.”
Pit scratched his chin. His stubble was coming back. He’d tried to keep his new face cleanly shaved when the hair started growing back, but it was turning out to be more work than it was really worth. He’d never liked looking at himself in a mirror. He’d always felt like he was looking at a stranger. Shaving made him remember how much he didn’t remember.
Earlier in the day, Sunday had made a phone call to the Pangean embassy and spoken to Dr. Cheetah. He’d advised against coming to the embassy directly. The roads around the property were under heavy surveillance. Instead, they were meeting at the food court of a busy mall, where the sheer number of bodies would help them hide in plain site. Pit thought a super-intelligent chimpanzee was going to stand out pretty much anywhere they met, but he didn’t have a better place in mind.
The food court was bigger than some of the small towns they’d spent the last few weeks driving through. The place was full of trees and flowers. Television screens showing advertisements and news feeds were spread liberally among the branches. He braced himself for a speech from Sunday about how trying to make the indoors look like the outdoors was some subtle evil meant to enslave the masses, but, if she was thinking it, she let it slide.
Instead, her eyes focused on a muslim woman in a full veil sitting in a wheelchair at a table dead center of the food court. A beefy black man in teal medical scrubs stood behind her, staring stone faced at Sunday and Pit as they drew nearer.
The woman in the veil held up her gloved hand and motioned for Pit and Sunday to have a seat. Sunday sat first, and said, “Thank you for meeting us on such short notice, Dr. Cheetah.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Dr. Cheetah. The voice had a buzz like an electric razor beneath it. He’d heard the chimps needed mechanical assistance to speak verbal languages. “We owe an immeasurable debt to your father. When one of his surviving children contacts us, the least we can do is afford her the opportunity to speak with us.”
“His only surviving child at this point,” said Sunday. “The Panic and Baby Gun are dead.”
“Ogre is still alive,” said Dr. Cheetah.
“Was Ogre my father’s child?” asked Sunday, sounding surprised.
“I reviewed your father’s genetics catalogue personally,” said Dr. Cheetah.
“He never told me,” she said. Then, she leaned back in her chair and waved her hand dismissively. “In any case, Rail Blade killed him years ago.”
“Oh dear,” said Dr. Cheetah. “You’ve been on the run for many years. I take it your access to information was limited.”
“Extremely limited,” said Sunday. “The only message I’ve gotten from my father in seven years was a note a few weeks ago telling me the war was over.”
“The note couldn’t have come from your father,” said Dr. Cheetah. “He was killed several years ago. I thought you knew. I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news.”
“How do you know he was killed? Did you see the body?”
“No,” said Dr. Cheetah.
“Then all you have are rumors.”
“Perhaps this is so,” he said. “My apologies.”
“In any case, we’ve not arranged this meeting to exchange gossip or rumors. We’ve come to discuss business.”
“I’ve been following your recent adventures with great interest,” said Dr. Cheetah. “After so long in hiding, you’ve disturbed the status quo greatly. The rise of this new team of heroes is an unpleasant development.”
“Unpleasant for us,” said Pit. “What’s it to you?”
“The public at large is extremely uncomfortable with the whole notion of Pangea. While the United States Government has granted us official recognition, the airwaves are filled with loud voices denouncing us as inhuman abominations and clamoring for our destruction. It is the human way to hate those who are different. Now that superhumans are once more openly flying over their heads, the resentment of the general public against so-called ‘freaks of science’ is further inflamed. But, it is difficult to turn this hatred into violence against superheroes; they are, after all, supremely suited to withstand acts of aggression against them. We Pangeans, however, are few in number. We do not fly do we possess the ability to lift tanks above our head. Our seeming weakness makes us tempting targets.”
“You do have command of an army of killbots,” said Sunday.
“That provides some measure of deterrence, yes. But, we are also a struggling young country. We are vulnerable to economic sanctions in a way that superhumans are not.”
Sunday leaned forward. “We can help with the economics.”
“So you can,” said Dr. Cheetah.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” said Sunday. “We need a sanctuary. Right now, there’s no country in the world that would give us safe harbor, at least none with a decent standard of living. I don’t want to hide in some desert cave the rest of my life. We are wealthy people. We’d like to spend this money someplace with flush toilets and air conditioning. A nice tropical mansion on the south shore of Pangea would be acceptable.”
“For us, it could trigger war,” said Dr. Cheetah. “We can hardly improve our reputation in the world by becoming a sanctuary for terrorists.”
“We intend to be discreet,” said Sunday. “The world doesn’t even need to know we are there.”
Dr. Cheetah tented his fingers together in front of his face. “If you were anyone else, this matter would not even be considered.”
“But I’m not someone else. And, if it weren’t for my father, you wouldn’t even have a country where we could try to seek sanctuary.”
Pan nodded, but said nothing. Only the faintest shadow of his eyes could be seen through his veil. He looked lost in thought.
Pit Geek had gotten involved with Rex Monday only about ten years ago. Long before Monday had turned to building an army of meta-human terrorists, he’d spent nearly a decade building weapons to be used against his hated foe, Dr. Know. For a few years, he’d succumbed to the dream of every evil super-genius and spent uncountable hours designing ray guns. Freeze-rays, heat rays, shrink rays, disintegration beams… no sooner than he’d build one than he’d move on to perfecting the next.
One of his projects had been the evolution ray. He’d originally planned to build a devolution ray, something that would turn his enemies into gibbering ape-men. But, when he encountered technical challenges with his regressive evolution ray, he’d decided to whip together a progressive evolution ray from the spare parts to see if he’s gain any insights to help him solve his puzzle.
The ray had worked, at least on his chimpanzee test subjects. Over the course of a summer he tested his evolution ray on 2,000 chimps, making certain he’d solved the technical problems.
Then, Dr. Know had unleashed Rail Blade upon the world. With her ferrokinesis, she’d destroyed Rex Monday’s base in the Congo. In the aftermath, Dr. Know had faced the ethical dilemma of what could be done with a hundred score talking chimps with average IQs of 170. They were no longer wild beasts; they couldn’t simply be released back to the jungle. Nor were they merely hairy humans. They could never truly be integrated into the society of any existing country.
However, in a lucky bit of timing, Dr. Know had only months before found an engineering solution for the ecological disaster unfolding in the north Pacific gyre. In the 80s, sailors began to report back that there vast expanses of the Pacific filled with dense concentrations of floating plastics. Soda bottles, plastic bags, scraps of lawn furniture, and millions of miles of plastic rope and nets were congregating in an area the size of the continental United States. The sheer expanse of the mass was causing severe ecological imbalances as some microscopic life thrived in the mess, out competing other microbes that had long been the base of the food chain.
Breaking the plastics down only created more surface area for the harmful microbes. So, Dr. Know had decided on the opposite solution. He’d designed small solar powered skimmers to collect the plastic in the gyre and shepherd it to a central location. The garbage patch the size of the US was swiftly reduced to an artificial land mass not quite the size of New Zealand. Dr. Know had already anchored the new land to the ocean floor with long chains of repurposed plastic. Birds had already begun nesting on the plastic shores, with their waste forming the foundation of a nutrient rich soil. Many plant species had taken hold as well. Dr. Know had extensive plans to landscape the place, but, finding himself deciding the fate of a small army of super-apes, he’d decided to give the country to them to make of it what they wished. Thus was borne the nation of Pangea.
Dr. Cheetah shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Pangea has all the resources necessary to become a dominant nation. We have a prime location between the world’s two largest economies. We are a nation of researcher and engineers; our intellectual property laws are the fairest on the planet. Many corporations privately express interest in partnering with our businesses. Only naked prejudice holds us back. We dare not give you sanctuary.”
“But—” said Sunday.
“My dear, there is nothing you can possibly say that would change my judgment.”
Then his cell phone chirped.
“This meeting is over,” said Dr. Cheetah, pulling out his phone.
“Come on, Sunny,” said Pit, standing up. Sunday looked like Dr. Cheetah’s words had sucked the life right out of her. He offered her his hand to help her rise.
They walked away as Dr. Cheetah began his conversation.
“The Covenent did what?” Dr. Cheetah shouted.
They turned back to him. The chimpanzee was standing up in his wheel chair, his body trembling.
Pit looked up at the nearest television. CNN News was showing a large white mansion on fire. It looked like a slightly scaled down version of the White House. Beneath it was the caption, “Pangean Embassy, Los Angeles.”
The camera was focused on the news anchor, but switched back to a reporter on the scene. A very unhappy looking Servant was standing next to him. The sound was off, but closed captioning was on.
Reporter: “What prompted this attack on an embassy?”
Servant: “Department of Homeland Security intercepted an encrypted phone call into the embassy. We have a verified voice print the call was made by Sundancer. Not all of the call was deciphered, but we did have firm information that Sundancer and Pit Geek were meeting with the Pangean Ambassador at this time.”
Reporter: Doesn’t this violate international law, to attack the sovereign soil of an embassy.
Servant: It would also be a violation of international law for the Pangeans to meet with these fugitives, or withhold information on their whereabouts.
Reporter: But the raid didn’t unfold as planned.
Servant: We arrived inside the Ambassadors office unannounced, but without taking hostile action. We did not find our targets. Before we could leave, the Pangean’s robotic security forces initiated an unprovoked assault. We caused some damage in the course of defending ourselves, but I can assure you there were no human casualties.”
Dr. Cheetah dropped his phone as these words appeared on the screen. “Three of my aides were killed,” he cried. “That monster!”
By this point, everyone in the food court was staring at Dr. Pan, and, by extension, Sunday and Pit. There had to be fifty cell phones pointed in their direction, snapping pictures.
Pit took Sunday by the hand and started to run back across the enclosed walkway.
“Ap and Skyrider weren’t on the screen,” said Sunday, breathing harder than she should have after running such a short distance. “Do you think you killed them?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“I can’t believe that son of a bitch survived having a mountain fall on him,” she grumbled.
The door to the elevator opened. A teenage boy practically walked into them. He was holding an Ipad in his hand and a familiar voice was coming from the speakers.
“The robots had flamethrowers as well as guns,” a kid was saying. “They caused the vast majority of the damage you’re seeing on screen.”
“Give me that,” said Pit, snatching the iPad away from the kid half a second before the door closed. The sound of fists pounding on the door faded as the elevator began to rise.
The screen showed a webpage. The banner read, “Ap’s Live Web Cast.” The screen was divided into two windows. In one window, Ap was smiling as he answered question. In the other window, what looked like a blonde college age girl in nerdy glasses was staring into a webcam.
“Ap,” she said. “Code4U here! Such a thrill to finally meet you!”
“Hey Code, whatup?”
“I was just wondering why you didn’t use your foam mode to control the fire?”
The elevator stopped at the third floor. Amazingly, the teenager they’d taken the iPad from had run up the flight of stairs next to the elevator and grabbed at the iPad as the doors opened. Pit kept his grip on the device as Sunday kneed the kid in the groin and pushed him back out the door.
“I did control the fire as much as possible, but once it became clear that our targets weren’t on site and the confusion over who was attacking who died down, we were asked to leave the grounds. Since we were no longer in hot pursuit, we had no choice but to comply. Rest assured, the Covenant will always respect the wishes of the appropriate authorities. Today, we just made a tough call in the face of two competing legal premises.”
The elevator doors wouldn’t close because the iPad guy was too dumb to stay robbed. He kept kicking his foot back into the door just as they were about to close. Sunday kept pushing him out.
He ran at them again. With a sigh, she held up her right hand, and allowed it to burst into flame.
This time, the doors closed unimpeded.
Code4U asked, “So, if you’re in L.A., do you have dinner plans? ‘Cause I’m in school here and I’d love to meet you in person.”
“Um,” said Ap, looking flustered.
“I mean, not like a date,” she interjected, suddenly sounding embarrassed. “I mean, you probably have a girlfriend.”
“Well,” said Ap, with an expression that was almost a grimace. “It’s like this. I…”
He cupped his left hand to his ear. “I have reports the terrorists have been spotted. We’ve got to go!”
The signal in Ap’s window blipped out, then just as quickly reappeared. The burning embassy was no longer the backdrop. Now, behind Ap, there were large concrete columns and row after row of cars.
“Oh shit,” said Sunday.
Then, the elevator shot up like it was a rocket. The sudden acceleration knocked them both to the floor.
“Oh shit!” screamed Sunday. With a horrible jolt, the steel cage that carried them smashed through something above them.
Code4U vanished from the second window of Ap’s webcast and was replaced by streaming video from an unknown source showing the elevator bursting out of the top floor of the garage. Skyrider was under the car, lifting it. Servant was on top of the car, kneeling. A pale yellow plasma flowed from his hands and coated the steel box he stood on.
“Close your eyes,” said Sundancer, her hand flaring. “I can’t cut loose without frying you, but let me get outside.”
Pit closed his eyes, but could still see light dancing before him. There was a smell like the burner of an electric stove turned to it’s highest heat. Seconds passed. Then more seconds. Pit opened his eyes as the light faded.
“Power trouble?” he asked. “Need some help?” This wasn’t the best location to help get her powers jump started again, but he was at least willing to try.
“This metal isn’t burning!” she snarled. “I can’t go hotter without cooking you!”
On screen, Ap was crawling up the elevator shaft. The box was a tiny dot in the sky by the time he reached the top and turned his camera on it.
“We’ve got them!” he cried. “Skyrider is going to fly the elevator to a secure holding location, while Servant is reversing his time aura to maintain the integrity of the cage. Basically, Sundancer can throw all the power she wants at it, but time is passing so slowly for the molecules of the box that it would take a year before the damage appears!”
“Well now,” said Pit He shoved the iPad into his mouth, then smacked his lips. “This looks like a job Pit Geek.”
“Just do it,” she said.
“I’ve been wanting to say that line for years,” he said. Then he pressed his lips to the door, and sucked.
And then the explosion pulverized every bone in his face.
3557 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Nine 3114 words

2011-08-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

This is raw first draft. Some chapters may not be safe to read at work. See chapter one for other disclaimers.

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Clean water is hard to find here. The loose stuff just drifts around in little spheres, most no bigger than ball bearings. I found an orb the size of a baseball last week and felt like I’d found gold. Except, gold’s easy to find here. Bars, coins, rings, chains and sometimes just little nuggets.
Useless.
If I could melt it all down I’d have enough to build a throne. I’d be Midas, king of this world. Dying of thirst.
Why didn’t I drink more water?

Chapter Nine
Homes of the Heroes

Ap wanted to be discrete. He couldn’t just ask Simpson to cut and paste him into Detroit. Ap had no ties at all to the city, no reason to go there. If it was true that Servant had once been the meta-human drug lord known as ogre, how high did this secret go? Did Simpson know? Did Katrina Knowbokov, who bankrolled the whole operation? Whose toes was he stepping on in pursuing the truth?
The irony was, he had a damn teleportation belt, and the one thing the geniuses here hadn’t figured out how to do was to make it teleport him anywhere. Not that he was ungrateful. The restore application had worked beautifully, resetting his body to the exact condition it had been a week ago, when he’d done his last back up scan. From now on he was doing those scans daily.
In the end he’d had Simpson send him to Chicago. He’d mentioned a few touristy things he planned to do with his time off. Simpson seemed to buy the cover story. Unlike comic book heroes who always seemed to work pro bono, members of the covenant were paid a healthy salary, so he’d made reservations at the Peninsula Chicago, the fanciest hotel he’d ever stayed at, not that he intended to actually stay there. Instead, he checked in, removed the space machine transponder unit from his belt, and plugged it into the bathroom outlet to charge. He put his cell phone into the same outlet. Without these, he was no longer transmitting real time data revealing his location. He now had his privacy, but he was also now working without a safety net. He didn’t even have an internet connection. He was so used to the streams of data in his retinal display that he felt off balance, half blind and stupid, as he went down to the lobby to meet the courier bringing him his rental car.
Once he got behind the wheel of the car, the sensation was even worse. He’d never driven before he got dematerialized. He’d gotten his drivers license only a month ago, and this had been with his retinal display providing every answer on the written test. His actual hours logged behind a wheel were less than twenty, and this mostly around Katrina Knowbokov’s private island, where there were fewer than twenty cars, total.
So, to pull out into Chicago traffic and drive seven hours down congested interstate to reach Detroit was a bit of a challenge, to say the least. By the time he reached his destination, he felt as burned out and rattled as he had after his confrontation with Pit Geek.
The Detroit Cube was in the middle of a nice part, surrounded by older homes that had been gentrified. Just a decade ago, this had been the worst part of town, a little feudal kingdom where Ogre’s gang had been the only law. But, after Rail Blade had trapped and presumably killed Ogre by sealing him in the cube in a battle that flattened seven blocks of rat-infested hovels, the Knowbokov foundation had given the city grants to build a park around the thirty foot steel cube. There were uglier works of municipal art than this.
The park was nearly empty by the time Ap arrived. It was windy and cold and right on the edge of sunset. Except for bundled up man walking his dog, no one else was anywhere near the cube.
Since he had no internet, Ap had already downloaded the three programs he wanted to try into his belt.
“Magnavision mode,” he said. Then, he stuck a two pound molybdenum magnet on the south face of the cube and walked around to the north. The rust brown cube now glowed green. In theory, the earth’s own magnetic field flowing through the cube would interfere with the magnet on the far side and his retinas would be able to spot anomalies. And, he could see, very, very faintly, a blob near the center of the cube. But what did that mean? Was he looking at a man sealed in the cube? Or was he looking at a hollow space?
“Well, that didn’t work,” he said, walking back to the magnet. He tried to pull it off. It may have well been welded on.
“Double density mode,” he said. His arms and chest burned as the muscle fibers packed within them suddenly doubled number. Even with the added strength, he had to put his shoulder against the cube for leverage as he pried the magnet free.
Ap looked around, making certain no one had watched his struggles. Satisfied that he was alone, he whispered, “Ultrasound mode.”
Suddenly, he heard the babble of every conversation taking place in the houses surrounding the park. He heard the chuff chuff chuff of the dogwalker’s pants legs rubbing together from a hundred yards away. From every direction came the rumble of traffic.
He was grateful there was no one near enough to see him since he now had four ears. The two he’d been born with were now long, stretched out, and forward facing. Two smaller ones in a similar bat shape thrust up from his temples like horns. He pressed his face to the cube and rapped it with his knuckles.
It wasn’t quite right to say that he could see the middle of the cube. His mind was no flooded with sensory data that he didn’t possess the vocabulary to describe. It was nothing like hospital ultrasounds, where a computer converted sound into light. But, he was confident in what he was hearing. If he understood the vibration patterns, the middle of the cube was hollow. What’s more, there was a shaft extending down to the ground.
“End ultrasound mode,” he said.
He shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and pulled up his hood. The sun had gone down, and the wind was knifing right through him. He wandered around the park until he found a manhole cover. If he’d been online, he could have walked into the cube in his ghost mode. But, he couldn’t do it without GPS. The second he stepped into the cube he’d be completely blind. Hell, even if he had been online, his signal would almost certainly be cut off the second he stepped inside. So, he’d have to do this the hard way.
In Double Density mode, he shoved his fingers into the manhole cover and pulled it aside. A dank smell of rot wafted up from the hole. Ap paused. What was he really expecting to learn by going down there?
But, he hadn’t come all this way to turn back now. Activating the LED flashlight on his belt buckle, he climbed down the ladder, into a concrete tunnel about six feet high and eight feet across. To his relief, the drain was practically dry save for a foot long trickle of moist sludge at the very center.
The shaft seemed to run on a course that led it under the cube. So, he followed it, and right where he judged the center of the cube to be, he found that the roof was a different color than the rest of the tunnel. It wasn’t exactly new, but it was definitely newer than the rest of the tunnel.
He switched to camcorder mode and began to record the areas of the tunnel where new concrete met old. It wasn’t he most exciting evidence he could have collected, but he felt like he should leave with at least something.
Satisfied he’d done all he could, Ap turned back toward the entrance.
The tunnel suddenly turned bright as his belt light reflected against something pure white.
Ap started to speak, but a beefy hand clamped over his mouth and picked him up, slamming him back into the concrete wall. Servant stood before him, his eyes narrowed into little slits.
“So now you know the truth,” said Servant. “Happy?”
Ap couldn’t answer.
“Ogre was a killer,” said Servant. “Worse than a killer. He would have made a skinny thing like you into his bitch. You’d have begged for death when he was done with you.”
Ap reached for his belt. Apparently, Servant was under the impression that he could only activate his powers with voice commands. While that was convenient in the heat of battle, he also had a keypad on his belt, and his best modes saved as hotkeys.
Servant suddenly fell forward, his hand hitting concrete, as Ap entered ghost mode.
“I’ve read about you,” Ap said. “You’re as bad as the people we’re hunting. Worse!”
“Pit Geek and Sundancer are terrorists,” said Servant. “I hardly think running a gang makes me worse.”
“Your gang wars killed hundreds. Most of them kids! And who knows how many thousands of people died from the poison you were peddling.”
“The only reason we were selling drugs is that weak little punks like you were willing to get on your knees in front of a stranger in order to get the money to pay us for another hit. You can’t condemn the supply when you were part of the demand.”
“I never killed anyone,” said Ap.
“Everyone kills somebody,” said Servant. “You think your parents weren’t dying knowing what you were doing out there on the streets?”
“This isn’t about me,” said Ap. “My record’s clean. As far as the state is concerned, the crimes I committed as a kid are paid for.”
“And you think I haven’t paid for my crimes?” asked Servant. “Rail Blade locked me in a metal cube for three damn months! There’s no prison in the world where a man is locked up so he can’t move, can’t see, can’t breathe or shit or piss. I thought I was dead. I thought I was in hell! Trapped with nothing but my memories. I thought I’d been in hell for centuries when Rail Blade yanked me out so that her dad could autopsy me. They were both surprised as hell when I woke up.” He shook his head, like he was shaking away bad memories. “I was too.”
“Fine,” said Ap. “You had three bad months. In a court of law, you’d be executed. Three months a joke.”
“I didn’t find it funny,” said Servant. He looked up at the ceiling, a haunted look in his eyes as he gazed at his former tomb. “I meant what I said about thinking I was in hell. My momma… she was a good woman. Used to take me to church. I can’t blame her for not making sure I understood the consequences of my action. I’d been warned about hell, told to repent and give my life to Jesus.”
He looked Ap squarely in the face and said, “I know you don’t believe me, but Ogre really did die in that cube up there. The person that woke up under Dr. Know’s scalpel was a new man. Rail Blade wasn’t happy, but Dr. Know said he believed in second chances. I was just a kid, then, only thirteen.”
“You were only thirteen when you ran the meanest gang in Detroit?”
Servant shrugged. “I was big for my age. Big and stupid. Dr. Know arranged for me to get back in school. It wasn’t easy catching up, but I made it through high school. I was in my second year of college before Katrina Knowbokov approached me about joining the Covenant. This is my chance to make up for the bad things I did in my old life.”
Ap sighed. “Fine. I guess… I understand second chances.”
“Then we’re cool?” asked Servant.
“For now,” said Ap. “I probably would have taken this better if you’d just trusted me from the start and not turn this into some kind of mystery.”
“Do you really think the world would accept me if they knew my past?”
“Well,” said Ap.
“What if they knew yours?”
Ap crossed his arms. “If stuff comes out, I’ll deal with it.”
“You’re on a good team for keeping secrets,” said Servant. “Mrs. Knowbokov is pretty good at stopping reporters who snoop around into our real identities.”
“How does she stop it?”
“I kill most of them,” said Servant.
Ap froze.
“That’s a joke,” said the big man. “The boss lady is richer than Oprah. She buys people’s silence.”
“Right,” said Ap.
“So, you drove here?” said Servant.
“Yeah,” said Ap. “It was kind of a nightmare.”
“I love driving,” said Servant. “You want a partner for a road trip back to Chicago?”
“Why not?” said Ap. He began walking back up the tunnel toward the manhole cover. His thoughts were churning. Servant seemed sincere. And Ap was committed to the belief that people could turn their lives around. The one thing that Ap still worried about was that Servant seemed to crediting God for his conversion. Ap didn’t believe in God. He’d changed because he’d found the strength inside himself to change. Servant had changed to try to get into the good graces of a mythical being. Would his conversion hold if something shook his faith?

They’d come to L.A. since the Pangeans had an embassy here, but Pit had another agenda. They were a day early for their meeting. They’d made good time across the desert in their stolen Sebring. They’d put the top down and Sunday had spent most of the trip stretched out with her seat back, her eyes shielded by a comically large pair of dark sunglasses, lightly snoring. They’d stolen new clothes from a Goodwill in Kentucky and Sunday had picked up the garish pink sunglasses and asked, “Who’d wear something like this?” She’d popped them on her face. “They look like something a female fugitive in a bad movie would wear to hide her identity.” And then she’d worn them pretty much non-stop since they’d been on the road.
It wasn’t just the glasses that made her look like a different woman. Despite her brief fling as a biker in a leather halter top, for most of the years Pit had known Sunday, she’d dressed rather conservatively. She didn’t show a lot of skin, and usually wore muted colors. But, she was now dressed in a short pink sundress with spaghetti strap shoulders. Her legs were mostly bare.
“I really need to even up the color with a tan,” she’d explained.
Pit wondered if she was trying to dress like the kind of woman that Pit used to associate with. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t necessary, but, on the other hand, he was the last person on earth to tell anyone anything about clothes.
He was a little worried about how much she was sleeping. Admittedly, he was keeping her up half the night. She had good reason to be worn out. But, ever since he’d brought her back to life, she’d been sleeping at least twelve hours a day. She seemed okay when she was awake, and she said she’d never felt better in her life, but he wondered if she was keeping something from him.
Right now, however, she was awake. They were driving around Hollywood with a black and white Xeroxed map with fancy letters at the top that read, “Homes of the Heroes of the Old West.” Luckily, it wasn’t just heroes on the list of about a hundred names on the back. Frank Macey, the Stick-Em-Up Kid was on the list at number 48.
The pulled up in front of a squat beige bungalow in a run down neighborhood.
“914” said Sunday, squinting at the numbers on the door. “This is it.”
Pit stared at the small house. There was a wooden fence hiding the back yard. A few sunflowers peeked over the top.
“Look familiar?” she asked.
It did look familiar. But it looked familiar because they’d stopped at a Kinko’s in Lexington and read everything they could find on the internet about Frank Macey. He’d was pretty sure there had been a black and white photo of Macey standing in front of this house.
He knew, without knowing why he knew, that the house had once been painted the same yellow as the sunflowers. There hadn’t been a fence. The living room had wooden floors and there had been a big black and white rug.
Had he lived here?
Was he Frank Macey? The kid in the red tights had been right. With his new face, he was a dead ringer for the actor. Macey had been a recurring bad guy in the Dallas Smith, Texas Ranger franchise. He’d appeared in over thirty films. But, the series ended in 1942, when the actor who played Dallas Smith had joined the army and died handling a live hand-grenade before he ever got out of boot camp. Macey had appeared in a handful of films after this, never again in a western, but always playing a gangster or some other kind of thug. He’d also gained a reputation for showing up to work drunk.
He’d wound up working for the L.A. sanitation department, driving a garbage truck.
And in 1954, both he and the truck had simply vanished.
Pit’s earliest memories bubbled up at the tail end of the 1950s.
“I said, look familiar?” Sunday asked after he’d stared in silence at the house for two minutes.
“Naw,” he whispered. “I mean, yeah, a little. But not what I was wantin’. No flood of memories. I thought I’d feel like I was waking up.”
Sunday leaned back in her seat. “I haven’t felt wide awake in three days,” she said.
“You’ve been sleeping a lot.”
“It’s your fault,” she said. “You keep me up half the night, and when you finally do settle down, you steal the covers.”
“We’re lucky I ain’t eaten one yet.”
“You’ve eaten blankets?”
“Used to eat all kinds of stuff when I was sleeping. Ain’t done it in years, though. Once I dreamed I was eating a big marshmallow. When I woke up my pillow was gone.”
Sunday groaned. “That joke stopped being funny in kindergarten.”
Pit scratched his head. “What joke?”

3114 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Eight 3550 words

2011-08-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

See chapter one for various disclaimers. Also, I might should have mentioned this before, but these chapters may not be be safe to read at work. There are quite a few mentions of anatomical parts and functions that polite people don't normally discuss in public. There's also far more profanity, obscenity, and scatology in the character language than you normally find in my work. What can I say? The two central characters are mass-murdering supervillains. These are just the voices I hear them using.

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Found a black boot today with a foot inside of it. It has to belong to Ap. The thing is, I found it next to a wallet that has a license in it that expired in 1972. Andrew Kermit Bergman. Lived in Tampa. Was I in Florida during that time?

All the strata have been jumbled up. All sense that I could walk from one edge of my memories to the other and find a coherent path has been lost.

Things I do remember eating:

The hood ornament off a Jaguar.
A diamond ring and the woman’s finger still inside it.
A hatchet.
A scented candle.
A little clay cat.
A Coleman lantern.
A can of Campbell’s tomato soup, unopened.
A beer mug.

I wasn’t always a killer or a thief. For years I just drifted around, no purpose or care. I gravitated to out of the way dives where, for five bucks, I’d chew and swallow a beer mug, or q-ball, or, as noted, an unopened can of soup.

It wasn’t until I made it to Tijuana that I learned what I truly was.
Which wouldn’t have been possible if I’d known who I truly was.

Chapter Eight
Kissing the Grim Reaper

Sunday wrinkled her nose as she crept back toward wakefulness. What was that smell?
She opened one eye. Her nose was practically jammed into a man’s armpit. She opened her other eye. Why was she sleeping on someone else’s arm? And why was she cold? And why did her bones ache so badly?
Right, right, right. She was laying on Pit Geek. They’d crash landed in ice-cold lake then fallen asleep on a rug. He’d removed his jacket and draped it over them, though given that it was sopping wet that had done more to chill them than warm them. Her only other blanket was a banner.
She sat up. Pit was still sleeping. She rubbed her eyes. Daylight streamed through the windows, causing the dust on the pine floors to dance. She wrapped the banner around her to fight the chill.
She knew she could solve the problem of the cold in a heartbeat.
Except she couldn’t. Something bad had happened to her last night. She’d never pushed her power so far, never tried something as ambitious as melting an entire mountain. At first, letting go like that had felt liberating. But later, as she’d been flying Pit to safety, she’d felt as if all her life’s energy was spiraling out of her. Ordinarily, using her powers didn’t take that much effort. Her father had said that the heat and light weren’t coming out of her, but from the sun. It was free energy, channeled through the tiny wormholes she summoned into existence around her.
He’d never said where the energy to open the wormholes came from.
She rubbed her arms. Every bone ached. She felt hollowed out, as if the wormholes hadn’t just let out heat and light, but had instead sucked something out of her.
She’d died last night.
She remembered the tire catching her in the gut. Remembered the way her ribs had snapped and knifed into her lungs. Her mind went black at the moment she fell toward the trees, but then there was a vivid image she couldn’t shake: she’d opened her eyes while she was laying on the ground, and she couldn’t move her legs, and she couldn’t summon her fire, and she was coughing, and coughing and drops of blood were spattering in her eyes.
And then a black cloud had moved in from the edges of her vision and she’d stopped coughing, and everything had gone quiet, and then she’d been dead.
Now she was alive.
She looked at Pit. His broken nose had popped back out, and was almost back to normal. He was still missing a hand, though the stump had healed over with new pink flesh. She couldn’t bring herself to look at his mangled groin.
He’d had the regeneration ray. He’d used it on her instead of fixing himself. Would she have done the same?
She stood up, careful not to wake him. Maybe he was just used to being hurt. The whole time she’d known him, he’d always been healing from some new bullet hole, or worse things. And he did heal. It was one of his powers. He didn’t need the ray. He just needed time. He’d only used the ray on her because he needed her help to escape servant.
Or maybe he actually cared for her.
She looked out the window. There was mist over the lake. Nothing but trees on the other side of the water, though she could barely see the edge of the next cabin over if she looked to her left. That was probably the cabin with the king sized beds covered with goose-down comforters.
If he cared for her, it was just a sex thing. He made no secret that he found her attractive. Maybe he thought by saving her life she’d be so indebted to him that she’d have to let him paw and slobber over her to satisfy his animalistic craving to dominate her.
She sighed.
It was her father who’d been the rapist. She’d just wrapped her nude body across Pit Geek like he was her personal body pillow and he hadn’t laid a finger on her.
Maybe….
Maybe she didn’t hate all mankind.
She walked over to him. She nudged his cheek with her toe.
“Wake up,” she said.
Pit rolled over.
She put her toe in his ear and wiggled it. “Wake up.”
He opened his eyes and rolled onto his back. He stared up her long legs to where they disappeared under the wrap of the banner. He looked disoriented for about half a minute, then he grinned as his eyes fixed on her face. “Ain’t this a fine way to start a day,” he said.
“A better way to start a day would be with coffee,” she said. “And some clothes. And some transportation. And some fucking clue as to where the hell we are.”
“West Virginia,” he said. “Maybe Ohio. Or Kentucky.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” she said.
“We can’t rob another bank in Ohio the way your working ‘em,” he said.
“We’re done robbing banks,” she said.
He propped himself up on his right elbow. He stared at the stump of his left hand, looking puzzled. “We must have had one wild night.”
“You don’t remember?” she asked.
He sat up, scratching the back of his head. Then he carefully touched his nose, and finding it improved, shoved his finger into it and began to dig out big black globs of dried blood. “Yeah, I remember now,” he said. “It just takes my brain a while to get going some mornings.”
“Mine too,” she said. “Let’s break into the rest of the cabins and see if there’s a mess hall.”
“What are we going to rob?” he asked.
“The mess hall?” she answered, not understanding his question.
“I mean, what are we robbing if we’re not robbing banks?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ve decided you’re right. We’ll go to Pangea. We’ll retire and spend the rest of our lives drinking banana daiquiris.”
“You think we’ve got enough?”
“By my count you’ve got close to eighty million dollars swimming around in that mysterious gut of yours. We’ll be all right.”
Pit nodded. “What changed your mind?”
“It’s a different game, if superheroes are back,” she said. “I don’t want to play any more.”
He furrowed his brow. “You scared? ‘Cause by my scorecard, we licked them pretty good.”
“I’m not scared,” she said, turning her face back to the window so he wouldn’t be able to see her eyes. “But, the war is over. We’ve got all the money we’ll need to buy a little peace and quiet. I just don’t have anything left worth fighting for.”
This was answered with silence. She turned back toward Pit, and found he had his hand crammed deep into his mouth. He produced the regeneration ray a few seconds later.
He aimed it at his left hand and pulled the trigger. In under a minute, he was wiggling fresh fingers.
He rose and dropped his pants. He squatted, looking awkward as he tried to aim the gun at the affected area. She sighed.
“Give me that.”
He handed her the gun.
“Sit there,” she said, pointing to the hearth of the fire placed, which was raised off the floor about a foot.
He did so.
She crouched before him and pushed his knees apart. She grimaced.
“Bad?” he asked.
“What did he use on you? A chainsaw?”
“I think it was his toenails. Sort of mutified.”
She set her jaw and breathed through her nose. He’d brought her back from the dead. She at least owed him the fortitude to not turn away from his mangled manhood. She took aim and pulled the trigger. The gun began to scan. It ran through all of its normal commands, but introduced a new one: “Removing foreign matter.” Suddenly small dark pins, rings, and balls began to ooze from his flesh and drop onto the stone hearth, making soft clicking sounds as the bounced.
“What the hell?” she asked.
“Damned if I know,” he said.
Half a minute later, the job was finished. Pit had a fresh new pair of hairless testicles and his penis seemed intent to prove its repaired blood flow by sporting a rather impressive erection. Of course, Sunday didn’t have much to judge these things by. She felt an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and measure this part of his anatomy by comparing it to her hand size, but she was absolutely certain this would be misinterpreted.
She said nothing.
Pit wisely acted as if he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the situation. Instead, he picked up some of the small metal bits that had fallen from him. He stared at them, and suddenly she could see a spark in his eyes.
“You remember something?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“What?”
“I… I don’t know where it was. Down south somewhere, maybe. I remember there was a two lane road, and right beside one another you had a bar, a tattoo parlor, a Holiness church, and a graveyard, all lined up in front of a couple of acres of old mobile homes.”
“What’s that got to do with those?” She nodded toward the fragments.
“A woman ran the tattoo parlor. Wendy? Cindy? Candy? We met at the bar. She was just getting started in the tattoo business. I told her she could practice on me. She used to draw all kinds of designs on me. A week later, they’d just fade away, like my body thought they were just another injury. She also did piercing. I think my body absorbed some of them.”
Sunday furrowed her brow. “You let someone shove metal into your genitals?”
“She was real nice to me,” said Pit, with a shrug.
“But you don’t remember her name?”
“I don’t remember my name.”
“So what happened to her?”
Pit said nothing. His eyes went vacant, like he was searching through all the little film loops in his brain, trying to find one that answered her question. He shook his head and grabbed his pants. He looked at the bloodied crotch.
“Guess I should wash these,” he said.
“Or burn ‘em,” she said.
“It was cancer,” he said. “Cancer’s what happened to her.”
“Oh,” she said.
“She’d been sick before I met her. Breast cancer a few years earlier. She’d tattooed over the two long scars on her chest. Lightning bolts. Said she had power over death.”
He shook his head. “She was skinny when I met her. Then the cancer came back. She took some kind of chemo that made all her hair fall out. Even her eyebrows. Her skin was so smooth and soft. She didn’t feel much like going out, so we’d just lie around in bed, me touching her, the hours rolling by. I’d try to cheer her up. Tell her she was beautiful as her hair fell out and her skeleton started showing through her skin. ‘My cancer beauty,’ I called her.”
He pulled on his pants. “And then she got really sick.” He tucked his still erect penis up against his belly. “And then she died.”
“I’m sorry,” said Sunday.
“Naw, it’s nothing,” he said, shrugging. “Everyone dies. Everyone.”
“You don’t.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I die a little more every day. You ain’t looking at a living man. You’re looking at a corpse too stupid to call it quits.”
“You keep saying you’re stupid,” she said, brushing her hair back from her face, “but the more I listen to you, the more I suspect you’re kind of really smart.”
“That’s just my dumbness rubbing off on you,” he said.
“If so, I wish more of you were rubbing off on me.”
Pit looked down at his jean, at his still noticeable erection. “Are you… are you saying….”
“No!” she said, feeling her cheeks flush. “God no. I’m saying that you’ve got this… this quiet wisdom about you. A calmness. You seem… centered. I’d like to learn how you get there.”
“Brain damage, mostly,” he said.

The next cabin over turned out to be a chapel. In a room behind the altar there was a small kitchen and, praise the lord, a coffee maker and an unopened vacuum pack of Starbucks coffee. And, because the lord was kind, water ran when they opened the tap. And then they plugged pot in and turned the switch to on, and, because the lord was fickle, there was no electricity. Pit flipped a few switches.
Nothing.
“I bet there’s a breaker box,” she said. “Check outside.”
“Can’t you heat the water with your powers?”
She froze. It was a very simple question.
For a brain damaged freak, he picked up instantly that something was wrong.
“Has something happened to your powers?”
“What?” she said. “No. Why do you think that?”
“Well, you ain’t glowed even a little bit since we climbed out of the lake. Usually by this time of day, you’ve lit up a time or two.”
“Usually by this time of day, I’ve had coffee,” she said.
“You really need coffee to use your powers?” he said. “That seems like some kind of weakness.”
“Some kind, yeah,” she said. “Look, it’s nothing big. I used a lot of power last night. It’s left me feeling a little… unsteady. I need to… if the heroes show back up, I need to save my strength.”
Pit leaned back against the sink, staring at her.
“What?” she asked.
“The first time I met you, you had trouble turning your powers on.”
“That was ten years ago,” she said. “I was just a little girl.”
“You were afraid of losing control.”
“What are you? My dad now?”
“You still touch yourself?”
“Pit!” she said. “What’s gotten into you? And how can you possibly know about that?”
“Monday told me before I ever met you that was how you found out about your powers. Maybe I got a dirty mind, but it’s something that stuck with me.”
“What I do or don’t do with my body is none of your business.” She went the tap and filled the carafe with water, then dumped in a random amount of coffee. She’d do this without electricity. Where the hell did Pit get off asking something like that?
She cradled the pitcher between her palms. She took a deep, slow breath. All she had to do was let out a little power. Very little. Too much and she’d blow up the pot. She imagined shards of glass flying everywhere. She imagined one sinking into her eye, driving into her brain.
The water stayed cold.
“You can’t do it,” said Pit.
“I just don’t want coffee all that badly,” she said, putting the carafe down on the counter. “It wouldn’t taste right without it dripping through a filter.”
“Sure it would,” he said, eyeing the grounds in the water. “That there’s cowboy coffee!”
She stared at her hands. All she needed to do to get past this was just make a little ball of light in her palm. Just something the size of a marble.
Nothing.
Pit said, “Looks like we’re gonna have to go into town for some java.”
She shook her head.
“We should stay here,” she said.
“Someone will find us here.”
She nodded. “I know. So. I should stay here. You should go.”
“That don’t make sense,” he said.
“I can’t turn my powers on,” she whispered.
“You mean I was right?” He scratched his head. “Man, I oughta write this down.”
“What you oughta do is go,” she said. “Right now, I’m a liability. Leave me my half of the money and go on. If I get my powers back, I’ll meet you in Pangea.”
Pit shook his head. “Naw, We’re a team. We go together.”
“A team is only as strong as its weakest link,” she said.
“You’re thinking of a chain,” he said. “And yesterday you melted a mountain while I coasted down a burning road in a crippled truck. Who was the weak link then? You’ve stood by me. I’ll stand by you.”
She crossed her arms. “You don’t understand.” She felt on the verge of tears. “I died. I died! And, using my powers last night… it hurt. It made me… I don’t want to die, Pit. I’m not like you. I can’t just shrug this shit off.”
“Then don’t shake it off,” he said. “Just wrap both arms around the idea and pull it close to your heart.”
“Embrace dying?”
“Death is like a mean dog. You show fear and it’s gonna chase you. But you run at it growling, and it backs off.”
“I saw you try that trick on the Toronto mission eight years ago,” she said. “You got bit!”
“But I bit him back. Look, you gotta look the Grim Reaper straight in the eye, grab him by his hood and plant a big one on his boney cheeks. If it’s your time, he’ll kiss you back. If not, you’re gonna make him more scared of you than you are of him.”
She rubbed her arms, thinking about what he said. She was as cold as she’d ever been, and her bones still hurt. If she’d ever felt more afraid, she couldn’t remember when. But, she took some degree of comfort that Pit was going to stick around.
“You look cold,” he said.
“It’s freezing!” she said, shivering. “Wasn’t it hot yesterday? Where’s global warming when you really need it?”
Pit took off his biker jacket and held it out to her. “I’d have given it to you sooner if I’d known you couldn’t make yourself hot no more,” he said, sounding sincerely apologetic.
She looked at the jacket like he was handing her a bomb.
“Something wrong?” he asked. “It smell bad?”
She took the jacket. “It smells fine.” The leather was still damp, but it was warm from his body heat. She said, “You keep being kind to me. Kindness messes with every assumption I hold about humanity.”
“It ain’t no sure thing that I am human,” he said.
She slipped her arms into the sleeves. Then, for the first time in her adult life, she couldn’t help herself. She hugged him. He held his hands out awkwardly to the side.
“Whatever you are,” she whispered, “the world needs more like you.”
He carefully wrapped his arms around her. He patted her back, as if she needed comfort.
But what if she didn’t need comfort?
She tilted her face up toward his. He stared into her eyes, looking confused. She held her gaze. His eyes were brown, the irises looking almost like they’d been carved and polished from some rare wood.
“You, uh,” he said. “You… got nice eyes. You could, uh, you could be a model.”
“You really should just give up on sweet talk,” she said, standing on her tip toes.
He took the hint, and kissed her.
And he hugged her even tighter. She ran her fingers up his neck and mussed with his curls.
Embrace death, he’d said. Run straight towards it.
She moved her hand toward his crotch. Since the Grim Reaper wasn’t around, she chose to grab hold of her second worse fear. She found his fly and toyed with it. He moved from her mouth to nibble on her ears. The sensation was electric.
“I don’t touch myself,” she whispered in his ear as he nibbled on her neck. “I haven’t come since I was fifteen. The second I found out Rex Monday could watch anything I did, I swore off sex. I’m still a virgin.”
Pit put his hands under her butt and lifted her onto the counter. He tore away the cloth banner under her leather jacket and pressed his mouth between her breasts. Then his tongue found her nipple. She gasped, then groaned.
The paint began to peel from the kitchens walls as the air grew hotter.
Soon, the air smelled of burning coffee as the last of the water boiled away.
3550 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Seven 4174 words

2011-08-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

I found seventeen bullets. Nine left. Shooting a moving chicken ain’t as easy as you’d think.

Chapter Seven
Hounded by Heroes

Pit had taken a few steps back when Sunday burst into flames. Now he jumped forward, mouth wide open, intending to bite the big man’s arm off. However, before he’d closed the gap between them even an inch, he was kicked in the nose by a blue leather boot with thick rubber soles. The boot had come from above him and as he hit the ground on his back he found himself looking up at a woman in a sky-blue flight suit and matching helmet, with her face hidden by a mirrored visor that showed the blood gushing out of his nose. There was something dark behind him, and he turned his face to see he’d just missed bouncing his head off the front tire of a Chevy El Dorado.
Before he could rise, a short kid in red tights jumped on his left arm, pressing Pit’s hand to the ground. The kid shouted, “Glue mode!” Instantly the kid’s hands turned gooey, like his flesh had turned to paste as he ran his fingers all over Pit’s knuckles. Pit’s free hand reached for the kid’s neck and grabbed hold, and began dragging the boy’s throat toward his mouth. The kid pressed Pit’s gunked up hand against the truck tire and shouted, “Ghost mode.” Pit’s hand suddenly slipped right through the kid and he wound up slapping himself in his already broken nose.
The boy stood up. Pit tried to rise, but found his hand thoroughly stuck to the tire.
“Shame to mess up your plastic surgery,” the kid said. “As a fellow film buff, I appreciated the tribute.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Pit asked, still trying to yank his hand free.
“Hello?” said the boy. “Frank Macey? The Stick-Em-Up Kid?”
The woman in blue swooped down. “We’re here to arrest them, Ap, not talk film trivia. Switch to foam mode. Servant’s got his hands full.”
“Foam mode,” said Ap as the woman dropped behind him and wrapped her arms around his torso. “Sorry, Sar—Skyrider.”
Then, they shot into the air a hundred feet up, which happened to be where Sundancer hand flown to, with Servant in tow. Pit shielded his eyes with his free hand as he stared up. Sunday was spinning in violent gyrations; she’d never been able to keep her balance with someone else in tow. However, her dizzying spirals in this case turned out to be an effective strategy. Servant suddenly went flying off, leaving a trail of vomit.
Sundancer suddenly stabilized her flight, shaking her fist at him as he crashed into the forest below and started bouncing down the steep mountain slope. “I hope you break your damn neck!” she cried.
But, with her attention focused on Servant, she failed to notice that Skyrider and Ap were now hovering directly above her. Ap was now completely coated head to toe in what looked like shaving cream. He opened his mouth and buckets of the white foam shot out of him, catching Sunday in the torrent.
“Son of a bitch,” Sunday cursed as she began to tumble wildly through the sky. The foam boiled off seconds after it hit her, but the unevenness of the heat she was producing was messing with her ability to stay airborne. Skyrider did an impressive job of following the flaming woman’s dizzying path through the air, and more and more foam found it’s target on Sunday’s face. Sunday coughed and gasped and spit as she wiped her eyes, trying to rid herself of the goop.
“Keep foaming her!” Skyrider shouted. “She needs to breathe like anyone else!”
Pit was distracted by a loud whoosh to his right. He turned and saw a white blur flash up the road and enter the parking lot, skidding to a halt at the rear wheel of the truck Pit was glued to.
“This guy’s going to need new tire’s anyway,” Servant said as he put his right hand under the rear bumper and lifted the back of the truck. Servant ripped the wheel right off the hub, sending lug nuts shooting across the gravel lot.
“Naw, he won’t,” said Pit, thinking about the black shadows on the wall of the bar.
Servant wasted no time on further banter. He drew the tire back like it was a discus and let it fly. The tire caught Sunday right in the gut and she went flying, missing Skyrider and Ap by a whisker. Her body was limp, folded across the tire, as she cut a long glowing arc through the sky, her flames sputtering and dimming. They went dark completely as she crashed into the forest.
“Servant!” Skyrider shouted. “You nearly hit us!”
“But I didn’t,” he said.
“We almost had her!” she shouted back.
“And I definitely got her,” said Servant.
Ap spit out a few last cupfuls of foam, then wiped his mouth.“That tire couldn’t even have touched her if I hadn’t cooled her off!”
Servant shrugged and crossed his arms. “So it was teamwork.”
“Let’s just find her,” said Ap. “Infra-eye mode!” He looked in the direction she’d flown.
Pit Geek looked toward the bar. He said, “You got someway of calling an ambulance?”
“You’ll get all the medical attention you require,” said Servant, watching Skyrider and Ap disappear into the trees.
“I was thinking about that poor guy in the bar.”
Servant cocked his head toward the door. Smoke was still drifting from the building. Servant picked up a piece of what had once been the Harley’s frame and started bending it. He crouched in front of Pit and twisted the metal around his face, covering from just below his eyes to just above his throat, crimping the metal behind Pit’s neck. Pit noticed that Servant didn’t have a single scorch mark or even any dirt on his costume after bouncing down the mountain.
Servant stood up, looking at Pit’s immobilized hand, and probably thought he was being clever when he said, “Don’t go anywhere.”
Servant went into the bar. His white tights seemed to glow in the darkened doorway. Servant stopped moving. For some reason, his tights turned dark.
“Dear God,” he whispered.
He came out of the bar a moment later cradling Root in his arms. For reasons that Pit couldn’t even guess at he was buck naked. His muscular body was covered in thick black kinky hair. His uncircumcised genitals were monstrously large. Worse, his face had lost it’s square jawed comic book handsomeness, and been replaced by a misshapen skull covered with gray-blue leathery skin. He revealed a mouthful of jagged fangs as he snarled at Pit, “What kind of monsters are you?”
“The bad kind, I reckon,” said Pit, his voice muffled by his metal gag.
Servant pressed his lips tightly together. He took a deep breath through the gaping hole in his face where his nose should have been. Then, the air around him rippled and he was back in his costume, and his face was once more human. Servant turned into a blur as he darted down the road, leaving a cloud of dust in the parking lot. Pit had no idea how far they were from the nearest hospital or even which direction to head, but apparently Servant knew.
Pit twisted his neck, pushing the metal gag tighter against his lips. Servant had apparently been under the misconception that Pit had to get something between his teeth to bite it. Instead, he puckered his lips and sucked. The metal gag spiraled down his mouth like it was vanishing down a toilet.
He was about to start nibbling at the rubber around his hand to free himself when Skyrider burst back above the treeline. She was carrying something in her arms, but it was too dark to make out what. A few seconds later, a large round shape like a balloon twenty feet across drifted into the air behind her.
Skyrider flew back to the parking lot, landing in the gravel in front of Pit with a soft crunch. She carried Sunday in her arms. Sunday was completely limp, her face and body flecked with baked on foam that looked like dark brown meringue. She was covered with a hundred scratch marks from where she’d fallen through the trees. Her face was covered in red goop, as if she’d been lying on her back drinking a bottle of ketchup, then coughed it out. Her open eyes stared blankly toward the stars. The skin of her face was now the same pale shade as her restored leg.
Skyrider placed Sundancer in the bed of the pick up truck. There was a blue plastic tarp wadded up in one corner of the bed. She unfolded this, covering the body.
“She’s dead,” said Pit.
“Neither of you could really have expected you’d be getting out of this alive,” said Skyrider, her voice strangely hollow and mechanical.
“No one gets out alive,” said Pit, looking up at the dark sky.
He spotted Ap bouncing along the tree tops. The top of the boy’s head had swollen up into a balloon. It apparently left him buoyant enough to run along the very tips of the branches. Ap jumped out over the parking lot and drifted down behind the pickup that held Sunday’s corpse. “End Airhead Mode,” he said. With a sound like a whoopee cushion, his head deflated back to its normal dimensions in barely a second.
“Where’s Servant?” he asked.
“The big guy remembered an appointment elsewhere,” said Pit.
Ap’s face turned pale. “Did you… did you eat him?”
“Naw,” Pit chuckled. “He ran some guy we half killed off to a hospital.”
Skyrider sighed. “Damn it. He could be anywhere.”
“Just call him,” said Ap.
“He doesn’t carry a phone!”
“Right. What’s up with that?”
Skyrider shook her heads. “He doesn’t have any pockets.”
“Hello,” said Ap. “That can’t be that hard to fix.”
“He doesn’t wear pants,” said Skyrider.
“He just needs a utility belt,” said Ap.
“Anything that doesn’t slide off his forcefields gets chewed up by his time flux. A belt wouldn’t last half an hour on him.”
“He could just tuck it into his tights,” said Ap, sounding exasperated that Skyrider was making such lame excuses for why a teammate couldn’t carry a phone.
She looked toward Pit, as if making sure he was still secure, the back to Ap. “I guess it won’t hurt for you to know. Servant doesn’t wear tights. All clothes just fall off of him. But, he can make his force fields opaque and change their colors.”
Ap grinned. “You mean Mr. Holier-Than-Thou prances around in public buck naked?”
“And if something breaks his concentration and distracts him, his fields go transparent!” She laughed. “Oh god. You can’t know how much I was sweating through that press conference, praying that he wouldn’t get a question that rattled him.”
Ap burst into laughter, snorting as he wiped tears from his eyes. “Shit,” he sighed. “Is there something seriously wrong with me that I find this mildly arousing?”
Skyrider shook her head. “I’ve gotten a good look at his junk. The porn industry suffered a tragic loss the day that man picked up a Bible.”
Pit found it highly disrespectful that they were laughing so hard while Sunday’s body lay in front of them. On the other hand, they’d both completely forgotten about him. Biting the tire would pop it, and catch their attention.
So he bit his left hand off at the wrist. As usual, there was a half-hearted trickle of blood, then the wound dried up. He jammed his right hand into his mouth and felt around the pile of junk. He’d always been able to pull out the stuff he’d eaten, though the stuff he’d eaten last was always up front and he sometimes spent an hour or more pulling out crap before he found what he wanted. Luckily, one of the last things he’d swallowed in that vault in Columbus had been a gold brick. The thing weighed about thirty pounds but was still small enough that he could wrap his fist around it. He lunged to his feet as he pulled his hand from his mouth.
Skyrider had her back to him. Ap’s eyes went wide. The kid opened his mouth to scream a warning but Pete was already in full swing. She spun and Pit drove the gold bar just below the edge of her helmet into her throat. The Kevlar collar gave some padding, but it felt to Pete like he flattened her trachea against her vertebrae. She dropped to the gravel on one knee, clutching her throat.
Pete vaulted onto the bed of the pickup, then lunged for Ap.
“Ghost mode,” the kid shrieked, in a girly pitch.
Pit flew right through the boy, scratching is face up as the crashed into the gravel.
“Stonefist mode!” The kid screamed, as Pit rose to his knees. He fell back down as Ap punched him just above the ear. He rolled in the gravel, cursing, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” It felt like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer.
“Spike toe mode!” the boy shouted. The tips of his black boots tore apart as sharp shafts that reminded Pit of little rhino horns tore through the leather.
The boy leaned drew his leg back and kicked Pit in the nuts, the spike toes digging in all the way to Pit’s left kidney.
“Son of a bitch,” Pit wheezed as he curled into a fetal ball.
“Web mode!” Ap shouted. The stars in front of pits eyes were just starting to clear when the boy began to spit on him, in long sticky strips that draped across Pit and clung to the gravel around him.
Luckily for Pit, the kid couldn’t spit all that far, and gravel is a piss-poor base to try to stick someone to. Pit rose up on his left elbow, lifting up the gravel without effort, and whipped his right arm out to grab Ap by the ankle.
“Ghost—” Ap screamed, but it was too late. Pit jerked his leg toward his mouth and took it off at the ankle.
Ap shrieked in utter terror as he fell, blood spurting from his severed limb.
“Stop being such a crybaby,” Pit grumbled as he dragged himself forward, then shoved another six inches of the kid’s leg into his mouth. This time, he’d just keep sucking until he reached the kid’s lungs. After getting punched in the head, the last thing Pit needed was this piercing high pitched screaming.
“Ghost mode!” Ap cried. “Ghost mode!”
Pit’s fingers lost their grip on the boy’s leg. The boy was still sitting before him, his eyes staring in horror at his mangled limb, but Pit’s hands passed right through him. Pit groaned as he sat up.
The boy was sobbing, but he for some reason had stopped bleeding. Maybe he just didn’t have blood in ghost mode.
“Aw, don’t take it so hard,” said Pit, holding up the stump of his left forearm. “I’ve lost lots of limbs. You ain’t gonna die.” Then, he remembered that it wasn’t to his advantage to comfort the kid. “I mean, you are gonna die, if you turn solid again. Next time, I’ll bite off your head.”
“Exit,” the boy sobbed. “Exit!”
And then he wasn’t there. Pete furrowed his brow. He knew this command. The kid had just been snatched back to safety by Rex Monday’s space machine. What the hell? Were these three super-powered goons working for his old boss?
He limped around the truck, his legs wobbly as jello. He’d been kicked in the nuts lots of times, but, Christ, this kid had practically neutered him. Skyrider was gone, probably snatched away by the space machine. But, Servant might be back any second. Pit didn’t really have time to wait until he was feeling better. He reached his right hand back into his mouth and felt around until his fingers closed around the handle of a gun. He pulled it back out, carrying the regeneration ray. He tossed aside the blue tarp and leaned against the side of the truck to keep his arm steady as he aimed at her. He pressed his lips together and tried to ignore his various pains as the lights danced across Sunday’s body. The time dragged by with tortuous slowness as the machine announced each stage of her reconstruction.
At last, the gun was done. He stuffed the ray back into his mouth. Sunday’s body was whole. But she still wasn’t moving. Pit crawled into the truck bed, laying on her as he pressed his fingers to her throat. No pulse.
“Wake up,” he cried, crouching over her. He raised his fist and drove it into her chest, right under her left breast. He knelt down, placing his the stump of his arm under her neck to tilt her head up. He took a deep breath and placed his mouth on hers. Fortunately, he had to actively try to devour things, other wise his mouth was just a mouth. He sealed his lips to hers and pinched her nose shut, then filled her lungs with air. He did this three times, then straddled her, preparing to push on her chest.
Then she turned her head.
“Sunny?” he asked.
She opened her eyes. She looked around, her eyes glazed. She finally focused on him. She sat up.
“You’re alive!” he cried, and fell upon her, grabbing her head an planting a huge kiss on her mouth. Then, his body tensed up, as he anticipated impending vaporization.
He drew his face back from hers.
“Was I dead?” she whispered.
“Sure did look like it.”
She nodded slowly. Then she looked at his battered face. “Well, your new look didn’t last long.”
“We’ll use the ray on it later,” Pit said, lifting himself off of her. “Servant could be back any second.”
“Right,” she said, sounding dazed as she sat up. “Where’s the Harley?”
“Flattened, remember?” Pit said as he limped to the door of the truck. “You know how to hotwire a truck?”
“No,” she said, as she scooted toward the edge of the bed.
Pit laughed at he looked a the steering column. The keys were in the ignition!
“This must be a safe neighborhood,” he said. “Get in.”
Sunday supported herself on the edge of the truck as she walked gingerly to the passenger door. She got into the truck and looked down at Pit’s crotch as she fastened her seatbelt.
“Ick,” she said. “What happened down there?”
“You shoulda seen the other guy,” Pit said. He threw the truck into gear and lurched backward onto the road, then put the truck into drive and stomped the gas. Sunday grabbed the dashboard and shouted, “I’d rather not die in a car crash!” as the trucks tires squealed to hold onto the asphalt as they raced along the curvy road.
“Servant might come racing up this road any second,” Pit said as he jerked the truck around another curve.
His words proved prophetic. At that exact instant a white blur flashed into their headlights. On pure instinct, Pit gunned the motor, and half a second later they each had a face full of air bags as Servant slammed into the grill, shattered the windshield, then bounced over the roof. He slammed into the bed, grabbed the blue tarp, but then slipped out of the bed. Apparently, his forcefields really were kind of slick. Pit continued racing forward blindly until he sucked down the airbag that obstructed his view. The truck was still running, but white steam was poring from under the hood. The check engine light came on, as well as a little red thermometer next to it.
“Keep driving,” said Sunday, unbuckling her seat belt. “Try to get at least a mile away. Two or three if the truck can make it.”
“What are you…?” he never got to finish his question. She pushed her door open and jumped out.
Pete remembered to shut his eyes. When he opened them, it was as bright as mid day. The truck seemed to be losing power and pressing the petal to the floor only produced a top speed of sixty, then fifty, then forty. He kept driving without glancing into his rear view as flaming magma began to rain down around him. Trees each side of him suddenly exploded into flame. The temperature in the truck cab suddenly grew unbearable. He reached for the AC button. The second he pressed it, the engine seized up. He threw the truck into neutral and rolled another half mile down the mountain before he reached a slight uphill grade and drifted to stop. He got out and looked back at he mountain he’d just come down. Was it just his imagination that the mountain now looked significantly shorter? It was hard to tell with all the smoke. Every tree in the area was now on fire.
Light flickered behind the dark haze. Sunday suddenly dropped down from the smoke. Her arms went dark and she grabbed him beneath his armpits. They shot up into the smoke.
“You can’t fly and carry me!” he shouted.
“If Skyrider can fucking carry passengers, I can fucking carry passengers,” she growled. They punched out into clear sky. Pit noticed their path through the sky was still weaving back and forth, but it was certainly nothing like the vomit inducing spin she’d put Servant through earlier.
He shouted above the wind, “What happened to the big guy?”
She sounded like she was panting as she said, “I kept my distance. Since he couldn’t fly, I tried melting the asphalt to trap his feet but he kept jumping free. He threw a couple of big rocks at me, but I melted them. So, I decided to melt off the mountain top and just drown him in hot lava. He swam to the surface a couple of times, but I think I got him.”
“Did he ever turn naked?” Pit asked.
“That… is the oddest thing… I’ve ever… been asked,” she said. She was really straining to breathe now. They were dropping lower and lower over the treeline.
“You doing okay?”
“Not really,” she said, as they dropped even closer to the ground. “That a lake… up ahead?”
Pit Geek strained to see through the flickering radiance surrounding them. But, yes, he did see a dark patch on the ground ahead that might be water.
“Hold onto … your ass,” she said. “In case of… a water landing… your seat … flotation—”
They hit the water at a shallow angle, bouncing along it like a stone skipping across the water before they sank. Pit pushed his head back above water and gasped. Sunday bobbed up next to him barely ten feet away.
“I can’t believe… that worked,” she whispered.
As Pete kicked his feet around, he noticed that his toes kept hitting bottom. He stopped flailing and stood up. The water only came to his nipples. It was ice cold, which numbed the pain in his groin. He grabbed Sunday by the arm and said, “Shore’s this way.”
They climbed up onto a bank covered with pine needles. Behind them was a row of log cabins. No lights were on anywhere.
“This kind of looks like a boy scout camp,” he said. “Looks empty.”
She rose, and started stumbling toward the nearest one. “Empty or not, we’re sleeping here. I’m not feeling so hot.”
Pit glanced back toward the glow on the horizon. The mountain she’d set on fire had to be at least fifty mile away. They’d really been moving.
Sunday melted the lock off the cabin door. Inside looked like a meeting room, with the whole back wall being one enormous stone fireplace. A green cloth banner above the mantle read, “Christ is King.”
Sunday dropped to her knees on the big rug in front of the fireplace, then collapsed face down. Pit climbed up onto the fireplace and tore down the banner. He draped it over her like a blanket.
He saw a chalkboard next to the door they’d come in. He walked to it and saw a stick of white chalk in the tray.
“What are you doing?” Sunday whispered.
“Don’t trust my memory,” he said. “Wanna write something down.”
In rough block letters he wrote, “FRANK MACEY. STICK-M-UP KID.”
He moved to the window. “I’ll keep watch,” he said.
“If they find us, the find us,” she murmured. “Get some sleep.”
Pit moved back to the rug and sat down.
“Lay down,” she said.
He lay down.
She pressed herself up against him, laying her head on his good arm, draping an arm and a leg across his body.
“I can’t sleep without a pillow,” she said, her voice soft and distant.
Then she began to snore.
4174 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Six 3590 words

2011-08-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

First draft, yadda yadda. See chapter one for the full disclaimer.
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Found a pistol in the rubble. A .22 revolver, intact. Most gun parts I find are mangled where I bit through them. Three bullets, but I bet I can find more out here if I look for them.

Out here? In here?

Anyway, the gun can come in handy in catching those damn chickens. I might could have caught them on earth, but out here (in here?) they can actually get some distance with those wings.

Funny thing is, I’ve had a lot of guns in my hand, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually shot anyone or anything. But, how hard can it be?

Chapter Six
And She Danced

They were at a rest area in southern Ohio when the cop spotted them. The rest area wasn’t much, just a couple of cinderblock outhouses with no running water. There were some cement picnic tables under a tree, all cracked up, crumbling, and covered with bird poop. They had their Harley parked under the tree, well away from the official parking spaces. Thanksgiving was only a week away, and they were near the mountains, so Pit had expected the day to be chilly. Instead, the day had actually passed from pleasantly warm into actually hot at some point. When the weather was cold, it was no big deal. Sunday could keep them warm. When it was hot, alas, her thermostat only ran in one direction.
It was mid afternoon and Sunday had stretched out on the cement table top with her jacked under her head to catch a nap. They’d been racing down the highways more or less at random, never staying in one state more than a day. They hadn’t exactly been discreet as Pit had adopted a standard cruising speed just shy of 110mph. That was the speed where the Harley felt just right, like it was flying. But, they’d put over 8,000 miles on the bike in just shy of two weeks. It was nearly impossible that no cop had seen him. Why hadn’t they been ambushed yet? The suspense was killing him.
Then, the Highway Patrol car pulled into the rest area. The cop had parked, gotten out of his car, glanced in their direction, then froze. Then the cop had very, very, very slowly lowered himself into his driver’s seat, fastened his seat belt, then drove out of the rest stop at a very controlled and moderate rate of speed.
At first, Pit thought this was odd behavior. Had the cop seen them or hadn’t he? Then, Pit figured it out. That cop had seen them. Probably so had a hundred others. And each of them had to know, by this point, that Pit had a reputation for swallowing limbs, and Sunday had a reputation for leaving behind a trail of widows. By this point, it was well established that Devourer and Burn Baby never struck twice in the same town. For most cops, it was probably a wise choice just to act like they hadn’t seen anything and let some other city worry about them.
After Sunday woke, they headed south, across the Ohio river, and after nightfall wound up pretty much as lost as a person could get after taking a wrong turn off Highway 23 and winding up on a road so full of switchbacks that Pit really had no idea where they were headed. And, of course, the gas was getting low. And, of course, Sunday was complaining about how hungry and tired she was. Pit had no problem with just pulling off the road and sleeping under a tree, and his dietary needs weren’t particularly dainty. Sunday, on the other hand, refused to eat roadkill, which Pit thought was a bit snooty of her, especially since she of all people would have to eat it raw. Sunday was also insistent that they sleep in a place with a real bed and an actual bathroom, She’d been nagging Pit take a shower every day, which was just crazy, and who was she, his mother? But, he went along with her agenda without a grumble. As long as they were robbing a bank every other day or so, he was having fun.
Then, just as he was on the verge of stopping the bike at the top of the next mountain and admitting that he didn’t know where the hell he was and asking her to fly up and look around for any towns nearby, he spotted lights through the branches of the trees coming from one of the ridges above. He gunned the bike up the curves, arriving at a structure that looked like it had once been a cinderblock gas station and garage, that someone had nailed a bunch of boards to. A wooden sign in front declared it to be the Hillbilly Hideout. In smaller letters it read “B-B-Q and Beer.” A half-dozen pick-up trucks were parked in the gravel lot.
“Dinner time,” he said, as he pulled the bike in beside a beat up Ford.
“I was hoping we could find a hotel first,” said Sunday. She looked really beat, and she’d been quiet all day.
“We’ll ask for the nearest one,” he said.
“Damn,” she said, getting off the bike. “You asking for directions? This is gotta see.”
As they approached the door, he heard loud country music thumping from inside.
“Oh lord,” Sunday moaned. “I’m not sure I’m up for this.”
“What’s wrong?”
She crossed her arms. “Nothing. I’m just tired. Tired of greasy road food. Tired of being on that bike twelve hours a day. This road we’ve been on tonight must surely be the intestines of America. I say the next big town we reach, we steal a plane and head for France.”
“You speak French?”
She shook her head. “But, French cops probably scare even easier than American cops. And when we aren’t working, the food’s got to be better.”
“It’s all the same to me,” said Pit. “I really can’t taste anything.”
“Your taste buds have probably been killed off by all the crap you put in your mouth.”
“Maybe,” said Pit. “The thing is, the food doesn’t really go into my mouth. Every now and then, I might feel a tickle in my throat, especially when I’m pulling stuff back out, but I really don’t think the stuff I eat goes in my at all.”
“Then where does it go?”
Pit shrugged.
“I mean, some of it must go in you. You haven’t starved yet.”
“Maybe. But what’s weird is that I haven’t used the bathroom since I woke up on the side of a highway back in 1956.
She stared at him.
“Honest,” he said. “I don’t even pee.”
“Okay,” she said. “That is either way more information than I needed, or the most fascinating thing I’ve ever learned about you. Seriously? Never?”
“Nope.”
“Wow,” she said, eying the door. “Let’s go in. Suddenly I need a beer.”
“I thought you didn’t drink.”
“Ordinarily I don’t,” she said. “But with any luck I’m going to kill the brain cells that have latched on to the mystery of your excretory functions.”
They opened the door to the strains of “Achy Breaky Heart.”
Sunday sighed.
The place was a dive, from what Pit Geek could see of it. There were about three light bulbs total working in the place. What he’d assumed to be a jukebox was an ipod plugged into a boombox sitting on a bar stool. There were eight or nine guys in the room, all middle aged rednecks with beer guts. Some were sitting at a bar, but most were clustered around a pool table, though not to play pool. Instead, there was a girl dancing drunkenly in the center of the table stripped down to her bra and panties, which were stuffed with dollar bills. She was a little on the chunky side, a square faced blonde wearing way too much make up. She looked the way Tammy Faye Bakker must have looked when she was sixteen.
Half of the men in the room turned their heads to see who’d just come through the door, and the other half continued to stare at the dancing girl.
Pit turned around and placed his hand on Sunday’s shoulder. “Let’s find another place.”
“We’re here,” she said firmly, pushing past him and heading toward the bar.
The girl on the table stopped dancing. The men all stared at Sunday.
“Got any Red Stripe?” Sunday asked the man behind the counter, a squat bald man with an eye patch with red long johns hanging out of a filthy white V-neck tee-shirt.
“The gum?” Eye-patch asked.
“There’s a gum named Red Stripe?” Sunday asked. She was shouting to be heard over the music, but then the song ended and she was simply shouting.
“We don’t have no gum,” said Eye-patch.
“Red Stripe’s a beer,” Sunday said. For some reason, the music hadn’t started back up again.
“We got Bud and PBR.”
Sunday pursed her lips, pondering her options.
“PBR,” she said. “And a barbeque sandwich.”
“We ain’t got no barbeque.”
“Your sign—”
“Kitchen’s closed.” He crossed his arms. “This time of night, we just turn the joint over to private parties.”
One of the men at the pool table staggered over. He had a half empty mason jar in his hand, full of clear liquid that made Pit’s eyes water.
“I’m Root,” he said, his speech slurred. “It’s my birthday. You’re welcome to stay.”
“How old’s that girl?” Sunday asked.
“Well I don’t rightly know,” said Root. He belched. “It’s impolite to ask a woman her age.”
“How old are you, girl?” Sunday asked.
“Old enough,” the girl said, crossing her arms.
“If we had an older woman,” Root said, looking Sunday up and down. “She’d be more than welcome to dance.”
Pit put his hand on Sunday’s arm. “If y’all ain’t got no food, we’ll just be moving on,” he announced.
By now, two of the beefier men had moved to stand in front of the door.
“What’s your hurry?” asked Root. “You just got here.”
“We’re just looking for dinner,” said Pit. “Didn’t really come to dance.”
“All women like dancing,” said Root.
“She doesn’t,” said Pit.
“You talk for her?” Root asked.
“Mister, I’m just trying to save you from a world of trouble,” said Pit.
“He doesn’t talk for me,” said Sunday.
“Then, what do you say? You want to dance?”
By now, Eye-patch had produced the can of PBR. Sunday took it, popped the top, and downed it while she contemplated Root’s question.
“This would be a dance where I take off my clothes,” she asked, wiping her mouth.
“Well, sure, if you wanted to. Sure.”
Pit tried to pull Sunday toward the door, but she twisted her arm free.
At the door, one of the large men pushed aside his jacket and revealed a pistol.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Mister?” the gunman said.
“I reckon I will,” said Pit. He raised himself onto a stool, suddenly looking forward to what was about to happen. In his opinion, once a man pulled out a gun, he deserved whatever was coming his way.
Sunday had taken off her jacket and laid it on the bar. She was wearing a tight black sweater beneath this that showed off her curves. She took a seat on a stool and began to unzip her boots.
Someone started the music back up. “Six Days on the Road” by Dave Dudley. It had been years since Pit had heard this song.
The girl on the table placed her hands on her hips. “Root, I ain’t splitting the money.”
“I dance for free,” said Sunday, standing up barefoot on a floor that even Pit Geek thought looked germy.
She unbutton her jeans and peeled them off. This was normally the time in a bank robbery where she would start glowing. But, she wasn’t using her powers. Pit noticed that her new leg had darkened up a little, but was still a lot whiter than her other leg.
Sunday pulled off her sweater. The girl on the table made a feeble attempt at starting to dance, but no one was looking at her now.
Sunday reached up and grabbed her bra, pressing her breasts together. If Pit had been a fair judge, he would have to admit that the girl on the table had nicer jugs. Still, Sunday won the rest of the body competition hands down.
Root was practically drooling. “Oh mama,” he said. “Baby, you should be a model.”
Sunday glanced back at Pit. “For the record, that’s much more flattering than you telling me I could be a prostitute.”
“Aw, what do I know about talking to women?” Pit said.
Sunday removed her bra. Now Root was actually drooling. The song shifted to “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” by David Allen Coe.
“You like what you see?” Sunday asked.
“This is a damn wonderful birthday,” Root mumbled.
“Want to touch?”
Root reached with thick, trembling fingers toward her dark areola.
And then Pit couldn’t see anything. Root was screaming. The girl on the table started shrieking. The boom box squealed as its electronics fried in the ions flooding the room. There was a gunshot to Pit’s left. Then another, and another, then a scream cut suddenly short. The room suddenly took on the smell of burnt bacon.
Pit rubbed his eyes, trying to get rid of the dancing spots. “Christ almighty,” he grumbled. “You’d think I’d of learned by now to keep my eyes closed.”
Sunday laughed, her voice only a few feet away. “Dad told me you were a slow learner.”
When Sunday vaporized a human being completely, it was a curiously soft sound, almost like a feather pillow being tossed onto a bed, a gentle “fumph.”
Fumph. Fumph. Fumph. Fumph. And maybe a few he’d missed over the girl’s shrieking.
He finally got his eyes working. The room was a lot emptier. The cinder block walls were painted with human shadows, men running, mostly.
Root was still alive, on his knees, both hands missing. His eyes had burst, leaving a trail of red and white goop streaming down his cheeks. He was drawing deep breathes and looking like he was screaming, but only gurgles came out.
The girl was still alive. She’d dropped to her hands and knees. Sunday let the fire surrounding her flicker out. Pit tried not to stare at her pubic hair, but found he really couldn’t help it.
Sunday grabbed the girl by the hair. “Give me the money,” she said.
“What?” the girl sobbed.
“The money in your panties and bra! Give it to me!”
“Oh god don’t kill me,” the girl whimpered.
“Give me the money!” Sunday screamed.
The girls hand were shaking so bad she dropped half the bills as she pulled them from her underwear. Sunday scooped them into a little pile and counted them. Pit could see they were mostly ones.
“Thirty-seven dollars,” Sunday said, shaking her head. “You’d sell your body for thirty-seven dollars.”
“No!” the girl protested. “They were just watching! They couldn’t… you know, touch me for a couple of dollar bills.”
“Then for what?” Sunday asked.
The girl sniffled. “I don’t know. Maybe a hundred? Maybe fifty?”
Sunday bunched the bills into her fist and the suddenly flared, singing the girl’s hair. The girl tried to crawl away, but Sunday grabbed her by the face, squeezing her cheeks, smearing the dark mascara tracks that ran down her face in an eerie echo of Root’s fate.
“I don’t know!” the girl cried. “I don’t know how much to charge!”
“I’m not quizzing you on the proper fees!” Sunday said. “No price! No price! No one should be commodity to be bought or sold! I’ve been fighting since I was no older than you trying to break the world free from its thinly disguised economy of slavery and here you are, here you are, selling yourself! Why? Why?”
“I’ve got a little girl at home,” the dancer sobbed. “I need the money for her.”
Sunday slowly released the girl’s face.
“Was one of these men the father,” she asked.
“No,” the girl said, wiping her snot from her face. “He’s my age.”
Sunday stared at the black mascara smudges on her hand. She wiped them on the pool table.
She walked toward Pit. He made a show of hiding his eyes behind his hand as he held her jeans toward her.
“Oh, go ahead and look,” she grumbled. “You think I didn’t see you staring?”
“Sorry,” said Pit.
“You’re not sorry.” She pulled on her jeans in one fluid motion.
“Naw. I’m not.”
She pulled on her sweater without bothering with her bra. She sat on the stool to put her boots on. “I hate all mankind.”
“There’s always monkeyland,” said Pit.
She gave him a glance sideways, started to say something, then stopped.
Pit glanced toward Root. He was still breathing, still sitting up, and maybe, against all odds, still conscious.”
“You going to put him out of his misery?”
“Not planning on it,” she said.
“What about the girl?”
“I don’t give a damn what she does,” said Sunday, with a dismissive wave.
On hearing this, the girl rolled off the table and crawled toward the door. Sunday zipped up her boots as the girl slipped outside.
“There might be some food in the kitchen,” Pit said, going behind the bar. The kitchen was little more than a sink, a microwave, and a small refrigerator. In the fridge, he found a pack of hot dogs. There was also a door to the gravel lot out back, standing open.
“You want a wiener?” he called out to her.
“Since you aren’t smart enough for innuendo, I assume you’ve found hot dogs?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m really not hungry now,” she said. “We never did ask where we could find a hotel.”
“Hey,” said Pit, staring at the open door. “Did you kill the guy with the eye-patch?”
“Uhhhh, no. I don’t think so. I think he bolted while I was focused on the guy with the gun.”
Pit Geek sighed. “I bet he’s called the cops by now.”
“Why should we care?” asked Sunday. “Let them come.”
She shook her head as she stared at the pool table. “Let them send a whole damn army.” She looked down at her hands, and let twin balls of glowing plasma bubble up in her palms. “I think… I think I’ve crossed a line, Pit.”
“How so?” he said, coming back from the kitchen.
“I thought there was a war,” she said, so softly he could barely here her. “I thought I was saving the innocent and ignorant masses from the machinations of secretive, powerful men who treated them like animals.” She sighed. “But they were animals all along.”
“Monday really screwed you up,” said Pit.
“Monday gave me hope.”
“Monday made you think that things were important. But nothing’s really important. These folks tonight were just passing time as best they could until the grim reaper came for ‘em. We’re all gonna die in the end, so what’s it matter how you live your days? Just do what you like to do. If these guys liked looking at some girl shaking her money maker, and she liked shaking it, why not let them have their fun?”
Sunday rolled the plasma around in her palm as she thought his words over. “That some kind of cowboy philosophy?”
“I dunno where I heard it,” said Pit. “Maybe it’s in the Bible?”
“I’m fairly certain it’s not,” Sunday said, chuckling. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve never been so tired in all my life.”
They stepped out of the bar and walked toward the Harley. When they were ten feet away, a large man in white tights dropped down from the sky and landed on the bike, flattening it. A cloud of dust rose from the impact. Pit and Sunday stopped dead in their tracks.
The man in white rose from his crouching position in the shallow crater as dust and shreds of pulverized Harley drifted down around him. He was tall and bulging with muscles, with a square jaw and close-cropped ink-black hair that made him look like he’d stepped out of a comic book. There was a large red S in the center of his chest.
“Pit Geek,” the man said, in a deep bass voice. “Sundancer. You’re under arrest. I’d advise you to surrender. Lethal force has been authorized for your capture.”
“You’ve got us confused with someone else,” Pit said. “We’re Devourer and Burn Baby.”
“Baby Burn,” said Sunday. Then she looked at the big guy. “You found us. Can you catch us?”
The man in white blurred. Before either of them could blink, he’d grabbed Sunday by the wrist.
“Not bad,” said Sunday. “But can you hold us?”
Pit remembered to close his eyes this time, but even still the flash felt like lightning burning into the back of his skull. He shielded his eyes with his hands as he carefully opened them. Sunday was nothing but a glowing outline. The ground beneath her bubbled like a pool of lava.
The man in white still had hold of her wrist. Not a single hair on his head was singed.
Pit couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Sunday smiled at her captor.
“You’re going to be a lot more fun than an army,” she said.
3590 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Five 3003 words

2011-08-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

See chapter one for various disclaimers. This is raw first draft. I'm not pausing to read it yet.

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It’s quiet here. Occasionally, I hear a goat or a chicken off in the distance, but normally it’s silent as a tomb. There was a time in my life when I wanted a little peace and quiet.

Be careful what you wish for.

Chapter Five
The Covenant

The supermen traveled via private jet to Guantanamo Bay. Sarah was at the controls, Clint was seated next to her, and Johnny was in the back staring out the window at the blue sea below as they drew closer to the base. The sea changed to a lighter hue as they neared land. The sun was a bit behind them, casting the shadow of the plane on the giant plastic dome that covered the base.
Guantanamo was where they kept the world’s most dangerous terrorists. At least, the most dangerous terrorists that had been captured. Sarah was still on the wanted list. So was Clint. Johnny was the only one on the plane with a clean record, and that was only because he’d spent the last decade as a dematerialized cluster of fundamental particles.
They glided through the jet gate of the dome. The light dimmed instantly.
On the runway, they were met by a jeep that carried them to General Shepard’s residence. Johnny had expected fancier digs, but the General made his home in the same one story tin-roofed style shack that the rest of the base was composed off. His house was fenced off with twelve foot tall chain link walls topped with razor wire. Johnny counted at least thirty cameras pointed at the structure. It looked almost like it was designed to keep the general a prisoner.
The interior was little better. Vast piles of money were being thrown into the war on terror, but apparently the money wasn’t landing here. They were taken to a conference room with a long folding table and folding metal chairs. There was a calendar on the wall, with the November photo showing a kitten staring at a turkey.
Johnny and Sarah took a seat. Clint remained standing, his arms crossed, staring at the door. Sarah left her helmet on. Her plastic surgery made it safe for her to move around in public now, but she still needed the voice modulators in the helmet. This conversation would almost definitely be recorded, and if they found a match with a previous recording of Sarah, it would be game over.
General Shepard came into the room alone. He said, “You have powerful friends. But don’t think for a moment that I lack the technology to neutralize every one of you and toss you into jail. Public use of meta-human powers has an official act of terrorism for five years now. You could all rot in a cell the rest of your lives.”
“Nice to meet you too,” said Clint.
“Yes,” said Sarah. “It is nice to meet with you, sir. We recognize the awkwardness of this situation. We appreciate your willingness to listen to our proposal.”
The general took a seat. “Let’s here it.”
“We will be the first to admit that the world has gotten along fine without superheroes for the last seven years,” said Sarah. “But, that was before Monday’s attack in Richmond by Sundancer in Pit Geek. If supervillians are back, you need us on your side.”
“Ma’am, I think you underestimate the advances we’ve made in the last five years in the field of meta-human controls.”
“And I think the undeniable fact is that you haven’t caught them yet. They’ve hit five banks in ten days. The stock market has fallen by half in that time. There have been riots in Chicago, LA, and Miami. If they remain at large another ten days, civilization as we know it might come apart at the seams.”
“What makes you think you can find them?”
“We don’t need to find them. We just need to respond to their next robbery in time to catch them.”
“But there’s no pattern,” Shepard grumbled. “They could strike anywhere. For all out analysts can figure out, they might be picking targets by throwing darts at a map.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Sarah. “We have access to technology that will allow us to respond instantly the second that another sighting is made.”
“Rex Monday’s space machine,” said Shepard. “You know possessing that technology is illegal.”
“In the U.S. Not where we’re keeping it.”
Shepard crossed his arms, and gave Sarah a skeptical look. “So. I know who you really are. But who are you supposed to be?”
“Skyrider,” said Sarah. “I can fly, and neutralize the gravity of anything I touch. This effectively provides me with superstrength. My flight uniform is Kevlar. I’m not invulnerable, but I can take most things that are thrown at me.”
Sarah’s flight uniform was sky blue and clung to her like a glove. Her helmet was the same shade, though her face plate was a pure mirror. She didn’t have an inch of exposed skin. With her voice modulator, she sounded suspiciously robotic. “My real name is Sarah Sandlin,” she continued. “Our people have provided your people with all the needed documentation to confirm out identities. Unlike previous superheroes, we have nothing to hide. Nor will we ever take the law into our own hands. We call ourselves the Covenant. We intend to be heroes the world can trust.”
Shepard looked toward Clint. Clint was a big man, built like a linebacker. Save for his logo, his uniform was all white, so bright and pure it hurt to stare at it. On the center of his chest there was a large red “S.”
“Clint Christianson,” he said. “My code name is Servant. My body generates force fields that produce various effects. I’m completely invulnerable. I don’t need to breathe. I can run two hundred miles an hour by compressing time around me. I can bend steel with my bare hands.”
“You fly?” asked Shepard.
“I can jump about a quarter mile. But, no, I can’t actually fly.”
Shepard turned to Johnny. “You’re a little young for this game, aren’t you?”
Johnny shook his head. “Name’s Johnny Appleton. The birth certificate we sent in should show you I’m twenty nine.” Of course, twelve of those years he hadn’t actually had a body. Biologically, he was only seventeen.
“Code name?” asked Shepard.
“Call me Ap,” said Johnny. “I’m the world’s first open sourced superhero. Twelve years ago, Rex Monday was trying to design a teleportation belt. He needed a guinea pig, so he had his henchmen kidnap some random person off the street. Lucky me, I’m the guy they picked. Monday strapped the belt on me, fiddled with the dials, and tore me down to a cloud of quantum particles. Unfortunately, the supercomputer he was using to piece me back together wasn’t quite up to the task. I was stuck that way until a few months ago, when the Katrina Knowbokov Foundation rescued me.”
The Foundation was an independent team of the world’s best scientists who’d been assembled to make sense of the mad-scientist inventions of both Rex Monday and Dr. Nicholas Knowbokov, both now deceased. The team had been able to put Johnny back together, but his years in a diffuse quantum state had left his atomic structure highly unstable. The belt now essentially was constantly rematerializing him in order to keep him from fading back into nothingness.
One side effect of his instability was that by making minor programming alterations to the belt, he could change his body. The scientists at the foundation had written a few superpowers for him, sort of as a consolation prize for the missing twelve years of his life. Johnny had since published the belt’s code on the internet. Now, thousands of programmers around the world uploaded new programs daily for him to test. Most were just variations on a theme; he had at least five hundred programs that phase shifted him so that he could walk through walls. Still, it was a fun toy. And, now that he’d been recruited to the covenant, it was more than a toy. It was a tool he could use to make the world a safer place than it had been for him growing up.
Shepard leaned back in his chair. He looked around the room. “For a team supposedly making a pact to be open and honest, you’re getting off to a damn shitty start.”
“How so?” Johnny asked.
“First off all, you check out,” said Shepard. “You’ve given us your real name and verifiable contact information. But, you didn’t mention your criminal record.”
Johnny turned pale. “I was a juvenile. Those records are sealed.”
“The Department of Homeland Security unsealed them for me,” said Shepard. “You’ve been arrested for prostitution, what, seven times?”
Johnny felt his cheeks turn red.
“You started smoking crack when you were sixteen. Dropped out of school a month later. Ran away from home a few months later. First actual arrest was in San Diego six months later. Then, pretty much once every other week until Monday’s men grabbed you.”
Johnny let out his breath slowly. He was determined not to lose his temper. “I understand you may feel the need to judge me,” he said. “But, I haven’t done any of those things in over a decade. When the team put me back together, I was clean. I have a new lease on life. I don’t need any kind of artificial substances to make me feel good about myself now.”
“Very inspirational,” said Shepard. “But if I authorize the Covenant to operate openly, how long do you think it will take others to discover your past? How much of a hero are you going to be once the National Enquirer tracks down some of your old clients and dealers for their opinions of you?”
“I’ll take that chance,” said Johnny.
Shepard turned to Clint. “Your birth certificate and contacts check out. So, we checked out your contacts contacts. They also passed.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” said Clint.
“Don’t you?” asked Shepard. “Because you’ve got the same biometric energy signature as an old supervillian that used to operate out of Detroit. Called himself Ogre. He ran the gangs there for five years. Rail Blade finally beat him by sealing him in a cube of solid steel twenty feet on each side.”
“I didn’t really keep up with the news back then,” said Clint.
Shepard shifted his gaze toward Sarah. “You barely even tried, girl. Sarah Sandlin? You’re Sarah Knowbokov. The Thrill! You’re wanted for the destruction of Jerusalem.”
Sarah shrugged. “An interesting theory.”
“The other interesting thing is that your mother is Katrina Knowbokov. She’s the richest woman in the world. And, if she hadn’t just purchased a combined nine trillion dollars in debt in US, European, and Japanese bonds this week, the entire financial system might have collapsed.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “It might have.”
“That kind of money buys a lot of second chances,” said Shepard. “Whoever you are.”
“We are who we appear to be,” said Sarah. “Just three people who want to save the world.”
“This will have to go up my chain of command. There’s no way I can sign off on meta-human activities without the explicit consent of the President.”
Sarah nodded. “You will discover that Katrina Knowbokov spoke on the phone with him this morning. They discussed further lines of credit, and the subject of the swift authorization of our activities may have come up. Not that there is any quid pro quo.”
“Of course not,” said Shepard. “So. How do I reach you? Some kind of fancy laser that paints a big ‘C’ on the moon?”
“I’ve got a cell phone in my helmet,” said Sarah. “Ap has one in his belt. We’ll give you both numbers.”
Shepard eyed Clint. “Why don’t you have one?”
Clint shrugged. “No pockets on this suit.”
“He’s the strong and silent type anyway,” said Sarah. “Johnny and I handle the talking.”
“Nope,” said Shepard. “Before I turn you loose on Sundancer and Pit Geek, there’s going to be a press conference. Just announcing to the world that we have three meta-humans working on our side is going to reverse some of the damage these two have inflicted on the financial markets. Servant will be your spokesman.”
“I really don’t like public speaking,” said Servant.
Sarah said, “And I’m—”
Shepard cut her off. “You’re the only one on the team not showing her face. And, your voice is plainly altered. It will undercut the message that you team has nothing to hide if you’re so obviously hiding something.”
“Then I’ll speak,” said Johnny. Like Clint, he wore no mask. His costume was a set of red tights with a large ‘A’ on the chest, with black gloves and boots to match the black teleporter belt. Between the three costumes, they were red, white, and blue. It wasn’t the most subtle appeal to gain people’s trust.
Shepard shook his head. “No offense son, but even if I hadn’t read your record, the first time I heard you speak I could tell you were queer as a three dollar bill.”
Johnny felt like he’d been slapped.
Sarah jumped in, “Sir, maybe that mattered a decade ago, but I hardly think Johnny’s sexuality is going to matter now.”
“You’re nuts,” said Shepard. “And, even if he was straight, he’s still obviously a damn teenager, and practically a midget.”
“Now your just being gratuitously offensive,” said Sarah.
“It’s okay,” said Johnny, determined not to sound flustered. He was five six, just two inches shorter than the average male height. He only looked short because he was in the same room as Clint. “I’ve been called worse.”
The General turned to Servant. “Like it or not, you look like a hero, and you’ve got a heroes voice. James Earl Jones would be envious. You’re the spokesman.”
Clint shrugged. “Fine.”
“The first question you’re going to be asked is, are you Ogre?”
“No.”
“One word answers won’t do.”
“No, sir.”
“Then where did you get your powers?”
“From the Lord,” said Servant.
The general stared at him.
“I became Servant after accepting Jesus Christ as my lord and savior.” Clint sounded utterly sincere. “He gave me these powers so that I could use them for the good of all mankind. As long as I have my faith, I’ll have my powers.”
The general grinned. “Oh, the folks in fly-over country are going to love this.”

Things turned ugly when they got back on the plane.
“The nerve of that bastard,” Johnny grumbled. “Acts like I’m an embarrassment because I’m gay.”
Clint shook his head. “You should have told us.”
“You didn’t know he was gay?” Sarah asked, with a tone of surprise that Johnny found bothersome.
“So he’s got a funny voice,” said Clint. “I try not to judge people.”
“What’s funny about my voice?” said Johnny.
“Never mind,” said Clint. “Anyway, what I meant was, you should have told us about your record. The Covenant is supposed to represent the highest moral standards. It’s hard to think of anything less moral than having a fag prostitute on our team.”
“I thought you were Christian,” said Johnny, crossing his arms. “You’re not being very love your neighbor at the moment.”
“Loving my neighbor means trying to help that neighbor get into heaven,” Clint said. “If you’re having sex with men, that’s a sin. I know people who can help get you straight.”
“Get me straight? It’s not a disease. It’s just how I was born.”
“Maybe you could use the belt to fix it,” said Clint.
“It’s not something that needs fixing!”
“Guys, let’s just calm down,” said Sarah, as the plane taxied down the runway. “We’ve got a long flight home.”
“So,” said Johnny. “Were you Ogre? Because being a murderous drug lord trumps being a hungry teenager who had to do some unpleasant things in order to have a meal.”
“You could have walked into any church in San Diego and asked for help,” said Clint.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Who I used to be doesn’t matter,” said Clint. “I’ve been born again. I’m a new man.”
“Then you were Ogre.”
Clint shook his head. “There’s thirty meter cube of solid steel in Detroit that you could cut open if you ever wanted to find out the truth.”
“Or you could tell me the truth.”
“I’m Clint Christenson. I’m Servant. This is truth.”
Things went quiet after that. Clint stared out the window. Sarah just looked straight ahead. Johnny pulled the wireless keypad off his belt and activated his retinal display. He’d been off-line for almost two hours. One of the conditions for getting onto Guantanamo had been to turn off all radios, meaning he’d been without his satellite link. In the missing time he’d gotten two hundred comments on Facebook on his proposed costume changes. People were enthusiastic about swapping the white capital “A” for the “@” symbol.
Of course, there was also the usual trove of spam. “What a fag costum!” someone named Alpha Dude had posted. Johnny started to delete the comment, then decided to leave it. Sometimes the simplest form of justice was just to let people expose their own ignorance.
He then signed into the Ap Exchange. Thirty two new apps had been uploaded. As usual, a fair amount were vision powers. It turned out to be relatively easy to tweak a retina to see in infrared or ultraviolet. But what he really needed now was something no one had yet effectively cobbled together.
He opened a chat box and typed, “X-ray vision. See through thirty feet of steel. Possible?” He hit send.
Almost instantly, the people currently on the forum started responding.
Sidekick: “Nope.”
BruceBanner: “What you need are gamma rays.”
Code4U: “Even gamma rays would be stopped.”
TheYellowKid: “Seismic imaging might work.”
BruceBanner: “Neutrinos?”
Sidekick: “How 2 capture?”
TheYellowKid: “4 iron, something like magnavision?”
Sidekick: “Like!”
BruceBanner: “Already pounding out code.”

3003 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Four 3353 words

2011-08-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

Things I don’t remember eating:
The Coke machine.
The 1969 Yellow Pages for Dallas.
Two cans of purple paint.
A peacock feather boa.
What looks like it might be part of an industrial sized air-conditioner.
The front end of a Dodge Dart.
An actual set of darts, plus the dart board they were stuck in.
A TV cart.
What might be but almost certainly isn’t the real Mona Lisa.
A five gallon gasoline can, empty.
A bag of airline peanuts, in the bag.
A truly hideous tie, about five inches wide, kind of a snot green with stripes the color of Grape Nehi.
A penguin. It’s dead now. My guess is, it starved. The chickens here eat the bugs in the trash and the goats seem to hang on eating the garbage directly. But I guess I didn’t eat much in the way of penguin food.
A set of three by five note cards, about dozen of them, with writing in what might be Russian. It’s got those backwards R’s and a half dozen other letters I can’t cipher out. Or maybe it’s my handwriting, from back in the years when I had a pound of shrapnel churning up my gray matter.
Oh Sunday. Things were so much simpler when I was dumb.

Chapter Four
Not Bonny, Not Clyde

Their first bank was a Suntrust central office in downtown Richmond. It was crowded, lunch hour, when a lot of people rushed in to take care of business. Pit had thought they should start smaller and with fewer witnesses, but Sunday had been adamant that they should do this big. She said she wanted a bank robbery so spectacular people would talk about it China. Pit had gotten swept along in her enthusiasm. Spectacular was now the plan.
So, step one was to drive a motorcycle right into the bank’s lobby. If Monday had been around, his space machine would have been the right tool for the job, but the morning after they’d used the Regeneration Ray they’d left the motel office to find this beautiful Harley parked next to the Camry and took it as a sign that their crime spree should begin with a little grand theft. They needed some kind of transportation since Sunday was graceful as an angel when she was in flight by herself, but her early attempts at carrying stuff had always resulted in her losing her center of balance and spiraling down to crash landings. Thus, a getaway vehicle was a necessity.
Pit gunned the bike up the plaza steps in front of the bank. The bank had a series of concrete posts near the doors designed to stop people from driving a large vehicle through the front doors, but the Harley slipped right through. Crashing through the plate glass windows might have damaged the bike, so at the last second Sunday stretched her arm out, wiggled her fingers, and BOOM no more window. They skid to a halt amid flaming debris and about a hundred screaming customers.
They had moments before cops showed up, not that either of them were all that worried about cops. When Sunday really lit up, bullets disintegrated before touching her. Pit wasn’t scared of bullets, and was scared even less now that they had a Regeneration Ray.
Despite the fact that the sky was filled with gray clouds and it felt cold enough to snow, this was fine, fine day to be a supervillian.
The first order of business was the rent-a-cop stationed at the bank. His face was red as a beet as he ran toward them, drawing his pistol. He aimed it toward them with both hands and shouted, “Put your hands up!”
Which they both did, but only to take off their helmets. They both dismounted the bike smiling at the guard.
“Put that thing down before you hurt yourself,” said Pit. Then he turned to the rest of the room and shouted, “Everyone on the floor, please! We’ll be done robbing this joint in five minutes and you can all get back to your lives.”
“Put your hands up!” the guard repeated, shouting louder. “Put your hands up!”
Pit sighed. “What are you, a broken record?”
Sunday began to undress as Pit walked toward the guard. Under her biker’s jacket she was wearing a leather halter top and blue jeans that looked painted on. She’d spent the seven longest hours of Pit Geek’s life shopping for these jeans and the calf-high zipper boots that went over them, and she wasn’t going to just blow these things to atoms the first time she wore them in public.
Pit felt a little sorry for the guard. Sorry for himself a little too. They both would have preferred to watch the strip show, but instead their eyes were locked on one another. Pit approached with his palms open. The guard probably wouldn’t fire at an unarmed man.
The guard shot him in the chest from a yard away. When Pit didn’t fall, he shot him again, and again, until his clip was empty.
Pit snatched the empty gun away. “First nice clothes I’ve worn in months and you had to go put holes in them,” he grumbled. He was decked out in biker’s leathers, even leather pants. Secretly, he was happy that the jacket now had a nice pattern of holes. He’d felt a little dainty wearing clothes without even a scuff mark.
Pit pointed the gun at the guard. “Now you get on the floor.”
The guard looked confused. “The… the gun’s empty,” he said.
“So it is,” said Pit. “I knew that.” He frowned. “Well, I’m in luck, because my doctor told me I have an iron deficiency.” Then, in three neat gulps, he ate the gun. He could have downed it in one bite, but it wouldn’t have the same impact. The guard’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his skull.
“Down,” said Pit.
The guard went down.
Pit looked back and found that Sunday had finished stripping. Unfortunately, she was already sheathed in white radiance that forced him to shield his eyes. She walked toward the row of tellers, at first leaving a line of flaming foot prints. Then, as she neared the first customer laying on the floor, she climbed into the air like she was walking up invisible steps. There were red velvet ropes forming a little maze for customers to traipse through. They caught fire as she walked over them. She descended on the other sided of the tellers, in front of the steel vault door. She walked into the steel as if it wasn’t even there, because, by the time she reached it, it wasn’t. At her hottest, she could vaporize steel. Fortunately, in the ten years Pit had known her she’d honed her powers so that she could direct her full body blasts in a single direction, or else everyone behind her would now be dead.
Pit ran toward the wall of tellers and vaulted behind the counter. He could now hear distant sirens. He shouted to the room, “Everybody just stay calm and stay down! Sounds like help is on the way. No need for anyone here to be a hero.”
He ducked to slip into the bank vault. The Sunday sized hole in the door was a good six inches shorter than he was. Inside, Sunday was already vaporizing locks on safe deposit boxes and yanking them open. Gold coins, jewelry, and comic books in polybags were being tossed into a pile. Legal papers were reduced to ash.
Pit sucked down the valuables. Then he turned his attention to all the cash, shoving stacks of hundreds, fifties, and twenties between his teeth. It took several minutes to finish off the vault. Pit wasn’t good enough at math to have a real guess of how much he’d just swallowed. Certainly at least a million.
They went back into the lobby.
“You guys are doing fine,” Pit said. “Give us two more minutes and you can all whip out your cell phones and tell folks how you were just robbed by the modern Bonnie and Clyde.”
Sunday turned her head sharply towards him, in what might have been a nasty look, though with her face too bright to focus on it was tough to say.
She said to the room, “When you get on your phones, you tell people that no bank in the world is safe. Not just from us. The so called authorities of this world create a theatre of safety to make you feel as if your money is secure, while all the time they steal you blind behind the scenes. The safest place for your money is in your mattress. Tell people!”
“What the hell was that about?” Pit asked as they reached the motorcycle. “That wasn’t in the script.”
“I was unaware there was a script,” she said.
“Well, not a real script, but, y’know, there’s a flow to these things.”
“I’ve never gone with the flow,” she said, moving on.
Sunday had folded up her clothes as she undressed and placed them neatly in the saddle bags. Pit secured Sunday’s helmet to the back seat as she floated out to the plaza, the glass windows melting like ice at her approach.
Pit straddled the bike as gun fire erupted outside.
“Y’all keep your heads down, y’hear?” he said to the people laying on the floor. “It’s been a nice, clean robbery so far. Hate to see any of you nice folks get perforated by a stray bullet.”
Then he gunned the motor and roared out onto the plaza. He skidded to a halt to watch the action. He felt rather heroic, standing in front of a smoking bank with a hail of bullets flying around him. Of course, none of the bullets were aimed at him. The flying woman sheathed in white flames had a lock on the cop’s attention at this point.
“No one is safe!” Sunday shouted over head. He stretched her arms toward the first cop car. It exploded, taking out the cops next to it. She pointed toward the second car. These cops were fast learners, and started running. Two seconds later the car went off like a bomb. Smoking bits of twisted steel clattered on the cement plaza like a shower of hail.
There were four more cop cars, and four more booms. Any remaining officers had retreated behind a freshly arrived fire truck.
The firemen hastily hooked a hose to a hydrant. Sunday crossed her arms as she waited for them to finish.
She glanced down at Pit. “See you in Short Pump.”
Pit nodded, then put on his helmet.
The jet of water shot toward Sunday. And then there was steam, vast, billowing clouds of white vapor that rolled across the plaza and quickly reduced the line of sight for the surrounding five blocks down to about three feet. Pit wheeled out ahead of the billowing steam, darting through traffic stalled by the police action. There was a helicopter overhead, but only for a moment. A second sun flashed through the sky near the chopper and it began to spin out of control.
They met up behind an old vacant WalMart in Short Pump. Sunday made Pit turn his back as she dressed.
“We’re not Bonny, not Clyde,” she complained as she pulled on her boots. “Where did that come from?”
“What’s your problem with Bonny and Clyde?”
“To start with, they were lovers,” she said. “I don’t want the world to think we’re sleeping together.”
“Why the hell not?” Pit asked. “You don’t mind being known as a bank-robber and cop-killer, but you’re worried people might think you’re loose?”
Sunday pressed her lips tightly together. Then, she said, “In any case, it’s unoriginal. We aren’t copying anybody. We’re originals. Pit Geek and Sundancer.”
“I don’t want to be Pit Geek no more,” said Pit.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I got a new face. I got some nice clean clothes. Maybe I don’t want people to know I used to live in a pit and bite the heads off chickens.”
“I have a feeling that, face or no face, people are going to put two and two together. Pit Geek could shrug off bullets and eat solid steel. And, on the debut of your new face, you shrugged off bullets and ate a pistol. I’ve got a hunch someone is going to make the connection, Pit.”
“Devourer,” said Pit Geek.
“That’s your new name? Devourer?”
“It’s more dignified.”
“I don’t like it. It doesn’t roll off the tongue. It has two soft ‘R’ sounds mushed together.”
“Eater?” Pit said.
“Pithier, but I don’t think it’s that much more dignified than Pit Geek.”
“You should go back to Burn Baby.”
“No,” said Sunday. “And it was Baby Burn. And what’s wrong with Sundancer?”
“You’re the one who wants to be original. Any time I hear Sundancer, I think of the Sundance Kid. People will start thinking I’m Butch Cassidy.”
“I’ve heard of the movie,” said Sunday.
“There was a movie?” asked Pit.
“That’s where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid come from,” said Sunday.
“Naw, they were real people,” said Pit. “Butch had a gang that used to rob trains and banks. The Wild Bunch. Sundance was part of the gang. His real name was … was Harry. Harry, uh, Harry Longbow? Anyway, he stole a horse from a ranch in Sundance was how he got his name.”
Sunday gave him a puzzled look. “You can’t remember your own name, but you know the name of some fictional cowboy?”
“He ain’t fictional.”
“Whatever,” said Sunday. “I’m vetoing Baby Burn right now. Burn Baby also. You can call yourself Toiletman for all I care.”
“Toiletman?”
“Since you shove crap down a hole,” she said, sounding as if it should have been obvious.
“Speaking of crap, what was that bit about putting money into mattresses? We want it in banks so we can steal it.”
“You want to steal it. I don’t see much point in us acquiring a lot of wealth. But, I do think that, as you said, the whole world’s on edge right now. The world’s teetering on the edge of another great depression. If we trigger a run on banks, we might bring down the house of cards. Money only has value because people think it has value. Destroy the underlying belief system, and you destroy money.”
Pit patted his belly. “Could you maybe wait until we spent this million bucks we stole before you destroy the value of money?”
“That was a lot more than a million that you wolfed down,” said Sunday. “But, so what? Where the hell are we supposed to be spending it? I mean, I have to lay out some dough each year to keep the yacht fueled so the generators can keep the place air conditioned, but it’s not like I can take the boat anywhere. Dad’s bribed the local officials into ignoring the boat. The cover story is that I’m a mafia informant under witness protection by the FBI. But, I can’t take the boat to another country, because I don’t think the faked paperwork Dad has on file would stand up to scrutiny. And, anyway, why do I need a boat? I can fly!”
“Yeah, buck naked. You could show up places wearing clothes if you had a boat.”
Sunday gave a grim smile as she nodded.
“What do we need money for?” she asked, not looking at him directly. She was staring off in the distance, thinking out loud. “We can’t buy a house with it. Cars? If we want an expensive car, we can just steal it. And we can rob a jewelry store just as easily as a bank. Anyway, who wants jewelry? What’s it good for?”
“Most women like jewelry.”
“Most women like being given jewelry,” said Sunday. “Our warped society has taught them that they only have worth if they have a diamond on their finger. All sexual relationships are tainted by this thinly disguised variant of prostitution.”
“So you wouldn’t sleep with me if I gave you a diamond ring?”
“Nope.”
“How about if I make a solemn vow not to give you a diamond ring?”
“Definitely not.”
“What if I were a woman?”
“What kind of stupid question is that?”
Pit shrugged. “You’ve just never shown any interest in men.”
“And that makes me a lesbian?” Sunday rolled her eyes. “The day I met Rex Monday, I knew that I’d never have a relationship with a man. He opened up my mind to the truths of the world, things I’d always seen, but never had the courage to accept as true.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m not human. I’m the next step up the evolutionary chain. Sleeping with an ordinary human… it’s like you sleeping with a monkey.” She gave him a sideways glance. “You, uh, wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Naw,” said Pit. There was a pause. Then he added, “I’d eat one, though.”
“I’m sure you would.”
There was another long moment of silence.
“So,” Pit said. “I, uh, I might be another step up the evolutionary chain as well.”
“Maybe,” said Sunday. “But you don’t brush your teeth. You’re make it easy to say no.”
Pit nodded slowly. He turned his head and furtively slipped a finger between his lips, running it along his new teeth. They didn’t feel dirty.
“So,” he said. “What if I—”
“Give up, Pit.”
“So, what next?” he asked, getting back on the bike.
“We go find some hotel in the sticks and watch TV. See if the world collapse. If it doesn’t, we rob a bigger bank. Hell, we’ll take out Fort Knox if we have too.”
“But that’s all we’re spending the money on? Hotel rooms?”
She shrugged as she got on the bike behind him. “What’s your idea?”
“Step one, we go buy us some nice duds, then find a saloon where we can get plastered and dance the night away.”
“I don’t drink or dance.”
“You don’t dance?” Pit said, starting the engine. “It’s right in your name!”
“I picked that name when I was fifteen. I … lord, this sounds silly. I’d been taking ballet since I was a little girl. I really wasn’t good at it, but at fifteen I still thought I’d be a ballerina.”
“I don’t think that sounds silly. Girls like that stuff.”
“Only because we’re brainwashed by a culture of subservience. I can see now how sick it is that people trot out their prepubescent daughters in tights and tutus to advertise their sexual desirability. The world is just one horrible ongoing nightmare once you truly wake up inside it.”
“I don’t know about all that,” said Pit, gliding the bike forward around the speed bumps beside the WalMart. “I just know it’s fun to do the two-step with Merle Haggard spinning on the juke box.”
“What’s step two?” she asked.
“The two-step is a dance,” said Pit.
“No. I know that. I said what’s step two? You started this with, ‘step one.’”
“Right,” said Pit. “I was thinking about monkeys ‘cause of what you said. And, you know, there is one place we can go to spend our dough and live like kings.”
“Pangea?”
“Monkeyland!” Pit nodded. “The law couldn’t touch us!”
“The whole place is made of garbage!” Sunday said.
“Garbage might start to look valuable if you kill off the dollar,” Pit said with a laugh, though she might not have heard him since that was the instant he gunned the motor and they roared back out onto the highway. Sunday wrapped her arms tightly around him, her breasts pressed up against his back, the cheek of her helmet pushed against his shoulder blade.
The gray skies began to drizzle. The wind howled as if it were in pain as it the bike knifed through the air. Sunday let loose just enough heat to warm them.
It was a fine morning to be a supervillain.
3353 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Three 3877 words

2011-08-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

See chapter one for disclaimers. This is raw first draft. Still, I hope you find it interesting.

Nothing rots here. I’m not sure time passes at the same rate. I look out a the ring, like a miniature Saturn, made of junk and carrion, and wonder if we’re in orbit. There are no stars against which to measure our movement. I can make out only the slightest changes in the light that hint we’re in motion.

I’ve found three different clocks. All were electric. It’s a shame I never got my hands on an hour glass. But then, what could I prove. Perhaps the passing of an hour here measures eons elsewhere.

I had plenty of chances to swallow the one man who might have been able to dope this out.

Life is full of missed opportunities.

Chapter Three
A Leg to Stand On

Sunday pulled her rented Toyota Camry into the parking lot of the Post Office in Georgetown, South Carolina. It was November 11, and this was the next to last town on the contact list. Long before they’d been blamed for destroying Jerusalem, Rex Monday had told them that there might come a time when they would have to lay low. He’d told Sunday not to think of hiding and waiting as a form of retreat. In asymmetrical warfare, not attacking was a legitimate strategy. While you conserve your strength, the enemy must spend more and more resources to less and less effect. The resources required to scan ten million suitcases for bombs cost exactly the same if there are no bombs as they would if there were a thousand. In fact, no bombs can be an even greater weapon than a thousand bombs. If even one bomb a month were discovered at an airport, the level of vigilance would remain high. No one would question the value of the resources spent. But, if no bombs turn up year after year, complacency sets in. The public begins to view safety as a burden imposed upon them rather than a right they are entitled to. Political rifts form over the wisdom of the money spent to protect citizens from a seemingly imaginary foe.
Sunday was early. They weren’t supposed to meet at the post office box until 11:11am. Pit Geek still had ten minutes to arrive, assuming he was still alive. He hadn’t made it to the check point last year in Vegas.
Georgetown was about as different from Vegas as you could get. It was a small town that prided itself on a lot of old buildings. Sunday wasn’t particularly impressed by three hundred year old bricks or graveyards filled with towering oaks draped with Spanish moss. She did appreciate, however, that Monday had arranged their check-ins in towns with significant tourist populations. Georgetown was on the South Carolina coast at about the midpoint between Myrtle Beach and Charleston. A steady stream of visitors stopped into the downtown to browse the various antique stores and partake of the local eateries. Though she was a stranger in town, no one would give her a second glance.
She got out of the car at 11:10. Pit Geek was almost certainly dead, assuming he could die. She would miss him. Though she’d found him physically repulsive, she’d enjoyed his dry sense of humor and his curiously convoluted moral code. He was a cold-blooded killer who would murder a man for looking at him funny, and in the time she’d known him she’d witnessed him slaughter women and children without hesitation. It was difficult to reconcile this with the man who’d grabbed Rex Monday’s arm to stop him from beating her. She’d asked about it once. He’d shrugged like the question didn’t make sense. “A job’s a job and a war’s a war,” he’d said. “But I’ve never had a stomach for bullies.”
She went into the post office and fit the key into box 111. Inside was a pink slip informing her she had a package at the window. The line was ten people deep. She sighed, and took her place in the queue. For not the first time, she thought about disobeying her father’s orders. She could just kill everyone in the building and grab the package, then fly off and be in the Bahamas by nightfall. But, no, she was laying low. She was in hiding.
A little girl about four years old was in line in front of her, with her mother, a heavy set black woman in twenties. The little girl stared at Sunday’s ankles. Then she announced, “She’s got a robot leg.”
Sunday felt everyone’s eyes turn toward her. She was wearing pants, but no socks, and her c-leg was showing where it fit into her deck shoes. Just above the shoe little more showed than a slender silver rod. She’d lost her leg at the battle of Jerusalem, and had been wearing the prosthetic so long she sometimes forgot about it.
“Don’t be rude,” said the mother to the little girl. She gave Sunday an apologetic glance. “Kids,” she said, as if this were enough explanation.
Behind the counter, Sunday noticed one of the postal workers disappear into an office.
One drawback of Rex Monday’s advance planning was that checking their annual instructions required that they go into buildings where their pictures hung on the wall as part of the FBI’s most wanted fugitive’s list. Luckily for her, she had the sort of face that people didn’t dwell on. So many Hispanic immigrants had flooded into the southern US in the last twenty years that her dark skin tone didn’t merit a second glance. Her eyebrows were a bit thicker than most women’s, but aside from this her face was rather unremarkable. Pretty, but a bit bland. In the one good picture the FBI had of her, she’d been sporting a nose-ring and gone heavy on the mascara that day. She’d gotten rid of the nose ring almost a decade ago, and didn’t even own make up any more. She’d discovered that this rendered her almost invisible.
And then there was the leg. Thanks to the various wars they’d help set in motion, the number of veterans sporting artificial limbs was swelling by thousands each year. Still, there were far more men than women with artificial limbs. The leg was still enough to make authorities give her a second glance.
She kept watching the office as the line kept forward. She glanced around at the surveillance cameras. She glanced down at the package slip. After so many years with no word from her father, was it suspicious that this slip turned up now? Was this a set up? If they had captured Pit Geek, would he have told them the rendezvous times and places?
She made it to the counter. She traded her slip for a box roughly the size of a toaster oven.
She left the Post Office with as casual a pace as she could muster. What the hell was in the box? Were her years of hiding finally at an end?
There was now a pickup truck parked beside her Camry. The sunlight on the windshield hid the drivers face, but she could tell from his silhouette that he was watching her. Then the door swung open, and the ugliest man she’d ever seen stepped out. And then, at a second glance, she recognized him.
“Pete!” she exclaimed, running toward him.
He furrowed his brow. “Am I Pete?”
She drew within an arm’s length and said, “You are in public. People look at you funny if I call you ‘Pit.’ Not that people aren’t going to look at you funny with your face messed up like this. Get in the car before people start talking.”
Pit started to get back into his truck. She grabbed his arm. “No, you idiot. My car. I’ve checked it for tracers. You didn’t do that on your truck, did you?”
“How the hell would I know what a tracer looked like?” Pit asked as she dragged him to the Camry. She opened the passenger door and shoved him in, then threw the package into the back seat. As it left her fingers, she wondered if it might be some sort of doomsday device more deserving of delicate treatment. When the world failed to end by the time she closed the door, she relaxed. Two minutes later, they were at the Georgetown town limits, not due to any particularly breakneck speed she was setting, but because Georgetown just wasn’t that big.
“Where the hell have you been?” she asked. “What happened to your face?”
“I’ve been lots of places,” Pit said. “I don’t remember them all. I kind of remember holding the right half of my head in my hands then jamming it back on. I think I may have jumped into some helicopter blades. Look before you leap. Good advice.”
“How did you remember to come here today?”
Pit shrugged. “Dunno. My brain is still kind of splicing itself back together. Sometimes I know stuff without knowing why I know it. I knew I had to be at the Georgetown Post Office on November 11 at 11:11. Couldn’t remember if it was a.m. or p.m. Took a guess.”
“Do you remember my father? Rex Monday?”
Pit frowned. “He was that terrorist guy in the news a few years back. Whatever happened to him?”
“We don’t know what happened to him. That’s the point of us meeting at different post offices every year. We’re waiting for further instructions from him.”
“Oh,” said Pit. He gave her a long stare. “I know I know you. I remember… you carried me around in … I dunno… a basket? Like a baby? Are you… are you my mother?”
She gave him a sideways glance. “You’re joking, right?”
“I look older than you, so it doesn’t make sense. But… I was little.”
“You were decapitated at the battle of Jerusalem. A hand grenade blew your body into hamburger but your head bounced free. You were still alive. It took you months to regrow your body. For a long time, I was carrying your head around in a cooler. Later, when you had a little toddler body and a full sized head, we did use a baby carriage. But once you could walk, we went our separate ways. We were a much more valuable target together than apart.”
Pit nodded. “I was shot in the neck and chest a little over a month ago. It hurt, but now I just have little scars left. Do you know why I can heal from stuff like this?”
“No. And for what it’s worth, you didn’t know why you couldn’t die when I first met you, almost ten years ago. Your memory’s been crap the whole time I know you. You seem to have a talent for head injuries.”
Pit looked out the window. “Maybe I was born this way. Maybe I’ve always been stupid.”
“Maybe,” said Sunday. It wasn’t her responsibility to cheer Pit up.
“So,” he said. “You got a name?”
“My code name was Sundancer. You used to call me Sunny. But my given name is Sunday.”
Pit looked skeptical.
“What?” she asked.
“Your name is Sunday Monday?”
She sighed. They had a long drive ahead of them.

By the time they’d reached Virginia, she felt less paranoid. She assumed that no one at the Post Office had deduced that the twenty-five year old Hispanic woman with the c-leg was the same twenty-five year old Hispanic woman with a c-leg who was wanted from a long list of crimes against humanity. In a way, she felt contempt that she hadn’t been found out. It wasn’t difficult to hide in plain sight. Most American’s were too busy staring at their cell phones to pay any attention to the wanted criminals who moved among them.
They checked into a motel room in Petersburg, Virginia. It was a no-name, mom and pop place that didn’t bat an eye when she’d paid in cash. In what was likely pure coincidence, they were given room 11.
Pit closed the door behind them as Sunday placed the package on the bed. She carefully removed the tape and opened the cardboard, revealing a block of Styrofoam. She slid this out of the box and pulled the too halves apart.
Inside was a gun about eighteen inches long that looked as if it had been designed for a Star Wars movie. It was made of almost as much glass as metal. The side of the barrel was covered in vents. Where the trigger should be, there was a round, flat button.
“I bet it’s some kind of death ray,” said Pit. “Wasn’t the boss always talking about a death ray?”
“Nope. He used to say that he didn’t need a death ray because he had me,” said Sunday.
Pit’s eyes lit up. “Yeah. You … you shoot out fire from your hands. And you can fly. I remember now.”
There was a note in the box.
My teleportation belt wasn’t a complete waste after all. Presenting the Regeneration Ray! May you always have a leg to stand on.
Then, a postscript: P.S. War is over.
“War is over?” she muttered.
“What war?” asked Pit.
She read him the note.
“What war?” he asked again.
“How can you not remember?” she asked. “We were branded terrorists because we were trying to topple the governments of the world.”
“Which ones?”
“All of them,” said Sunday. “The entire world was corrupted by the machinations of my father’s enemies. There was no hope of repairing it piecemeal. We had to cripple every last remnant of the old order so that my father could finally become the true Rex Mundi.”
Pit nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Didn’t… did we tear down the Washington Monument?”
“Almost.”
“And… and the Twin Towers?”
“Not us, actually.”
“Jerusalem? We destroyed it?”
“Took the blame for it, at least. Technically, one of the good guys did the real damage. A nasty little bitch named Rail Blade. But, she’s either dead now or in a secret prison rotting away. She’s been missing as long as we have.”
Pit sat on the edge of his bed. “So. We were bad people.”
“We were revolutionaries. We were fighting for a cause.”
“I think we should have stuck to robbing banks.”
“I’ve never robbed a bank in my life,” said Sunday. She was actually a little offended by the suggestion. She was a soldier, not a thief.
“Don’t sound so judgmental,” said Pit. “I’ve been robbing convenience stores and bars the last month while waiting for you to show up. It’s practically honest work compared to blowing up cities.”
Sunday sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so closed minded. When dad disappeared, I went to live on his yacht in Bermuda. He had two million in cash in the safe. But… it’s been ten years, and I’m down to my last thousand bucks. I was really hoping the box would be filled with hundred dollar bills.” She picked up the gun. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“The letter said it was for your leg.”
“Not quite.”
“It’s a regeneration ray. What else are you supposed to use it for?”
“I’m not shooting myself in the leg with some mystery ray gun that turned up in the mail. What if it’s a trap by one of our enemies to neutralize our power?”
“Use it on me,” said Pit.
She eyed his face. She raised the gun. For a moment, she hesitated. What if this was a trap? Would she blow his brains out with this thing? She’d killed a lot of people, but could she really shoot the one person left on earth who was sort of, kind of, just a little bit, her friend? She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.
The gun spoke. “X-ray analysis of DNA commencing.”
She opened her eyes. A tight green laser beam formed a dot in the middle of Pit Geek’s brow. “Analysis finished. Calculating age.” Now a blue dot appeared on his forehead. “Analysis inconclusive. The median male age of 35.5 will be approximated. Beginning tissue deconstruction.”
Then, exactly the thing that Sunday had feared came true. Pit Geeks face simply vaporized, revealing mangled bones beneath. But, she held her aim steady as the gun continued to speak. “Repairing underlying structures.” One by one, the bones of his skull began to shift and crawl back into alignment. His gray, gnarled teeth faded out one by one into mists of static, only to reform an instant later as healthy white enamel. “Underlying structures repaired. Commencing tissue reconstruction.”
The effect was very much like something from Star Trek. The air in front of Pit Geek’s skull begin to shimmer with bright yellow sparkles. Then a ghostly face appeared over his restored skull, gradually growing more and more dense, until suddenly Pit Geek was whole once more.
“Holy shit,” said Sunday. “It worked.”
“Did it?” said Pit, feeling his face. “I don’t feel different. Still can’t remember more than little fragments.”
“It fixed your face, not your brain,” said Sunday. “I think it read your DNA, figured out what you were supposed to look like, then built you a new face. I don’t think memories could be fixed by giving you a new brain. In fact, it would probably wipe them out.”
Pit Geek stood up and went to the mirror.
“Who the hell…?” he mumbled. His jaw went slack. He raised his hand to touch his scalp, which was now covered in thick dark curls. He ran his finger along his brow, where his face hadn’t quite meshed up before. The skin was smooth, free of wrinkles. The DNA reset had, for some reason, left him with eyebrows, but had rebuilt the rest of his face without even the hint of a five o’clock shadow.
“I look like a movie star,” he said, his voice distant.
Sunday wouldn’t go that far. His eyes were still kind of beady, and his nose was slightly to big. But, the ray had taken at least twenty years off his face. Not to mention at least a quarter inch of grime.
He must have been noticing the same thing. “Aw hell,” he said. “I’ll have to start washing my face now. It’s like having a new car. You gotta wash it every week.”
“Some people wash their face every day, you know.”
He chuckled. “Ma’am, that ain’t the cowboy way.”
“You were a cowboy?” she asked.
He frowned. “Was I a cowboy?”
He turned to her. “Take off your pants. Let’s fix your leg.”
She stood, pausing for a second as she fumbled with her belt. Why was she hesitant? She used to burn her clothes off all the time as Sundancer. Pit Geek had seen her naked a hundred times or more. But, before, he’d just been this dirty zombie coot with the unexplained ability to swallow anything that got near his mouth. Until this moment, she’d never thought of him as a man. Like, a man man. Who might find pleasure in seeing her with no clothes on.
Sunday frowned. Where was this bourgeoisie modesty suddenly coming from? She’d shaken off the last remnants of those old values long, long ago. Letting out her breath, she dropped her pants.
She looked toward him. “Are you leering at me?”
He shrugged. “You’ve filled out since I last saw you.”
“Are you saying I’m fat?”
“No! Hell no. You are a damn fine looking woman. With hip like those, you could be a high dollar prostitute. I can’t wait to see you with both legs”
She sat on the edge of the bed and removed her c-leg.
“You know I lost my leg from a hand grenade that you threw, right?” she asked. “You still owe me big time.”
“Wah, wah, wah,” said Pit Geek. “You lost a leg. I came out of that battle as a head in a cooler. We all have our sob stories.”
Perhaps it was Sunday’s imagination, but Pit seemed… feistier than he had five minutes ago. Maybe the ray had affected his brain? Or maybe having a good looking face was making him cocky?
“Okay,” she said. “Do it.”
So he did it. The laser ran along the stub of her limb just below the knee. The machine ran through the same pattern as before. It correctly pegged her age as twenty five. When the underlying structures were rebuilt, she watched with fascination as bones began to materialize from thin air. She wondered where the calcium to build them was coming from. With Pit Geek, matter had simply been rearranged. Here, something new was being built. Was it her imagination, or was her whole body tingling? Was the ray stealing material from the rest of her? But she had no time to ponder. As the flesh and muscles faded back into their proper place, waves of pain rushed through her as the newly formed nerves knitted themselves back into her nervous system. The pain made her vision blur and left a metallic taste n her mouth.
Then the pain was gone, and she had a new leg. Like Pit’s face, the leg was hairless. She frowned. It didn’t match her other leg at all.
“Did it think I was white?” she asked, staring at the almost milky hue of her new limb.
“Ah, you just need a tan,” said Pit Geek. “It looks a hell of a lot better than that bionic woman crap you were hopping around on. Be happy.”
“A: I wasn’t hopping. Most people didn’t even notice the leg was artificial. B: I don’t really do happy. Happy is for people who aren’t at war.”
“We aren’t at war. The boss says it’s over.”
“But we haven’t won!” Sunday clenched her fists tightly.
“Ain’t we? You seen the headlines lately? The world seems like it’s right on the edge of falling apart.”
“If it’s on the edge, we should push it!” said Sunday.
“Or… here me out here… or we could just rob some banks.”
“What is it with you and banks?” she asked, shaking her heads.
“How can you not know this?” said Pit. “Banks is where the monies at.”
Sunday stared at her new leg. In addition to a tan, what it really, really needed was a nice pair of shoes.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try things your way for a change. Let’s rob some banks!”
Pit Geek held the gun toward an imaginary bank teller. “Hand over the money!” he said, then laughed. “Man, I bet this thing will scare the pants off of folks.”
Sunday laughed, a sound she hadn’t made in several years.
“Did you just laugh?” Pit Geek sounded astonished.
She shrugged. “Just, well, what you said just struck me as funny, considering I’m sitting her in my panties.”
“So you are,” said Pit, stepping toward her bed.
She lifted a glowing finger. “And I can still vaporize flesh.”
“So you can,” said Pit, dropping onto the other bed. “Man. Robbing banks. Just like the old days.”
“We never robbed banks in the old days,” said Sunday.
Pit went silent as he stared at the ceiling. “And I’m pretty sure we did it on horseback,” he whispered.

3877 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter Two: 3281 words

2011-08-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

See chapter one for a disclaimer about rawness, formatting, etc.
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Found a typewriter in the rubble today. Looks pretty beaten up, but it works. Seems old. The keys are perfectly round, yellowed with age. The ribbon barely leaves a mark on the brown sheets of grocery bag paper I’ve rolled into it.

There’s something sentimental about the sound of the keys clicking. I remember sitting in a hot room. It’s an attic somewhere; the walls are made of beadboard, painted pale puke green. There’s an oil lamp hanging on the hook next to me, unlit. The daylight is slowly fading out the window. For as far as the eye can see, there’s wasteland, little scrub bushes, dust and rocks everywhere, flat as can be.

I think it’s Texas. I think I grew up there.

Every day, I have more memories. One day, maybe she’ll remember as well.

Chapter Two
The Beast of Bladenboro

Ten Years Later

Bladenboro, North Carolina, can fairly be described as the middle of nowhere. It’s sits on a crossroad of two highways that don’t really go too or from anywhere. To the west lies Butters, south is Boardman, east is Clarkton and north is Dublin, but not the Dublin you’ve heard of. The primary think you’d remember about Bladenboro if you ever drove through it was how flat it was, surrounded by yellow dirt fields planted with soybeans and patches of pine forest. Beyond the forests lie long patches of swampland bordering meandering creeks.
Bladenboro’s only claim to fame is its monster. Starting back in the 1950s, residents reported livestock disappearing, only to be found later with bodies mangled with strange wounds no ordinary animal made. Then, in the sixties, the reports fell off, and by the turn of the century hardly any body remembered the Beast of Bladenboro.
Then goats started disappearing. Or at least, parts of them. Farmers would find the back half of a goat laying on the ground, with the front half nowhere to be seen. Bones weren’t crushed or even scratched by whatever made the cuts. The severing was as clean and neat as if an industrial laser had carved the beast in half.
The Discovery Channel came to town and shot some footage of the surrounding swamps, but they happened to arrive on a week that no animals were reported killed. They left with some grainy photos and edited together a one hour special on the beast. For a month after, amateur monster hunters would arrive in town and traipse around in the swamps with night vision goggles, taping motion-sensitive cameras to every other tree. They got a lot of pictures of deer, and more than a few pictures of startled hunters.
Bucky Cheraw was one of those hunters, and he was glad when a year had passed and it was deer season again. By now, the hoo-ha died down and the woods were quiet. The only people out here were other hunters smart enough to wear orange vests, not those yahoos from the city who’d been stupid enough to run around in tan and brown during hunting season, almost begging to get shot, and, even worse, spooking all the deer.
It was a cool September morning just before dawn when Bucky parked his truck at the end of the logging road and began traipsing into the woods armed with a hunting bow. Bow and arrow season started a few weeks before the regular season, and he liked getting a shot at the really big bucks before the less ambitious hunters flooded the woods.
His deer stand was only about a mile into the woods. He’d built it himself, treehouse style in a big maple, not wasting a dime on those fancy aluminum stands some hunters were now using. He considered himself a traditionalist, inheritor of a hunting tradition that dated back for a thousand years among the Lumbee Indians with whom his ancestors had intermarried. Of course, his ancestors might not have recognized his airplane grade aluminum arrow shafts with the titanium hunting heads, nor the laser scope he used to target his shots. But, Bucky was the first to admit that he was merely a traditionalist, not a primitive.
A hundred yards from his hunting stand, Bucky caught whiff of a terrible odor. Somewhere nearby, there was rotting meat. He looked up and through the trees he spotted buzzards. Pausing so that he no longer heard the sound of his feet crunching through the leaves, he could hear buzzards flapping around on the ground in the distance. He headed their way out of idle curiosity.
The found the buzzards picking apart a gray lump on the ground. They hopped and fluttered as the approached, backing off but not abandoning their prize completely. Bucky pressed his mouth and nose into the sleeve of his coat to breathe in an attempt to cut down the stench.
The thing had obviously been a deer, probably a buck, though by now the buzzards had picked apart the genitals and anus area so thoroughly he couldn’t be sure. Complicating identification further, the front half of the deer was simply gone.
Where was a crew from the Discovery Channel when you needed one?
He left the area slightly spooked, but only slightly. It made more sense to believe in poachers than to believe in monsters. A man had probably killed the deer ahead of season. He kept the head for a trophy, and had probably started butchering the animal, cutting off it’s front half with a chainsaw. This isn’t the technique he would have used to butcher a deer, but hey, they were poachers. If they’d been bright, they would have carried out the hind quarters first since this is where the good meat was. Instead, they’d probably carted out the front quarters, then spotted a game warden and gotten spooked before coming back for the rest of the meat. Case closed. Mystery solved.
The only monsters skulking around in these woods were lawless men.
Fortunately, his hunting blind was upwind of the stink. He spotted it while he was still a dozen yards off. The leaves were still thick on the trees and it looked like he would need to trim a few of the low hanging ones to have a good view of his target area. The tree was in an area where the woods trimmed out as the bled into a field. Running the edge of this field was an irrigation ditch. Deer would congregate on the field to chew the plants around the ditch and get a drink. It was a rare day he didn’t spot at least a dozen deer. The true skill lay in simply having the patience to wait for the right trophy buck to come along.
Bucky reached the wooden ladder that led up into his blind. He stopped and stared up.
Someone was snoring.
Someone was asleep in the blind.
The blind was just barely big enough for a grown man to lie down in if he stretched form one corner to the other of the five by five square platform. The blind was about fifteen feet off the ground, with the back wall away from the field completely open and a couple of long narrow windows on the other walls for him to line up his shots. He stepped back, standing on his tiptoes to see who was inside, but could never get the right angle to see beyond the edge of the floor.
Maybe it wasn’t a man? Did raccoons snore? Did skunks? What else could go up a tree like that?
If it was a skunk, he didn’t want to startle it. On the other hand, he didn’t want to waste a lot of time, either. The sun was up proper now, and the next hour was the golden hour for hunting.
And what if it was a man? Would it be someone he knew? Some local teen maybe, who’d found the tree house a convenient hiding place for getting drunk? Or maybe some other hunter who’d wandered this way to find him, got here early, gone up and fallen asleep waiting?
Or a convict. While he hadn’t heard any news, what if a prisoner had escaped a prison? What better place to hide than here in these woods? If it was a prisoner, he’d be desperate. Dangerous. Should he call the sheriff?
On the other hand, he’d be a laughing stock if he called the sheriff and it turned out to be a noisy raccoon.
Bucky wondered what his proud Indian ancestors would have done. So, he hid behind a tree and let out a loud “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!”
The snoring stopped.
The boards of the blind creaked as something heavy began to stir.
Then, a man’s voice: “Christ almighty.”
Bucky placed an arrow against his bowstring. If the man had a gun, he’d have to let loose a shot in the space of a heartbeat. He stepped from behind the tree.
An old gray haired man was sitting in the blind, his feet bare feet dangling over the edge. The legs of his pants were little more than tatters. He was wearing a green flannel shirt that looked matted with dark blood. His face was nightmarish; to Bucky, it looked as if someone had attacked the man with an axe and split his face in two, and the two halves hadn’t been lined up properly before they were stitched back together. The wound still looked filled with puss seeping from beneath thick scabs. The man’s bleary eyes were unfocused; he hadn’t spotted Bucky, though Bucky was standing in plain sight wearing a bright orange jacket.
“Who are you?” Bucky called out, drawing the arrow back to a firing position, but not yet bringing it toward the man.
The stranger scratched his thin gray hair as he looked in Bucky’s direction. One eye seemed to sit a half inch lower than the other, but finally both eyes spotted him. “Well now, I don’t rightly know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I’ve had kind of a rough time of late,” said the man. “Got my head split open. Lot of memories spilled out.”
“If you were in a fight, the sheriff probably has a report of it,” said Bucky. “Come down and I’ll call him. He can help you out.”
“Naw,” said the stranger, shaking his head. “Don’t need the law involved.”
“You a fugitive?” asked Bucky.
“What kind of question is that?” asked the man. “If I was, why would I tell you? And if I ain’t, why would you believe me if I say I ain’t. It’s like me asking you if you’re still beating your wife.”
“I’m not married,” said Bucky.
“Well I ain’t either,” said the stranger. “You and me, we could be buddies. Pal around. I bet there’s a place around here we could go drink beer and watch women take their clothes off.”
“I think you’ve had enough beer,” said Bucky. He slowly released the tension on his arrow. The stranger didn’t look like he was armed, and he looked too groggy to climb down from the tree. Convict or not, this land belonged to Bucky’s second cousin and the stranger was trespassing. He pulled his cell phone from his vest pocket.
“Aw, don’t call the cops,” said the stranger. “Can’t you be cool?”
“I’m practically cold,” said Bucky. “Look, I’m doing you a favor. You look like you need medical attention.”
“What? ‘Cause of my face? Shoot. It would heal if I’d just stop picking at it.”
Bucky dialed the phone.
The stranger rose, perched precariously on the edge of the platform. “I asked you nicely not to call the law.”
“You just sit down before you fall and hurt yourself,” said Bucky as the phone began to ring on the other end.
Then the man stepped forward, seeming to forget where he was at, and crashed into the ground fifteen feet below with a loud THUMP.
“Shit!” said Bucky.
“Excuse me?” said Sally Henderson on the other end of the phone. He knew Sally well, since they’d gone to High School together. She was now one of the dispatchers for the Sheriff’s Department.
“Sally, it’s Bucky Cheraw!”
“Bucky! How are you this fine morning!”
“It’s weird one, Sally. I’m out at Billy’s farm where I do my hunting. When I got here, I found some homeless guy asleep in my stand! He might be a fugitive; he didn’t want me to call the law.”
“Where’s he at now?”
“Not fifty feet in front of me, and he might be dead. He just fell out of my blind right before I called, and he didn’t look none to healthy to start with.”
“I’ll get an ambulance out there immediately. Deputy Tucker is already out near there as well.”
“Thank you, Sally.”
“No problem. Want me to stay on the line until they get there?”
“Ah, I guess not,” said Bucky. He didn’t want to sound like he needed somebody to hold his hand though this. “You got other calls to take.”
“Probably,” said Sally. “First day of bow season. Always at least one call of somebody getting hurt. You take care.”
“Take care now,” said Bucky, hanging up.
The second he put the phone back into his pocket, the stranger stirred. A fifteen foot fall onto concrete might kill a man, but on soft ground he wasn’t surprised the man was alright. He drew his bow and took aim as the man sat up.
“Don’t move a muscle,” said Bucky. “The law and an ambulance are on their way.”
The man shook his head and sighed. “Mister, I don’t remember killing anyone for almost three months now. You’re about to make me ruin a perfectly good streak.”
“The only thing I’m going to do is put an arrow through your neck if you try to stand up.”
The man stood up.
Bucky’s laser sight had a perfect red dot an inch to the left of the man’s Adam’s apple. He let go of the arrow, certain it would hit the carotid artery. On a deer, this would be the ultimate kill shot, dropping a buck where it stood without having it run wounded through the wood for five miles before it finally gave it.
The arrow found its mark, coming to rest with the tip of the arrow jutting out a good foot from the back of the man’s neck. Dark blood gushed down his neck in a veritable fountain. The stranger sighed, but didn’t fall down. He reached back behind his neck and drew the arrow all the way through, then tossed it to the ground.
“I bet about now, the beer and topless dancers seem like the smarter choice,” the man said, his voice little more than a faint gurgle.
Bucky drew another arrow. The man walked toward him. The arrow came to a stop deep in the man’s left breast. The man stumbled, but kept on his feet, still moving forward.
“Christ almighty,” he said. “I wish you knew how bad that stings.”
Bucky dropped his bow and spun on his heels. He leaned forward to run but not before the stranger grabbed him by the collar. He spun around in the man’s grasp, reaching for the hunting knife in his belt. He snapped the sheath open, but in his panic nearly dropped the knife. With a shaking hand he thrust upward, driving the blade into the man’s gut.
The man grinned at him. His breath was rancid as he asked, “How’s that stabbing working out for ya?”
Bucky reared back to punch the man in the face. His fist flew toward the man’s ragged, rotting teeth. An instant before his hand hit, the man opened his mouth. It seemed no bigger than an ordinary mouth, but somehow Bucky’s fist seemed to shrink as it slipped between the teeth, vanishing all the way down to the bicep. He paused, feeling as is his fist should now be a good foot and a half out the back of the stranger’s head.
He wiggled his fingers. He didn’t feel guts or tongue. He didn’t feel anything but empty air.
The stranger had a twinkle in his eye as he said, “Nu uh guh tuh to scruh!”
Then he bit down, and Bucky’s arm disappeared just above the elbow. He stumbled backward, blood gushing from his severed arteries. He slipped and fell on the leafy forest floor. He clamped his good hand over his stump to stop the bleeding.
The stranger chuckled as he plucked the arrow from his chest. “I said, ‘Now would be a good time to scream!’”
Bucky didn’t scream. He whimpered. “What the hell are you, mister?”
“I wish to God I knew,” said the man. The man leaned down and grabbed Bucky’s left boot. “I could use some new shoes.”
Bucky kicked the man’s hands away with his free leg.
The stranger sighed. “Look, you shot me in the neck, the chest, and knifed me in the guts. All I did was bite you. Hell, you got a good shot of living if you don’t fight me. Fifty fifty, minimum. That ambulance is going to show up and whisk you off to whatever hospital is near here. Is there a hospital near here?”
“Lumberton,” Bucky said through clenched teeth.
“Sure, that’s right,” said the man, scratching his head. “Damn, I wish I could think straight. We’re in North Carolina?”
“Yes,” said Bucky, feeling dizzy.
“Almost there, then.” The stranger looked around. “You got a truck or something nearby?”
“That way,” Bucky pointed with a nod of his head. “About a mile.”
“I’m guessing the keys are in your pants?”
Bucky nodded.
“Hold still. I’m taking your pants. Play nice, and I’ll give you your arm back.”
“What are you…?”
“Just hold still,” the man said, squatting down, untying Bucky’s boot. Bucky felt too lightheaded to resist. At this point, all he wanted was for the man to go away. He said nothing as the stranger stripped him of his boots and socks and pants. Time slowed to a crawl as he listened, desperately hoping for the wail of sirens.
Dark spots danced before his eyes as the stranger finished getting dressed.
Perhaps his eyes played tricks on him, but as the man tightened his stolen belt, he looked down at Bucky with a look approaching pity. He reached his hand into his mouth, his arm vanishing up to the elbow. A second later, he pulled out Bucky’s arm. He dropped it into the dirt next to Bucky.
“Next time,” the man said, “don’t shoot first and asked questions later.”
“I asked as lot of questions first,” Bucky mumbled.
The man rubbed his stubbled chin. “You know, I reckon you did. Well, never mind, then.”
He turned and walked through the woods, his boots crunching loudly. Bucky inched his way toward a tree and managed to sit up. No matter how tightly he squeezed his arm, there was blood seeping out with each heart beat. He looked toward the field. Help would probably come from that direction, coming up the field road instead of coming in from the back along the logging road. He rolled forward, he face landing next to his severed arm. He reached out and grabbed the sleeve of his camo jacket in his teeth. Then, with superhuman will, he managed to rise, and take a dozen stumbling steps toward the field, where he tumbled into the ditch. He rolled to a stop, face up, staring at the sun. There was a loud ringing in his ears, but no sirens.
Along the treeline, vultures began to gather.

3281 words

Burn Baby Burn Chapter One 5487 words

2011-08-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

The following is raw first draft. I've not read a word of it yet. I'm posting it here only in an effort to keep myself honest about my word counts this week. It may also be of interest to beginning writers who wonder what a raw first draft might look like. And, of course, if you are a Noboby Gets the Girl fan and really, really can't wait for the sequel, here's your first peek at it.

A note on formatting: I'm in a hurry, so I'm not taking time to dig through and fix all the missing paragraph indentations. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hopefully most paragraph breaks will be evident from context.

______

Teh quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Sonof a bitch.

I can type.

Chapter One
How Sunday met Monday.

Ten Years Ago

Sunday Jimenez was fifteen years old when she killed her first nun. She was a relatively new arrival at the Trinity Life Solutions School. Her mother had recently remarried and to say that she didn’t get along with her new step so-called ‘father’ was an understatement.
Her mother’s new husband had accused Sunday of being possessed by a demon and/or demons. Sunday had an odd… well, ability didn’t seem the right word to describe it. ‘Ability’ would imply that she was ‘able’ to control what she was doing, and she couldn’t. For reasons she didn’t understand, sometimes she would get hot. Really hot. She wouldn’t feel any different when this happened. Her usual first clues were the faint odor of scorched cotton and, if the lights were on, tiny wisps of smoke. Usually, it happened in her bed. When she realized what was going on, she would jump up and find her sheets covered with scorch marks ranging from light tan to dark browns all the way to charcoal blacks that crumbled when she touched them.
The therapist her mother had sent her too had a simple explanation: Sunday was acting out, due to her stress over Phil (her mother’s latest Mr. Forever True Love). She was sneaking the iron from the laundry and burning her own sheets, then claiming ignorance of how her bed had been damaged. Basically, she was flat-out accusing Sunday of lying, though she did allow that perhaps Sunday was suppressing the truth from herself.
And… maybe Sunday wasn’t telling the whole truth. Because the first time she’d burned her sheets, she’d just experienced her first orgasm. This had only been six months ago, when she was still fourteen. Now, she felt as if she’d gained six years worth of knowledge, and couldn’t imagine what more there was to learn between now and twenty. She was a little embarrassed by her naiveté only six months earlier. She’d still been going to public school then, and one of the boys in her class had gotten in trouble when they called their teacher a ‘jerk-off.’ She was stunned that the teacher had taken offense. She’d heard the term since she was, like, in kindergarten. She’d thought it just meant someone was, you know, extra-jerky. Like, lift-off was when a rocket shot into space. Jerk-off was when someone was such a jerk they entered a whole new orbit of jerkdom.
So she’d gone home and used Phil’s computer to look up the term. What she’d discovered had both mortified her and intrigued her. That night, she’d touched herself with some of the images she’d seen bouncing in her head. She’d discovered a new thing that her body could do as a result. Two new things, technically, but her first orgasm, which under other circumstances would have been utterly fascinating, had swiftly lost its position of importance when she’d realized that her bed was almost, but not quite, on fire.
And, to be honest, the therapist was right, sort of, a little bit. Sunday was now deliberately causing the scorch marks. She’d continued her experiments in bodily manipulation, not for the feelings of pleasure the act generated, but for the feeling of power. Because, when her heart rate passed a certain level, she felt a switch click deep in the center of her belly, and suddenly heat and light would seep from her pores like glowing sweat. She couldn’t trigger this just by running, which just left her tired. She needed the growing internal tightness in her abdomen to trigger the effect. It was terrifying, of course. She dared not explain the truth to anyone. She was certain she’d be swooped off to some secret government facility where she’d be locked up and forced to masturbate in front of teams of stone-faced scientists in white lab coats who would probe her with horrible, horrible devices, long iron sensors covered with metal studs that would force their way deep into her belly to stare at the trigger of her powers with cold, mechanical eyes.
The fact that she often came while the imagined probe drew near added to her sense that, just perhaps, she was a horrible pervert as well as a horrible mutant. When Phil had first brought up the possibility of demon possession, she’d shouted, “I am my own demon!”
Then they’d sent her to boarding school.
And then she’d killed the nun.
The nun’s name was Sister Cecilia. She’d taught algebra, and, though Sunday had been at the school for only a week, she’d already figured Cecilia out. The woman had obviously been a stoner at some point, a hippy-dippy flower child who had probably dressed in nothing but tie-dyes until some bad acid had frightened her back to the Lord. Her algebra lesson somehow always turned into rambling anti-drug lectures. She struck Sunday as slightly amusing, and mostly harmless.
Then, on her fifth day at the school, she’d gone into the bathroom near the science labs and smelled cigarettes. The back room was L-shaped, with a short line of sinks when you firsts walked in, then a long row of stalls around the corner, facing windows to the courtyard. Turning the corner, she found Anjelica and Moon standing next to an open window, their hands behind their backs. Sunday had made no friends since coming to the school, but she’d noticed these two girls in the science lab. Jewelry was strictly forbidden at the Trinity Life Solutions School, but she’d noticed a line of holes on Anjelica’s left ear that indicated she’d once had a whole row of rings or studs along the upper edge. Anjelica was tall and blonde but a little heavy set. Moon was thin as a broomstick, with straight black hair and dark bags under her eyes that always mad her look like she’d just been crying.
“You can keep smoking,” Sunday said. “I’m cool.”
Anjelica and Moon had relaxed. They’d already thrown their previously lit cigarettes out the window, but Anjela reached into her bra and produced the pack of Virginia Slim Menthol’s and a pink Bic lighter.
Anjelica popped one of the cancer sticks in her mouth and handed the pack to Moon while she struggled to get the lighter going.
“Almost out of gas,” she grumbled.
“Fag?” Moon asked, holding the pack toward Sunday.
“She’s on a British kick,” Anjelica said. “It’s their word for cigarettes. Don’t be offended.”
Sunday was slightly offended that Anjelica had thought she wouldn’t know that, but kept quiet. She took the cigarette and popped it between her lips.
“Fucking lighter,” Anjelica grumbled as the Bic continued to produce only sparks. “I don’t suppose you have one, do you?”
Sunday didn’t carry a lighter. But, she somehow felt completely at ease in the company of two fellow reprobates. So, she lifted her right index finger to the tip of the cigarette and … and something happened. She couldn’t really explain it. But, even though her heart wasn’t racing, and even though she didn’t feel the tightness in her gut, the tip of her finger flashed like a light-bulb. In the aftermath, the cigarette was half the length it had been, but what was left was smoking. She sucked in the smoke, then coughed violently. She was embarrassed to reveal she was such a novice.
She glanced toward the two girls, expecting them to be laughing at her incompetence as smoker.
Instead, they were staring at her, slack-jawed. Both were pale as ghosts, their cheeks flecked with gray ash from the disintegrated cigarette.
“How did you do that?” Anjelica whispered.
“Um,” said Sunday.
Such was the intensity of the moment, none of them had heard the bathroom door open. Sister Cecilia came around the corner, and both Moon and Anjelica froze, staring at her. Sunday looked over her shoulder, the cigarette still dangling on her lips.
She jumped back as the nun snatched the cigarette from her mouth.
“This is how it begins!” Sister Cecilia screamed, her spittle spraying on Sunday’s face. “Tobacco is the worst gateway drug! Do you want to be a crack-whore, selling your body to disease ridden beasts just to get your next fix? Do you want to die on some filthy mattress covered in your own vomit after you overdose?”
Sunday put her hands on her hips and tilted her head. “It’s just a cigarette. Chill out.”
“You, young lady, are the one who’s going to chill out!” the nun shouted, grabbing Sunday by the wrist. The middle aged woman turned out to have a grip like a gorilla.
“Let go!” Sunday shouted. “You’re hurting me!”
“You don’t know what hurt is,” Sister Cecilia said, dragging her forward.
“I said let go!” Sunday tried to pull away, but couldn’t budge the nun. She grabbed hold of the handle of a stall door, and felt her fingers slipping as the raging nun proved to be her superior in this tug-of-war.
Sunday wondered if she could make her wrist flash, the way she’d made her finger flash.
There was heat. There was light. In the aftermath, the nun lay dead, her hand completely gone, her arm nothing but blackened bone all the way up to the shoulder. Her clothes were on fire, and seconds later the sprinkler came on.
Sunday stared down at the nun she’d just killed. She suspected that a normal person would feel some degree of remorse at this moment. She instead felt that the nun had gotten what was coming to her. The nun had been the one to turn this into a physical confrontation by grabbing her.
She turned and found Anjelica glued to the far wall, eyes filled with terror. Moon, who always looked as if she’d just been crying, now was sobbing in a tight fetal ball at Anjelica’s feet.
She understood that the two girls would never be her friends now. All she would ever have was their fear. And, that gave her a little thrill, the thought of being feared.
“Tell anyone what you saw and I’ll kill you,” she said to them, though perhaps they didn’t here her with the fire alarms blaring, the hiss of the sprinklers overhead, and the sizzle and pop of nun-fat still burning behind her.
Of course, they took her to jail.
She didn’t stay there long.
She was placed in a holding cell by herself. She wasn’t sure why she was afforded the privacy. Obviously, they couldn’t put her in the same holding cell as men, and maybe there just weren’t that many women getting arrested at ten a.m. on a Thursday. Her first thought on being left in the empty holding cell was, “Good. I can finally pee.” Since, of course, her trip to the bathroom at the girl’s school had gone in a direction she hadn’t really planned on. But, even though she was alone in the cell with its single exposed toilet, she still couldn’t go, because there was a damn surveillance camera in the hall outside the cell that looked to be aimed directly at the toilet. Did the ACLU know about this?
The thing was, she really needed to go. She’d watched enough television to know that at some point she’d probably be given an attorney, but she doubted she could wait until she had legal representation who would defend her right to pee in private.
The camera had to go.
In the police car, she’d tried to melt the handcuffs. She’d mentally tightened every single muscle in her gut one by one to trigger the release of heat, to no avail. The problem, of course, was that her powers normally kicked in when she wasn’t thinking about them. Once you start thinking about not thinking about something, it’s all you can think about.
And yet… she went to the bars of her cell and reached into the empty hallway, pointing her fingers straight at the camera. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine jets of flame spouting from her fingertips and engulfing the camera. She furrowed her brow and clenched her teeth, her arm trembling as she willed the fire to come.
It never came.
After fifteen minutes, her arm was really sore. Worse, she was embarrassed by what whoever was on the other side of the camera was probably thinking. With her arm stretched up like that, they probably thought she was some kind of Nazi. The fact that she was still in her school uniform probably added to the effect. She didn’t mind if people thought she was a demon, she didn’t care that she’d soon be famous as a nun-killer, and she kind of liked that people might fear her, but getting branded a Nazi was too much.
She lowered her arm and walked to the toilet. If she kept her skirt down, really, how much could they see? She reached under the hem and hooked her fingers into the edge of her panties.
Behind her, a man cleared his throat.
Sunday spun around to find a man in the cell with her, leaning against the bars, his back to the camera. He had his arms crossed and he stared at her with a look that she made no sense at all. It was the same look her mother had given her the first time she’d brought home a report card that was all A’s. It was a look of pride.
“Are you my lawyer?” she asked, smoothing down her skirt.
“Do I look like a lawyer?” the man asked, in a tone of mock offense.
Sunday didn’t actually know any lawyers, so it was tough to say. She’d assumed a lawyer would be wearing a suit, but maybe that was just on television. This man was wearing blue jeans and scuffed up Nike sneaker. He wore a white cotton button up shirt. She guess his was probably close to fifty, since his hair was mostly gray. His hair was kind of long, not down to his shoulders, but still kind of shaggy. He had a deep tan and, following his line about the lawyer, his expression had settled into kind of a smirk, and the wrinkles on his face hinted that this smirk was a common expression for him.
She asked, “So… are you a cop? Because this conversation can stop now if you are.” She’d been read her rights. She liked having rights.
The man shook his head. “If you must identify me by a career, I used to be a physicist working for the army. Then, I blew up the world. Then I rebuilt it. Now, though it doesn’t pay as well as I’d like, I guess I’m God.”
“I thought they had a separate ward for psychos.”
“Nah,” said the man. He glanced around. “But, man, they sure give nun-burners their space.”
As he spoke, three female guards burst through the door at the end of the hall.
“I’ve been spotted,” said God, reaching into his back pocket. He produced a small black Ruger LC9 pistol and fired three shots toward the guards. All three dropped instantly.
“Oh my God!” Sunday shouted, the report of the pistol still ringing in her ears.
The man shrugged. “There are better places for us to have this conversation.” He pulled a calculator out of his front pocket and began to punch in numbers.
Sunday felt her body began to fold at an unnatural angle. Before she fully understood what was happening, she found herself staring at the back of her knees.
Then her body snapped back to normal and they were standing in the middle of a vast, trackless desert. The sky above was full of stars, the air so clear that Sunday could see the Milky Way. She spun around, off balance in the shifting sand. She dropped to her knees, temporarily forgetting how to breathe. The sand felt like it had just been pulled straight out an oven.
“What just happened?” she gasped.
The man held up the calculator. “I moved us to the Sahara so we could talk in peace. This is my space machine. Like it? I can move anything I wish anywhere I wish by something analogous to a cut and paste of spatial coordinates. I should have built this years ago, but I got side-tracked trying to perfect a teleportation belt.”
“Who are you again?” Sunday asked.
“I used to be Nicholas Knowbokov, until that name was stolen from me,” the man said. “Now, I answer to Rex Monday. It’s a play on words. Get it?”
Sunday didn’t get it.
“Are you with the government?” Sunday asked. “Are you here because of my… my powers?”
“No,” said Monday. “I’m not with the government. Yes, I’m here because of your powers, though that’s just part of the reason.”
“Just part?”
“I’m also your father,” said Monday. “Your real father. I’m something of a quantum anomaly. You’ve inherited some of my broken laws of physics. It’s taken a long time for your abilities to manifest, but you apparently have the ability to generate tiny wormholes. Since the strongest gravity well in the neighborhood is the sun, the other end of the wormholes tend to congregate there. Thus, when you open these wormholes, you’re unleashing pure solar material here on earth. Keep in mind, these wormholes are very tiny. If you only opened one or two, we’d probably need sensitive instruments to detect the effect. Open a few thousand, over a diffuse area, and you get scorched sheets. Open a few million in an area smaller than the palm of your hand, and poof, dead nun.”
Sunday rose up from the hot sand, brushing her bare knees clean.
“If you’re my father, why has my mother never mentioned you?”
Monday shrugged. “I raped her. That scar on her right eyebrow? I gave her that. She probably doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Sunday felt her guts tighten. “You admit to such a thing? What kind of monster are you?”
“Oh, the very worst kind,” said Monday. “There are two types of monsters. There are things that are less than human. And there are things that are more than human. I’m in the second category. You see, I created the world. Everything exists because of me. Everyone alive is alive because I created the conditions of life. And since I gave life, I feel no remorse about taking it away. What I want, I take, since, on the most fundamental level, everything is mine. I wanted your mother, so I took her. Now, I want you.”
Sunday gave him the fiercest look she could summon. “Touch me and I’ll burn you.”
“No,” said Monday, with a dismissive wave. “I don’t mean I want you like that. I want you as a soldier. I want to make use of your power in my ongoing war against my enemies.”
“Why should I help you?”
Monday shrugged. “Do you have a better use for your time? You’re a nun-killer, and, fair or not, you’ll probably get some of the blame for those three dead cops. For the rest of your life, you’re going to be hunted by the so-called authorities. You can’t go back to your mother. You aren’t going to be able to go out and get a normal job. You’re never going to have a house of your own, or a boyfriend, or any friends at all, actually, at least not in what you think of as the ordinary world.”
“So what?” asked Sunday. “Am I supposed to just kill myself?”
“No. You’re supposed to come live in the extraordinary world. You aren’t my only child. All of you have powers. I’ve already harnessed the power of two of my children, a boy who causes panic, and particularly nasty little freak I call Baby Gun. Since you set things on fire, I was thinking it would be appropriate to call you Baby Burn.”
“I’m nobody’s baby,” said Sunday, clenching her fists.
“Suit yourself. The name’s not important. All that’s important is your power. With one possible exception, I believe you’ve the potential to be the strongest of all my children. Given full command of your powers, you could reduce this desert to glass for a hundred miles in every direction. You could destroy cities with but a thought.”
“Maybe I don’t want to burn down cities,” said Sunday. “I didn’t mean to kill that nun.”
“You’re still young,” said Monday. “I’ll show you the world. By the end of the tour, you’ll hate all mankind.”
Sunday pressed her lips tightly together. She didn’t want to tell him she was halfway there already. She’d had a string of step-fathers, each more stupid and mean that their predecessors. She hated them all, and she hated her mother even more for being too weak and too foolish not to see the destruction she was bringing onto herself by falling for these losers. And yet, as she’d grown older, it seemed to her to be very much the pattern of the world. She could see it in all her schoolmates, each with their own unique mix of stupidity, cruelty, weakness and foolishness.
She crossed her arms. “I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. I can’t melt cities. I can’t even melt a fucking camera so I can use the bathroom in private.”
“Of course you’ll disappoint me,” said Monday. “Everyone and everything does. But, you can melt a camera. You just wouldn’t.”
“I tried.”
“I’m certain you did. But trying is the wrong technique. You first began to manifest your powers during the throws of sexual release, when your mind was utterly blank.”
Sunday wrinkled her nose. “How can you know about that?”
“Please,” said Monday. “If I can build a machine to take me anyplace in the world, don’t you think I can build one to let me watch anyone in the world? If you’d gone to the bathroom in the jail, it would have simply joined the thousands of hours of similar recording I’ve made of you since birth.”
“You bastard!” she said, pushing her hands toward him. She expected a wall of flame to sweep out and vaporize him. It didn’t.
Monday sighed. “Very dramatic. But also very cerebral. You’ve done very well in your studies over the years, despite a long history of behavioral problems. You’ve scored as high as 156 on certain IQ scores. I don’t really give much credence to these numbers, but there’s no denying you’re bright. You’re good at thinking. But, I need you to be good at emotion. I need anger! I need hate!”
“I’m as pissed off as I’ve ever been right now!” she screamed. But, was she? Often in her life, she felt like an actor on a stage. She always seemed to know her lines. But did she really feel them? In some ways, she felt as if she were just a little doll who lived inside her skull who coolly watched the unfolding show of her life as if her eyes were nothing but cameras.
Monday shook his head sadly. “Pathetic.” He pulled out his calculator once more. “If you can’t use your powers, you’re of no use to me. Unfortunately, I’ve revealed too much about myself to let you live.”
“For what it’s worth, I haven’t understood half of what you’ve said.”
“No one ever does,” said Monday, punching in a series of numbers.
Suddenly, there was an old man standing to his right. He looked like a bum, in worn and dirty clothes, his thin hair unwashed, his face covered in gray stubble. He stank so badly her eyes watered from ten feet away.
The bum dropped to his hands and knees and let out a loud retching sound, though nothing but a long line of spit came from his mouth.
“Christ almighty,” the bum whimpered, wiping his mouth. “No disrespect, Mr. Monday, but can’t you give me at least a few second warning before you do that?”
“Stop whining and get on your feet. I need you to eat my daughter.”
The bum rose on wobbly legs, eying Sunday with a look of confusion.
“Your daughter?”
“Eat her,” said Monday.
“Excuse me?” said Sunday. “Is this some kind of weird not-quite-rape threat?”
“No,” said Monday. “I found my associate here working at a carnival in Mexico. He’s a geek; if you’re unfamiliar with that particular act, it means that he was the wild man they would put into a pit where he’d bite the heads off chickens. Only, he had a bit more of an appetite, and for his act he’d suck down an entire goat in one bite. They called him El Chupacabra. He doesn’t remember his real name. I’ve taken to calling him Pit Geek.”
“And, just so I’m straight on this, you think he’s going to eat me like he ate a goat?” Sunday really wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be menacing, or just the strangest joke she’d ever been part of.
“I’ve watched Pit Geek swallow an entire crane before. He can handle you.”
“Crane? Like the bird?”
“Like the think they use to build skyscrapers.” Sunday’s confusion evidently showed in her face, because Monday added, “For some reason, he generates space warps as he chews. I’m still puzzling out the exact source of his powers.”
“He looks too old to be your kid,” said Sunday.
“Indeed. He’s a mystery. And one day I’ll solve that mystery for him, as long as he obeys me.”
Pit Geek sighed loudly and scratched his head. “Well, see, I don’t know much about myself. And I’d really like to know who I am, or who I used to be. But, one thing I do know about myself, Mr. Monday, is that I’m not going to kill a little girl.”
“She’s no longer a little girl,” said Monday. “She’s been menstruating for almost four years. She’s biologically as much of an adult as you are. Eat her.”
“Can we leave my biology out of this?” asked Sunday.
“Fucking useless goatsucker,” Monday mumbled as he punched in more coordinates. He pointed toward Sunday in with a rather melodramatic pose and shouted, “Crush her!”
Sunday looked up. There was now a two hundred foot all baby doll standing next to Rex Monday. He had a flabby toddler body, and jutting from his shoulders where his head should have been there was an old fashioned revolver the size of a school bus.
“You must be Baby Gun,” she said.
There was a flash of light.
A loud boom followed instantaneously, followed by the tink tink tink tink of a thousand bits of shrapnel landing on the black glass around her. It was suddenly daylight in the desert. Sunday had her hands raised over her head. She’d just blown a bullet the size of a sports car to smithereens before it had touched her. She’d vaporized her clothes as a result. But, since both Pit Geek and Rex Monday had their hands over their eyes, she was apparently glowing too brightly for them to see anything. Which was good, since in addition to being naked, she’d also lost control of her bladder.
Above her, the giant revolver cylinder clicked to the next chamber. She ran, still glowing, but uncertain she could blow apart a second bullet when she really hadn’t even seen the first one. She was thrown from her feet as the bullet slammed into the ground behind her. She crashed into the sand seconds later. It splashed like liquid as her heat melted the ground into a goopy bubbling syryup.
She struggled to rise in the molten slop as the hair rose on the back of her neck. She looked up to see Baby Gun’s enormous foot falling toward her. She lifted her hand and touched his heel as it fell. It felt like it was made of rubber. And then it wasn’t made of anything, as the solar flare that spilled out of her fingers tore the leg into a slurry of elemental particles. The giant toppled over, crashing into the sand.
Sunday sat up, studying the flickering plasma that sheathed her. She giggled. “Not half bad! Bring me another nun!”
Rex Monday stomped toward her, pressing a button on his belt. By the time he reached her, his clothes and face were coated in a thin sheen of what looked like Vaseline, thought Sunday was pretty sure Vaseline would have burned.
Monday grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her back to her feet.
“Sorry I broke your doll,” she said, in the most taunting tone she could summon.
“You ran from the bullet!” Monday screamed, and slapped her.
Sunday placed a hand on her cheek as the flames around her grew brighter. Monday didn’t seem to feel them.
“You should be able to fly!” Monday snarled, striking her again, this time with his knuckles cutting into her eyebrow. She raised her arms to block further blows and he kicked her in the gut. “You think half good is good enough? You should be able to shoot into the air like a rocket! You still aren’t in control!”
“Make up your damned mind!” Sunday screamed. “You told me I needed to lose cont—” Her protest was cut short when he slammed his fist into her lips. She fell back on the sand, blinking away tears. He drove his foot down on her left breast and with such force if felt as if he’d bruised her heart.
She could barely breathe as he leaned down and grabbed her by the hair. He pulled her into a seating position and raised his hand to strike her face once more. Sunday closed her eyes.
The blow never came.
She opened her eyes and found that Pit Geek was holding Monday’s arm.
“Mr. Monday, calm down. You told me she was your flesh and blood. You can’t kill her!”
Monday responded by pulling the Lugar out of his back pocket and shooting Pit Geek in the center of his chest. The old bum flopped back onto the sand, limp.
“You killed him!” Sunday said, though why she felt shocked by this she couldn’t quite say.
“I wish,” grumbled Monday, as Pit Geek flopped his arms around uselessly. “As near as I can tell, he’s immortal. He’s shrugged off worse than a bullet.”
Monday glared down at Sunday. Then he smiled. “With your face bleeding like that, you remind me of your mother.”
Sunday growled. Monday disappeared in a maelstrom of swirling light. The radiance was so great that even she couldn’t see what was happening. Three seconds later, when the flash of fury she’d felt faded away and her eyes adjusted, she discovered she was roughly three hundred feet in the air. Pit Geek and Rex Monday looked like little bugs. To her disappointment, Monday was unscathed by the maelstrom she’d unleashed, though Pit Geek was now rolling around in the scalding sand, trying to put out his clothes, which were now on fire.
Rex Monday looked up at her. Once more, he beamed with pride. He gave her a thumb’s up.
“Welcome to the family,” he shouted.
She wiped away the blood that trickled into her eyes. Flying felt… well, it felt like sitting on a really, really under-inflated air mattress. The slightest motion of a limb sent her skittering across the sky. She felt insanely unsteady and unsafe.
She looked around the heavens until she found the Big Dipper, and used this to find the North Star. If this really was the Sahara, she need only fly in that direction to make it to Europe. In fact, she might even wind up in Spain, and she spoke Spanish, at least a little. Maybe Rex Monday wouldn’t find her there. Maybe the cops from back home wouldn’t look for her.
Or maybe she should try to land and talk more to the man who’d known she could fly. The giant doll’s leg looked like it was growing back. Pit Geek was back on his feet, looking barely inconvenienced by a hole in his chest and third degree burns to his legs.
This had all been a carefully staged lesson, designed to teach her how to use her powers. What more might she learn?
Bringing her arms closer to her sides, she reduced the thrust that held her in the air and dropped back down toward the man who claimed to be her father. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter to her. She knew he was violent psychopath with delusions of grandeur. She’d never trust him. But, on the other hand, how do you turn your back on a man who taught you how to fly?

5487 words

Burn Baby Burn: The Master Plan

2011-08-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Here's my strategy for writing a novel in one week:

The book will consist of four parts. Each part will contain four chapters. Each chapter will average 4000 words. 16x4k=64k, a short novel by modern standards, but an average length for the pulp novels that I'm drawing my inspiration from.

Part One: Villians on the Rampage!
Part Two: The Heroes Strike Back!
Part Three: Sanctuary!
Part Four: All Fall Down!

A stack of note cards:

A dead nun. A new continent made of garbage. Chimps with bulldozers. The Beast of Bladensboro. Bank robbery in the buff. An unlucky hunter. An open-source hero. A manual typewriter. A place where nothing rots. A mysterious ray-gun. Memories torn apart by shrapnel. A bright light in the sky on a lonely stretch of highway. A city on fire. Learning to fly. Diplomatic immunity. All out war, etc., etc.

I start writing in 15 hours, more or less.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Burn Baby Burn

2011-08-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the plan: I have the next week off from work. I have no trips planned. Cheryl's going to be at work all week. I'll be alone most of the days.

So, I'm going to write an entire novel in one week. It's called Burn Baby Burn and it's the sequel to Nobody Gets the Girl. I intend to post each chapter here on my blog as I write it, completely raw and unedited, pure first draft stuff, solely for the purpose of keeping myself honest. Plus, there is the serious possibility that this project may crash and burn and take my sanity with it, and if I'm going to flame out in a spectacular fashion, I may as well do it publicly.

Yesterday while driving back from the beach I had Cheryl write up some note cards. I'm not making an official outline. Instead, I'll just keep jotting down ideas on cards and shuffling them into the sequence they need to appear in. This is the process I used to write Nobody Gets the Girl. That took 45 days. Of course, I was working full time while writing that book.

Previous attempts at writing a lot while on vacation have always been thwarted by the fact that, well, I was on vacation. It's tough to sit and crank out chapters when there's a beach across the road and fish biting in the creek out back.

The most I've ever written in a single day was 13,000 words. I also cranked over 10k in a day when I was writing the final chapters of Dragonseed. But, it's tough to write that much, because it's tough to daydream that much. Luckily, I've been daydreaming about this book for 8 years at this point. I have a lot of material already in my imagination buffers.

So, can I do it?

There's only one way to find out....

Hush, Second Draft, is Complete!

2011-08-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

Well, the headline pretty much says it all. I just finished sending out the final chapters of the second draft of Hush. This draft weighs in at 103,121 words. It's likely to get longer; I've rounded out a lot of the characters in my mind during this draft and future drafts will reflect the additional backstories.

Before I start the third draft of Hush, I'm going to work on yet another book, the long-awaited sequal to Nobody Gets the Girl, tentatively titled Burn Baby Burn. Obviously, since I have a November deadline to turn in Hush, I can't take long to work on Burn Baby Burn. Which is why I'm intending to write an entire first draft in only a week, starting 7am Monday and finishing my midnight the following Sunday.

Burn Baby Burn isn't an epic. It's a short and sweet action novel about two supervillians out to destroy the world. I'm anticipating it being only 60k words long. If I write 10k words a day for six days, I'm golden.

I'll post progress reports here once I start. Stay tuned!

Greatshadow Cover Art!

2011-07-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

Behold, the initial cover art for Greatshadow, courtesy of top-notch fantasy artist Gerard Miley. Gerard's portfolio can be seen here. I think there's a gritty realism to his style that nicely grounds the fantasy elements of his work. I have a lot of confidence in this book, and now that I see the cover I think the odds of it being a hit have just jumped.

I'm actually working on some final story edits on Greatshadow this week, so the art has arrived in time to help get me in the mood to tackle the project. The story is solid right now, but editor Jonathan Oliver has led me to the few spots in the manuscript where things get a little fuzzy. I also now have to add in story elements I've created while writing Hush, the next book in the series. A lot of the stuff I need to add is dragon lore; Hush features appearances by not one, not two, but four primal dragons. And, the world map I'll be including with the book names two more. How many total primal dragons are there? An excellent question. So far I've named eight: Greatshadow (fire), Hush (cold), Abyss (sea), Tempest (storms), Glorious (sun), Rott (decay/entropy), Kragg (earth), and Verdant (forest). Verdant, alas, is deceased when Greatshadow starts, slain by the first King Brightmoon. Since Verdant's spirit was in most wild plant life, he is, ironically, no longer pushing up daisies.

Over the course of the series, I've got plotlines featuring all eight of these primal dragons. Some obvious dragons I haven't yet explored would be a moon dragon and a desert dragon. I also have a percolating possibility of a dragon of love and sex. I can only imagine the cover if I get around to writing that book.

Since Greatshadow isn't hitting bookstores until January, for now I'm focused on making the books as good as possible, and have been letting my blogs lapse a bit, I fear. I think it's more important to focus on making my books entertaining than havig my blogs be entertaining. But, as the publication date draws closer, I do have plans to revamp this website to shift the focus to Greatshadow, including sample chapters, character profiles, etc. And, I do have a good writing essay coming soon, on the importance of character arcs.

Stay tuned!

A New Nobody Gets the Girl Review

2011-07-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

For a book that's been out for almost 8 years, Nobody is still getting the occasional review. Here's the latest by DarkCargo. And, 8 years on, I'm still tickled when I see people talking about my book!

Progress report

2011-07-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

Wow, over a month since my last post. What can I say? I've been working hard on the second draft of Hush. Sunday I sent out chapters 9 and 10 of the book to my wise-readers, bringing me to the mid-point of the book. My plan is to be done with the second draft by the end of July, though things might spill over into the first week of August.

The second draft is flowing much better than the first draft did. I've still got a lot of work left for the third draft, but at least I'm no longer fighting the drowsiness and low energy levels I was facing during the winter when my thyroid condition hadn't yet been diagnosed. My latest bloodwork still had my thyroid levels a bit low, but I feel normal again. I can sit and type for two hours without needing a nap. My dosage for my medication has been tweaked even higher starting this week, and I'm excited about the possibility that maybe in the months ahead I can crank out two to three chapters a week plus a blog post as well.

In other news, my class on ebook publishing at the Orange County Library was well-recieved and I've been invited back for a second class on writing, "How to Get Past the First Chapter and Finish Your Novel." It's going to be on Saturday October 8 at 10am. Call the Orange County Library at 919-245-2536 or email Jessica Arnold at jarnold@co.orange.nc.us to sign up for this free class.

Finally, Greatshadow is already available for preorder on Amazon! No cover yet, but still pretty amazing. January 2012 is going to be here before I know it.

Voice

2011-06-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of skills a fiction writer needs to master. You have to learn to create characters, to build scenes, and to plot. But there's another quality that defines engaging fiction that is far more difficult to learn or even to define, and that's voice.

Think about your favorite books. Odds are, when you remember your favorite passages from the book, you don't remember them as letters on the page. Instead, you remember them as audible words.

Authors, more than any other artist, must attempt to trigger synesthesia in their audience. Writers place symbols onto paper, which the reader experiences visually. But, when he really engages the reader, he creates the illusion that there's a speaker inside the reader's head narrating the tale--the reader hears the story in his mind's ear. Complicating this further, the auditory experience goes on to trigger sights, smells, tastes and textures.

Evoking this sensation of an unseen speaker isn't easy. You probably don't experience the sensation of "voice" when you're scanning your credit card statements or reading about a zoning board meeting in your local newspaper. It emerges in prose through a combination of subtle elements. A good narrative voice will have a distinctive pace and vocabulary.

Voice doesn't neccessary require that a character narrate the tale, though many books do rely on first person narration, for example Huckleberry Finn and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But, it can be just as effective to have a narrator that isn't part of the story at all. The voice becomes that of the author, or even that of the book; think of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Winesburg, Ohio. In these books, an unknown narrator is able to report events with a mix of objectivity and slanted commentary.

First and third person narration follow a slightly different path to trigger the synesthesia required for voice. With first person, the narrator is plainly another human being (or alien, or talking dog, or whatever). You get the presumption of a narrative voice the first time the word "I" appears in the tale. The tricky part of first person, I think, is that once you establish that a human is telling the story, it's easy for the voice to feel false and unnatural. We know what a real person telling a real story sounds like, and unfortunately what constitutes "real" is sometimes in conflict with other needs of story telling. For instance, a real person might say, "I went to the grocery store and saw my old college roommate, Ken." But an author is going to want to try to invoke senses and build a scene. Something sounds off about, "I was standing in the produce section, surrounded by bright yellow bananas, awash in the scent of ripe strawberries, hefting a chilled watermelon into my cart when I spotted a face that had once been familiar to me. It was Ken, my former college roommate, who stands six feet two and has blonde hair and wears glasses..." Ugg.

Another difficulty of first person narration is that you do have to work within the confines of your narrator's limits. Once Mark Twain started writing Huckleberry Finn in the voice of an uneducated kid, he couldn't switch gears in the middle of a scene and have Huck start quoting Shakespeare, even if some quote by the bard would have been appropriate to the moment.

With third person, the story can escape the limits imposed by the pretense that an actual character is relaying the story. But, it sometimes takes the voice longer to emerge, since the reader isn't immediately certain who is speaking. A character? The author? Some bodiless, omniscient entity? The book itself?

I don't know a quick and easy short cut to learning the art of voice. My early stories and novels completely lacked any sensation of voice. I think (hope!) that most of my writing today does have this elusive quality. Part of this is just down to practice. You have to write a lot of clunky prose, just like a person who wants to play piano has to play a lot of scales. But, at some point, a pianist makes a nearly mystical transition from playing notes to playing music. The same thing happens for an author. One day you're just writing words and arranging them in sentences and paragraphs, then, suddenly, the words come to life, and you aren't so much writing your story as you are transcribing it as you listen to the narration in your own head.

The one trick that is vital for me is that, even with novels, I always read my work out loud before I declare it finished. When words are just symbols on a page, you can wind up with phrases that are perfectly correct, yet still don't sound right when you say them out loud. It's also easy to build overly long sentences. Most narration will sound more natural if one sentence doesn't exceed the span of one breath.

It is a lot of work to read a novel back to yourself, but so what? People wouldn't pay you for the work if it was too easy. And if it's the step you need to take to perfect the novel's voice, it's the best investment of creative time you can make.