The Hipster From Outer Space (The Hipster Trilogy Book 1)

by Luke Kondor

  From its outline all she saw was the fur, pitch black in places, and a refraction of the cosmos surrounding it in others — all the colours of the neighbouring galaxies splashing it with rainbow coloured nebulae. Its concentration was completely on the hole in front of it. Its chubby, fleshy hands grabbing onto the red mush spilling out and filling its mouth. It was growing with each bite, not enough for human eyes to see, but at a pace noticeable to Carol’s insight.

  In the Outer Reaches of space, it made no noise, but from watching it, Carol almost heard the grinding of its teeth against the tougher part of the food — the gristle and the bone.

  Carol willed her body to move closer to the beast. But with that single thought the beast turned to her. It was impossible. It was as though the beast heard her thoughts. Its ears pricked upwards and it looked at Carol. And then its voice. A whisper so sharp it cut its way into Carol’s thoughts, hacking at her mind, her consciousness.

  A Thinker.

  It’s voice was made of words and images and whatever sensory devices it could utilise to make itself clear.

  I’ll come for your flesh, the beast said as it scooped a handful of the stuff into its mouth. I’ll peel your skin and eat your tongue.

  With the images came the pain they suggested. Its fingers grabbed handfuls of skin from her arms, pressing so tightly its fingers went into the skin and meat beneath. She screamed as the beast yanked so hard the skin split beneath her shoulder blades.

  Somewhere a dog barked.

  Carol woke. Her skin cold. Her back wet. A pressure on her stomach. It was still dark, but it felt like the sun might peek its head up at any moment. She lifted her head and looked at her stomach. Indie was lying on her — her paws stretched outwards and over her. She was looking at her, tongue bouncing out of her mouth. She barked again and Carol jumped.

  “Indie!” she shouted. The dog’s ears lowered and she dropped her nose to Carol’s side. “Sorry Indie,” she said. “It’s okay.” She reached down and patted her head before sitting up and tried to make sense of what she’d seen.

  It wasn’t the first vision she’d had since being on Earth. She’d had a few in her time, and she’d have many more. Recently, though, there’d been more than ever — an influx of them. This was the first vision of the beast, but she’d seen similar horrors over the last few months: horrors that convinced her that the world was coming to an end. Now, though, it had a face.

  She climbed to her feet and swore under her breath. Her back was soaked with morning dew. She whistled and clicked her fingers and Indie followed her back into the kitchen where she closed the door. She filled the kettle and set it to boil.

  As she placed the tea-bag in an empty mug she had another vision. This time it was short and calm and flashed before her like someone flicking a light switch off and then back on in quick succession. A single image of a man. A Thinker, like herself. But a Thinker built on inconsistencies. The DNA which he’d laced his consciousness with was wrong. It didn’t line up on any measure of time or space and existed on a fabric of its own.

  Carol poured the tea, added sugar and milk and sipped from it.

  “Maybe,” she said quietly. “Maybe…”

  Aidan Black

  What a day. A mixture of disappointment and success. A true lesson in what the start-up entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley would call “pivoting”. Occasionally you come to a roadblock — lack of funding, no audience, no interest, maybe some programming is broken, your employees aren’t getting along, and you have to change course. Make the best of what’s given to you. You pivot. If life gives you lemons, you pull their fucking teeth out, bag ‘em up, and feed them to your pigs.

  Aidan sipped from the tea. It was bearable. He didn’t like bearable. But it was the only thing keeping his mind from exploding. He’d already complained about the first cup. He knew that if he complained about the second cup he was going to have to get physical and he already had a full van and a sore head.

  The restaurant was sub-par. If he were the manager he’d have the place running like a well-oiled machine. He’d have the place packed with customers. He scoffed as he looked around. There were four customers, and one of those customers was a cat. A fucking cat! They didn’t eat baked goods and they certainly didn’t pay for anything. Maybe it was the cat that was putting people off.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out his comb when the tinnitus-like whine, the whitest noise, ramped up like some fucker was riding the volume knob — all the way to eleven. His head felt like it might explode. He smelled copper. He saw fire. He saw an ape, screaming, teeth biting down.

  Moomamu’s here.

  “Okay,” he said, pressing his head onto the cool surface of the table. “Where? Fucking where?”

  Kill him. Rip his tongue out. Tear his skin off. Kill him. Feed me. You miss one hundred percent of the chances you don’t take. Kill him.

  “Okay,” he screamed. He didn’t care if people were looking now. “Just tell me where!”

  Across the table. With the cat.

  The whispering voice was angry. The noise subsided just enough for him to run the brush through his hair and to look over to the bearded man with the cat. He would normally follow him to a quiet area, avoid unwanted attention, but the pain … the fucking pain. He had to finish it now. It wasn’t the original plan, but he had to deal with the cards he’d been dealt. He had to pivot.

  Sammy Black

  Her hairy pink belly was rising and falling. Slowly. Each breath weaker than the last. Her eyes had been closed most of the time. Occasionally opening them to look out at the other pigs or at Sammy as he cleaned around her. A dull whimper escaping her every now and again. The smell of death and dying sticking to her.

  Elsa was eight years old. It was natural for a pig like her to pass away. Too many piglets had left too many scars. Mother pigs like Elsa aren’t supposed to last much longer than that. But only a few weeks before she was bouncing around the pen like a pig in … well. The point was, she’d been a lively little chunk of fat, oily eyes of vivid black, hardly settling, until recently.

  Vets were out of the question. There was no way they could have people snooping around the Pig-House. Unless that person never left. And a local person going missing would be too much. The whole town would come together. A village search. Pitchforks. Wicker Man. Bees.

  Sammy continued on with his work, cleaning up after the others, feeding the goats, gathering up eggs to sell. The daily routine. The ritual.

  He was scraping up goat shit from a pathway when he heard the scream. A haunting whine that carried through the farm stopping every animal in its tracks. It was coming from the Pig-House. It was coming from Elsa.

  When Sammy ran back to look he fell to his knees and screamed. It wasn’t the dead pig that scared him — he’d seen his fair share of dead animals, and then some. It wasn’t the pooling of inky black liquid seeping out of her eyes, her ears and mouth that had chills running down his spine. And it wasn’t the sudden sinking in of her skin, like the bone had partially crumbled inside her. No, none of that made him want to run away as fast as he could and not stop running until he fell to the floor with exhaustion. It wasn’t any of those things. It was the hand pressing outwards against her stomach. A human hand, as if it was trying to break its way out of Elsa’a dead body.

  Five Reasons Yayatooism Is The Right Religion For You

  Samwell Lloyd

  Samwellllloydblogs.com

  If I were to travel back in time ten years and speak to my younger self I would slap me. I would slap me right across the face. Because that younger me, the eighteen year old, smoking weed, drinking alcohol till the early hours of the morning. That version of me was asleep. He was dead to the world. A puppet. Not in control of his own strings. Now I know better. Now I’m in control.

  Why?

  Well that’s easy. Because now I’m a Yayatooist.

  Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. Religion is stupid. Yayatooism isn’t a real th
ing. If you’re going to find religion, make it a traditional religion, or as we Yayatooists call them “Trad-Rels”.

  Okay, so let me bend your ear for a few minutes. Let me give you 5 simple reasons why Yayatooism is the right religion for you.

  1.) It’s founder is an actual space-being called Yayatoo.

  Okay so imagine a girl, a very pretty one at that, with pink and blue hair, tattoos, and the bluest eyes you’d ever seen. That’s Yayatoo! No beard, no smiting, and exactly the kind of god a modern world needs — a female one. Yayatoo isn’t actually from Earth. She is an ancient sentient being called Yayatoo who has taken a host and, although initially wanted to go home, has seen that she can teach the humans of Earth a lot. She’d decided to stay. Lucky us!

  2.) There’s no praying involved.

  Yayatoo doesn’t require us to pray, or to read massive old books, or even to believe in things that you can’t see. She’s not into all that Trad-Rel stuff. The only thing that Yayatoo asks of us is that we give her any material possession she asks for. She might like some food, or some item of clothing, or one time she even asked for my Playstation 4. How kick ass is that? A god who requires nothing of you, other than your belongings.

  3.) Yayatoo is alive.

  The thing that always bothered me about Trad-Rels is that all of their deities are dead and have been for ages. How can I relate to a god who’s been dead for so long he doesn’t even know what a Flaming Sambuca is? Honestly, the Trad-Rel gods are all out of whack, over the hill, washed up. Whereas Yayatoo is very much alive today, and she has a tattoo on her shoulder of a freakin’ hawk! A FREAKING HAWK!

  4.) There’s no such thing as church.

  Okay, this might change. After all we may need somewhere to crash indefinitely. But right now, Yayatoo is staying at a friend of mine’s. She’s just sleeping on the sofa like a radical modern traveller. AirBnB style. Which is where I found out about her to be honest. So that means no church. Which I hate. It’s such a Trad-Rel thing to have massive old-school pointy buildings full of people chanting and lighting incense and shit. Right now, church is my friend Dave’s flat.

  5.) It’s free to join.

  Have you noticed that Trad-Rels are getting a little pricey? It seems like every religion right now has got its hand out. Asking for you to put your hard-earned cash money in its own to fund its wild parties and christenings and whatnot where they throw water at a baby’s head. Which is another point, why are people throwing water at babies’ heads? Let me just promise you one thing, there’s no water being thrown on babies’ heads in Yayatooism.

  So there you have it. Five reasons why I think Yayatooism might not only be the religion for you, but the religion for our generation.

  I’ve put together a free PDF document detailing everything that Yayatoo has taught us so far about life, the world, and the other worlds. Apparently there’s loads out there. All you need to do is go to SamwellLloydBlogs.com/yestoyayatoo and get your FREE PDF! All we ask for is your e-mail address, a contact phone number, and the best time to call you.

  All the best,

  Samwell Lloyd,

  Yayatooist, Blogger, Food Enthusiast.

  Aidan Black

  White Log Farm, 2002

  AIDAN PRESSED HIS FINGERS AGAINST his head. They were cold from the icy bottle of lager he’d been carrying. The summer heat was sizzling on the farm floor. He wanted it to stop. He wanted it to die. In nothing but his shorts and a white vest top of his brother’s, he walked past the goat pastures, past the car park, towards the admin cabin. He kicked a stone as he went and it bounced off the ground, upwards, hitting the metal fence with a clang that echoed throughout the empty farm.

  Apart from him, his brother, his granddad and the animals, the farm was dead. No visitors to be seen. A month prior and Aidan had been up to his knees in crying children, faces painted like animals, ice cream sticking out of their mouths, asking for food pellets. Always more food pellets.

  But today was empty, as it had been for a while. The whole place was quiet, like somebody had placed an upturned glass over the farm, separating them from the outside world, trapping them in a vacuum, like a spider being deprived of oxygen — something the world would deal with later.

  His granddad was in the cabin, on the phone. He’d been on the phone for what seemed like days — talking to lawyers or newspaper people.

  A goat cried as Aidan walked past and he replied with his middle finger and mouthed the words “Shut the fuck up”. It didn’t notice. It kept on chewing the floor. Aidan called it an “Ignorant fuck” as he skipped over a drain. The goat looked up.

  He walked onwards, swinging the cold lager in his hand, all the way to the cabin. Before he even opened the door he heard his granddad inside. Something about “credit”. Something about “interest”. Aidan took a deep breath and placed his hand on the door handle, warm from the summer heat, and twisted it open.

  “This is where you get to prove to me that you can be a success,” his granddad said. The handset tucked between his head and his shoulder. The spiralling cord anchoring him to the spot. His long grey hair tied into a ponytail. His charcoal dark eyebrows. His perfectly ironed shirt and tie. His thick moustache of grey, reaching over his top lip, towards his chin. Aidan looked at the deep wrinkles in his forehead. He tried to smile, but couldn’t. His head felt light. His granddad looked at him, saw the bottle in his hand, nodded and gestured for Aidan to take the drink to him. No smile. No thank you. Only lager.

  The inside of the admin cabin had always been the boring part of the farm. The office desk. The boxes of paperwork — receipts, orders, etc — and the old computer whirring away, sounding like it was etching itself onto the internet every time they connected to it. The place was dark and dusty and the only light coming in was from a single window pane of security glass. The blinds were down, blocking out the headache-inducing sun, only letting fine slices of light cut their way through.

  His granddad took the bottle without making eye contact.

  “The thing is, Dean, the thing is, that we need you to put together a mortgaging option that makes sense for me and the farm. I need you to dig into your soul and pull out something special. I won’t take anything second tier. I won’t even consider anything that doesn’t include the options that I … yes, that’s correct … does that sound okay to you? Are you a winner? Are you a success?”

  On the wall, behind his granddad’s head, was a small bookshelf, a single bottle of whisky on the side, and a selection of books with titles like The Millionaire & Me and Six Habits Of Very Influential People.

  As he left the cabin he found himself wondering if he’d sleep that night. He looked over to his granddad’s van alone in the empty gravel carpark. Freshly cleaned and glimmering in the sun. The vinyl stickers on the side peeling a little, but still good, still fresh. He skipped over to it and tried the driver’s seat door. It was locked, but the side door swung open. Inside were ladders, buckets of paint and spirits, different scraps of wallpaper, and the big red toolbox that screamed to be opened. He looked to the cabin — the blinds were still closed. He climbed into the van and ran his hand across the cool metal surface of the toolbox.

  He leaned his head out of the van, just enough to check that the admin cabin blinds were still closed. They were. He unlatched the lid, carefully lifted it open, and revealed a treasure chest of tools — hammers, spanners, wrenches, and a whole lot of stuff Aidan didn’t have a name for. He smelled the fizz of the metal tools mixed with oils and grease. It reminded him of his childhood, following his granddad to his odd jobs. The toolbox was so organised. Everything had its place. The screws had a little compartment, along with the nails. There was a little tray for scraps of sandpaper, and the larger bucket part of the toolbox was packed with clean, shiny, metal doodads.

  He reached in and picked up a set of orange-handled pliers He looked at them closely. Squeezed them in his hand. He used the pliers to grab onto the side of the toolbox and attempted to lift the too
lbox with the pliers alone. It didn’t move an inch. It was hopeless. But he heard the metal scratch … wait … he thought it was the metal. He stopped when he thought he heard the cabin door close. He held his breath.

  Nothing.

  He placed the pliers back into the toolbox and stopped at the sound again. This time it was closer.

  He tried to turn, but before he could he was yanked backwards out of the van. The unseen hand pulled with such a force that he fell and smashed his head on the gravel.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” his granddad growled as he towered above him, blocking out the sunlight. “You little …”

  His granddad saw the open toolbox in the van. He shook his head and slapped Aidan across the shoulders before reaching into the van and grabbing the hammer.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Aidan cried. His head and shoulder throbbed as he tried to crawl away. “I promise.”

  His granddad paced towards him, grabbed Aidan’s left hand and pulled it towards him. He pressed it against the floor with his right boot, the weight of it crushing his wrist, splaying his fingers outwards. His granddad placed the hammer against one of his fingertips, lining it up.

  “Tools are dangerous,” he said, looking at Aidan with the calm of a simple man going about his day-job. “Listen to me, Aidan.”