The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  “No,” I said.

  “You look square.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You look it.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “You wanna drop acid with us, man?”

  “Are you sure you haven’t seen this girl?” I said.

  “I don’t know, man, you see a lot of people but it’s hard to really remember the faces, you know what I mean?”

  But there was also this:

  “Yeah, she used to hang around here, but haven’t seen her in weeks.”

  “Oh yeah, she went by the name of, uh, Bright Sunshine, I think, I only met her once.”

  “No, she said her name was Wallflower.”

  “No, it was Daisy.”

  “Oh yeah, I fucked that little girl. Man, she was high that night. Man, that pussy was some tight pussy.”

  “She sucked my dick twice for beer and weed.”

  “I think she has a pimp, man.”

  “She goes to school with my little sister. Is that weird or what?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a month.”

  “I haven’t seen her in days.”

  “I don’t know where she crashes, man.”

  * * * *

  …and I was going to my car when a skinny, smelly hippie fellow with B.O. and dirty long blond hair came up to me and said: “Hey, man, $10 and I’ll tell you where you can find her. Wallflower.”

  “How do I know your information is good?”

  He shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

  I got out my wallet and gave him two fives.

  He gave me an address and an apartment number.

  “That’s where she’s staying?” I asked.

  “No, man,” he said, “that’s where a wild party is happenin’ tonight.”

  “Wild?”

  “Party. You know, lots of drugs and sex. We call them ‘love-ins.’”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, and she’ll be there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She goes to every orgy in town, man.”

  “You know she’s thirteen?”

  “Yeah that’s why she’s popular. I seen twelve-year-old chicks at some of these orgies, man. Wild, huh?”

  “Wild,” I said.

  * * * *

  …and I went, that night, to the address and the apartment number. It was in a shitty part of town. There was loud music and a lot of moaning inside. I knocked and knocked on the door and was about ready to break it down or climb through the window when it opened. A naked woman in her twenties stood there; she was rail thin with frizzy red hair, glassy eyes, and a thick bush of dark pubic hair.

  “Look at you,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Trippy,” she said, “look at you in the suit, man!”

  Two more naked girls joined her and they glared at me up and down with silly grins on their pusses—uh, faces.

  “Wild,” one said.

  “Who are you?” the other said.

  “I’m looking for a girl,” I said.

  One said, “Well you came to the right place,” and all three of them grabbed me and pulled me inside.

  The room was thick with marijuana smoke and empty beers bottles lined the walls. What can I say about the floor? It was a sea of human flesh; it was, for all intents and purposes, a Mongolian Clusterfuck. I guess I was square, I’d never been to anything like this—I’d heard about such things but didn’t believe they were true. But here it all was, before me: dozens of naked men and women of all ages fucking and sucking and moaning and groaning and coming and pissing. I don’t have to describe what it all smelled like, even the pot smoke didn’t cover that smell, a smell that I admit turned me on, along with the sight of so many nude women with their holes being filled with cock.

  The three girls who pulled me inside were pulling off my clothes; they were saying, “C’mon, baby, let’s get it on,” and kissing me and grabbing me. I was waving Jenna Rush’s photo about when I saw the girl, right in the middle of the orgy; all she wore were a pair of white panties and moccasin boots, her hair done in braids. She was marvelously tanned from head to toe and she had one man’s cock in her ass and another in her mouth. Both men were in their forties and had long, thick beards and smiling at one another as they did the Senator’s daughter.

  I called out her name.

  The music was too loud.

  “What is this noise?”

  “It’s the Airplane!” one of the girls said.

  I screamed, “JENNA! JENNA RUSH! YOUR DADDY IS LOOKING FOR YOU!”

  All the fucking stopped and there were many eyes on me.

  The music played on—

  When the truth is gone.…

  “JENNA RUSH!” I yelled.

  “Oh shit!” the girl shrieked, pushing the two men and their hard penises away.

  “JENNA! COME HERE!”

  “Fuck you, pig!” she said, grabbing a flower print dress from the floor and running past me.

  I went after her.

  “Hey!” said the naked women. “Come back! You don’t want her, she’s a little girl. We’re women. We know how to fuck!”

  As much as I wanted to stay, I had a job to do.

  Jenna slipped on her flower print dress as she ran.

  “Come back!”

  “TELL MY DADDY TO GO TO FUCKING HELL, MAN!”

  We were running down the street, toward the beach.

  That’s when some guys in leather jackets grabbed me.

  One of them hit me in the back of the head.

  They also grabbed Jenna.

  “Is this her?”

  “It’s her.”

  “What the…,” I said.

  These guys, something was wrong with them—they had no faces. Well, their faces were skulls with rotting drooping flesh and eyeballs dangling from the sockets; plus they were slouched and moved about in a funny manner, like their bodies were stiff.

  “What the fuck,” I said.

  I was hit on the head again and, as the story often goes, everything went black.…

  * * * *

  …and I came to, back inside the apartment where the orgy was going on, but now it was no longer a “love in” with all the many sounds of pleasure, it was a slaughter house of madness and there were many screams of pain, fear, and death. The guys in leather jackets, these guys with skulls for faces, five of them in all, were killing naked men and women left and right, smashing their heads open and feasting on their brains, smearing blood all over their rotting flesh and laughing. A sixth one, who seemed to be the leader and was the tallest, held Jenna Rush by both of her arms; he watched and took glee in this sickness. Jenna tried to get free, but she was too small and weak. She looked at me with terror, and then I blacked out again.…

  * * * *

  …and came to out in the middle of nowhere. A storm had rolled in and it was beginning to rain, thunder in the sky. Two of the skull faces were digging a hole in the ground. Jenna Rush was sitting on the ground, her arms tied behind her by rope. The leader was pointing a revolver at me.

  “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

  “Who are you?” I coughed, rubbing the back of my head and feeling the two large bumps there.

  “People call me The Power,” he said. “My Momma calls me Stevie.”

  “Let her go,” I said. “Let us both go, and you won’t have any trouble.”

  “Trouble?” he laughed, and his five cohorts laughed with him. “We are trouble, my man. I should change my name from The Power to The Trouble from Hell.”

  “Let the girl go.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Do you know who she is? Who her goddamn father is?”

  The Power seemed to grin, if a skull can do that. “Yes,” he informed me, “I do.”

  Then he shot me: two bullets in the chest.

  I looked at the bullet holes, and the blood coming out.

  “Oh shit,” I said.
>
  “You’ll be dead soon, don’t worry. Would you like one in the head? Then we’ll bury you nice and comfy.”

  “Hey, Power, let’s make him one of us,” said one of his crew.

  “Yeah,” said another, “I bet his brains taste reeeeeeeaaaallll gooooooood.”

  “What?” said The Power. “You zombies didn’t get enough at the party?”

  “There can never be enough,” all five said.

  “True,” said The Power. “Well,” he said to me, “you’ll come in handy, I think. When you rise from your grave, you’ll deliver a message to Senator Rush. A very important message. You’ll tell him The Power Platoon has come home to roost.”

  The other five converged on me as I lay dying from the gunshot wounds. They smashed my face in, broke my head open and began to greedily eat.…

  The last thing I remembered hearing was The Power saying: “Take off his shoes and socks. We bury the dead barefoot, remember?”

  V. “…”

  …and then I woke up. I couldn’t breathe—

  VI. “THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ZOMBIES”

  “I can’t breathe,” I said, coughing.

  “It’s okay,” Miss Melfile was saying, touching my back, “you’re just having a flashback.”

  I’d told her everything as it came back to me—

  I stood up.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, “if I’m dead, how can I be breathing? Do the dead breathe?”

  “You’re dead, but you’re not really.…”

  “I don’t like being like this. Is there a cure?”

  “I don’t know,” Ms. Melfile said. “But I like you this way. You know? I really do.”

  “Obviously what I have to do is find The Power and rescue the Senator’s daughter.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “I’ll go back to where this all started, where that party was.”

  “Some party!”

  “Wait,” I said, scratching my skull, the hair and dead flesh falling off, “can I even go outside in the sun? Will the light destroy me?”

  “That only happens to vampires,” my secretary (who was naked) said.

  “Then I’ll be okay?” I asked her.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said.

  “I’ll have to use your car.”

  “The keys are on the kitchen table,” she said. “Before you go, will you give me a sloppy kiss?”

  “But of course,” and I gave her a long one.

  * * * *

  The sunlight didn’t put an end to my being one of the undead, but I can’t say it was all that pleasant. The heat and brightness were extremely annoying; and it was a sunny day with no clouds to boot. I couldn’t believe that it was this very sun that made me move to southern Florida in the first place.

  I drove to South Beach and turned on the radio. The local news was reporting on “riots and madness” on the streets of Miami.

  “It is uncertain if this could be college students protesting the war,” the news announcer said, “or some other form of civil unrest and disobedience.”

  “Hippies,” I muttered, “goddamn hippies.”

  I heard a lot of police and ambulance sirens, but didn’t see any signs of rioting or madness.

  `The apartment complex where the orgy had taken place four nights ago was covered in yellow police tape.

  There was one lone cop guarding it. He was young and in uniform and looked nervous. When he saw me, he drew his service revolver, pointed it at me and said, “Stop right there, you freak!”

  “Freak?” I said incredulously, and then I remembered what I looked like.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Really.”

  “The hell it is. You just turn around and go back to what rock you crawled out from.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll shoot.”

  “Why don’t you shoot, rookie,” I told him, “because I don’t think it’ll do a goddamn thing to me.”

  Seemed like good a time as any to test this. The rookie shot me once, in the chest. I felt the impact but there was no pain. There was a hole, but there was no blood.

  “Holy crap,” said the rookie.

  All I could do was laugh, and the laughter brought out the apparent monster inside of me. I moved fast, slapping the gun out of the rookie’s hand. “No, please,” he said and this made me laugh more—like a maniac—and just as it overtook me last night, there was the sudden urge and need; so I bashed the rookie’s head on the ground, opening his skull, and feasted on his squishy, yummy brains, savoring each bite. I could feel the brain matter and various fluids going down my throat and settling into my stomach. This felt good. But do the dead eat? I couldn’t be completely dead then. Those people at the orgy, I saw them all die, rather violently, their brains being devoured by The Power and his buddies.

  What the fuck. I got a hold of myself. With my jacket sleeve, I wiped mind goo away from my mouth.

  I stepped under the police tape and into the apartment. Empty, as expected, with the walls and floors covered in dried, putrid blood. Lots of chalked outlines of bodies, many bodies.

  …and then a voice.

  Arthur Gideon.

  “What?”

  Gideon, why didn’t you do as I told you?

  “Tell me what? Where are you?”

  Why didn’t you do as I told you?

  It was The Power. His voice was in my head.

  “Get out of my skull, you motherfucker.”

  You are one of us now.

  Distant laughter.

  Go home, Arthur Gideon.

  “Fuck you.”

  Go home, we’re waiting.

  * * * *

  On the radio, the news guy was saying, “…strange and unconfirmed reports that dozens of bodies are missing from the police morgue. These bodies are from a mass murder that happened several nights ago.…”

  Ah, but it was true. Now I knew what was going on because I saw them all over town: naked and ugly zombies wandering around with that special zombie walk and causing all kinds of dastardly trouble, like killing hapless ordinary citizens on the streets.

  * * * *

  The Power held Miss Melfile with one arm and had a gun to her head, the same pistol he used on me. His buddies were there, too, as well as Jenna Rush. Jenna was not the tanned pretty hippie girl anymore; she was like me, like The Power, like all her friends who were now terrorizing Miami.

  “Gideon! We just missed each other,” said The Power. “We got here and you’d just taken off. And look what you left for us, one hot bitch.” He kissed Ms. Melfile on the cheek; she was struggling but didn’t seem to mind. I don’t think The Power realized she was into dead men.

  Still, I said, for effect: “Let her go.”

  “That’s what you blabbered last time.”

  “And now look at me,” Jenna Rush said with a giggle.

  “Before you were killed,” said The Power, “I told you when you came back, you were to go to see the Senator and tell him about his daughter. You didn’t do this. Tsk tsk tsk.”

  “Yeah,” said one of his crew, “tsk.”

  The others went, “Tsk tsk tsk.”

  “Don’t you know I’m the leader of you all?” said The Power. “I’m the fucken wellspring, pal!”

  “We all do what he says,” Jenna Rush giggled.

  “The problem here,” I said, “is that I’ve always had a problem with authority.”

  “You’d make a great hippie, Gideon. I had a feeling you’d be difficult. This is a-okay. So: here we are. And this is what I want you to do, Mr. Private Eyeball: you’re going to call the Senator, you’re going to say you have his little girl, and you’re going to set up a meet with him. Say she’s being stubborn, she doesn’t want to go home, so you want them to have a father-daughter heart-to-heart on neutral ground. The meeting place will be where we killed and buried you. Nice and remote.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Your hot bitch here gets a bullet in the
noggin.”

  “Let him shoot me, Arty,” Miss Melfile said. “Don’t give in to ultimatums from assholes.”

  “Ahh, honey, you don’t mean that,” said The Power, kissing her cheek again.

  “Arty,” my secretary said, looking right at me, “you must realize now what I truly want.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Just let him do it.”

  “I can’t. This has to play out to an end.”

  She nodded.

  “Do I kill her or not?” The Power asked.

  I wanted to get to the bottom of this shit. I went to the phone and called the Senator’s private line.

  “Goddammit,” he said, “I’ve been trying to reach you the past forty-eight hours!”

  “I have her.”

  “You found her?”

  “She’s here.”

  “Good job, sir. And not a moment too soon; this city is going to hell right now.”

  “Literally.”

  “Bring her home.”

  “She won’t go.”

  “What?”

  I held the phone toward Jenna.

  She yelled, “FUCK YOU DADDY, I WON’T GO HOME!”

  I proposed the meet.

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he said.

  “Half an hour,” I said to The Power, hanging up the phone.

  “Works for me,” he said with a shrug.

  “Now let my secretary go.”

  “I’m a zombie of my word,” he said, and released Miss Melfile from his grip.

  She straightened her hair and smoothed down her skirt. She didn’t look at me. Miss Melfile appeared disappointed.

  * * * *

  That remote area just outside the city limits didn’t seem so desolate and lonely in the daytime. Senator Rush showed up in his car with Jill and two bodyguards donning dark suits—I had no idea if they were federal or private; they were your typical thugs: well-dressed and -armed and willing to kill on command. Jenna Rush and I stood by Miss Melfile’s car and waited. (I still had no idea where my car was, probably stolen or vandalized.) Jenna kept giggling, saying, “Man oh man, is Daddy having the surprise of his lifetime coming.”