"You bastard!"
"Who are you? What are you doing this to me?" Jim asked stumbling back.
The stranger stood up straight and steadied his breathing.
"I am removing you from the original equation of balance," he said.
"Where did you come from?" Jim whined.
"I am from a realm of injustice. I am the buffer zone. I am the man who cuts the paper only ever half way down and finds the rot at the core. I slide down fractals of echoing unreason and find the original equation. I find monsters. I drag them to an eternity in hell where they belong. And I found you!"
And as the stranger stood before him something thumped into the fat man's back. He screamed as his blood gouted from the knife wound.
His abdomen split open, ripped wide by his own hands, and watched as his guts slopped onto the floor.
"Why are you doing this to me?" he yelled crashing to his knees.
The stranger looked with disgust at the pile of pustulant flesh slobbering to the floor.
"You are doing it to yourself, James," he said. "I am merely helping you discharge your own guilt."
Jim's face slipped from his skull as a sodden mask. The stranger lurched forward and clawed it away before Jim had a chance to hold it in place.
Squeezing it dry of excess blood, the stranger placed Jim's mask upon the flesh of his own.
"Recognize yourself now, James?" he asked turning his head this way and that for the fat man's inspection.
Jim's flash burned fingers reach up uncomprehendingly, wavering in a slow nauseating terror, to his skin sloughing free of his bones.
"Dear God!"
"No conscience, no fear," the stranger said quietly and deliberately. "Always running, always hiding, but I will always you."
Vomit sprayed through the clenched teeth of Jim's bloodied skull.
Eyelids gone he could not help but stare even as the words bubbled out of his throat in a sodden gloop.
"It's not true."
The stranger thrust the bloody mask of flesh covering his own face at Jim's suppurating skull.
"Look at me, you fucking monster!"
"I can't. My face!"
"I am you, your own festering guilt. You dragged me here. Do you know how much grief monsters like you give me? Do you!"
"I…"
"Answer!"
And as the stranger stood before him Jim's guts continued to pour out like dead snakes onto the floor.
"You make me sick," the stranger said, stepping back and sighing.
He threw Jim's face back at him, picked up his hat and put it on. Reaching into his pocket he threw a grubby coin onto the table.
Jim keeled over as the ground conveniently rose up to break his fall and the stranger walked up to the closed doors.
Streams of red and yellow filth ran out his skull his voice bubbled though it.
"I'm sorry, Frank. I'm sorry."
And as the doors swung wide of their own volition and closed behind the stranger Jim snapped back up, blinked and rubbed at his face.
He looked around, at the empty tables and chairs, at the dark corners, the mezzanine, his eyes trailing over the railings, searching looking, but for what?
The door to the street opened again.
The stranger looked inside.
"Out here, now!" he yelled at Jim.
"What?"
"I'm giving you a second chance," the stranger said. "Now get out of here before it all changes back and it's too late."
#
They watched from the other side of the road as a Rover pulled up outside the cafe and Frank climbed out.
It was the only car in the street. The sign above the diner had also changed.
"Frank?" Jim said to the stranger at his side.
"Frank!" he called out.
Frank hesitated for a moment, and looked around.
"He can't see you," the stranger said to Jim.
"Why?" Jim asked puzzled
"Because now, to your reality, he died, and from his reality as it is now, you never existed. Everything breaks down at the point of singularity," the stranger said. "Don't you know anything? I've had to unravel everything, everything about his life and start it all over again, without you ever being in it."
"But what about me?"
"You didn't learn a thing, did you?" the stranger said exasperated.
"But that's my place," Jim yelped pointing a podgy finger at the diner.
"You don't have any place," the stranger said.
"How come?"
"Because you don't exist. In fact, from where you are standing now, you never ever did."
Jim's face creased.
"I'm dead?" he asked.
"God give me strength," the stranger said adjusting his Fedora.
"I don't understand."
"You were never born."
Something slithered up through the drain at Jim's feet then slithered back out of sight.
"What was that?"
"That's what I wouldn't like to know," the stranger said. "But you'll get used to it. And maybe it means that we have to work some more on that guilt of yours. Who knows?"
"You know anyone else would think that what I did was bad, evil even," Jim said.
"Yes, well, I'm warped. What can I say?" the stranger said admiring his reflection in a shop window. "And you'll have to go on a diet. But that's beside the point, since you've been removed from the grand scheme of things anyway. So basically, you have the memory of a nightmare that never ever was since you were never ever there."
"I am not fat," Jim protested.
"In this universe you're gross, believe me." The stranger said walking away.
He stopped and looked back.
"Are you coming along or what?" he called.
"Where to?" Jim asked walking as fast as he could.
"To square one," the stranger said, "then you can help me find more creeps like you used to be, who also think they have escaped justice.
"But a few ground rules first.
"My boss is a woman called Persephone. But for God's sake, don't say her name out loud. Otherwise she'll send you on the worst jobs in history. And if you don't do it right, she'll have the furies on you like a rash looking for poison ivy."
"The furies?"
"Never mind, just... never mind. Now hurry up."
(First published in Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine, spring 2012)
FOLLOW ME (intro)
CHAPTER 1
"Jump in, Jack!" Pete yelled tapping the steering wheel.
Titch sniggered in the back.
Boyd thumped him on the shoulder.
"Shut up you little creep."
"Hey, what did I do this time?" Titch whined rubbing at his arm.
"Just shut up," Pete said as Boyd climbed out the backseat.
"Come on, Jack," Boyd said to me. "Get in for Christ's sake before it gets dark."
It looked like I was to be the in between-oh guy in the back again.
So I jumped in and Boyd jumped in after me.
And as soon as he did Pete rammed his foot down before Boyd had a chance to pull his legs in the door.
I tried for some wriggle room between Boyd and Titch but I couldn't even find the seat belt.
I gave up.
"Where are we going to this time?" I asked.
"Black Widow's place," Pete said yanking the cigarette from his mouth.
A cloud of smoke hit me in the face.
We were headed for Cammo, The House of Shaw's. The place Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about in Kidnapped a long time ago.
Only now the place was nothing but rocks and ruins and galls thrown up through grass like suppurating sores.
We didn't pick it for all that.
We picked it for being out of the way. Close to the city but a zillion light years from nowhere. No prying eyes.
Pete leaned into the rear view mirror and looked at me.
"What's wrong with you, Jack?" he said.
I didn't answer.
Instead I looked out the window in time to see a whirly gig rise up behind the trees, its blades chopping though the sun.
The sky was clear blue and the gunship chased after what looked like a plastic bag. Only the bag was flying faster than the gunship could follow.
"Is there a war on or something," Boyd asked.
"There's always a war on," Pete said.
"They must be on exercise or something," I said, but no one was listening to me.
Pete jerked up and down on the wheel rattling us side to side.
"Jack?" Pete called out.
"Pete?" I answered still not looking at him.
Because that's the thing with Pete. You don't react to him. He only gets worse if you do. You can't even let him think he is getting to you.
Don't encourage him. That's what I'd learned.
So I just kept on looking out the window until I lost sight of the chopper's blades as it sailed right over us.
"Oh, forget it," Pete said.
Some guy on the radio raved on about the rain, that there was too much of it, that we were planting too many trees, that the trees here trapping all the water in the Northern Hemisphere. And because of that, everywhere between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn was in virtual drought every day of the year.
You could have fooled me. I thought it was already that.
But you learn something every day.
There wasn't a cloud in the sky from where we were sitting.
There hadn't been for days.
So it was just another radio nut job with a microphone.
"God help us all," the guy on the radio yelled before Pete flipped the channel.
Then some other guy came on the line, GM food, the gene splicing nightmare, new species being brewed from old...
"For Christ's sake, Pete," Boyd said.
Pete flicked the channel again.
Lemmy – Silver Machine.
Retro or what?
But it didn't matter because by now I didn't care. I don't think any of us did. Just unlucky clawed rabbits on a fun run to hell we were I guess.
Pete leaned into the mirror again.
"What's wrong with you?" he said to me.
"There's nothing wrong with me, Pete," I said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," I said.
He yanked down on the wheel and all of us shot our hands out trying to grab hold of something as the car swerved to the side.
"Wake up, for crying out loud, guys," Pete laughed flicking his cigarette out the window. "You'd think we were going to a funeral."
His cigarette butt bounced off the windshield of a passing car.
Its tires squealed then it raced ahead and swerved in front of us.
An instant flash of sweat shook me cold from top to toe as my heart thumped my ribs.
Pete didn't even slow down.
The brake lights of the other car flashed. Its wheels locked on the road and tire smoke blasted in through the window on Grant's side.
And before I could get my hand up to mouth, to stop breathing in the stink, Pete yanked himself out of his seat, using the steering wheel for leverage, and crashed his foot down on the accelerator.
"Shit!"
I think that might have been me when our heads flew back and thought my neck was going to break.
"Pete?" I said.
But it's funny how deaf he gets whenever he feels like it. But then again, the engine was revving so hard it was impossible to be heard anyway.
Besides I was the only one talking and no one ever listened to me.
Pete pulled around the side of the other car until we were racing parallel with it.
Grant was still out of it in the passenger seat, and Pete screamed out window on his side at this older guy in the other car.
"Why don't you just fucking die?" he yelled.
I didn't know Pete had so many teeth.
The older guy in the other car gave Pete the finger and Pete swerved the front end of the Mondeo at the guy's Rover.
Boyd and Titch grabbed the headrests. I hooked my fingers round the belt under me. It didn't stop us swaying all over the place though.
The guy in the Rover ripped his wheels away from us, slammed his brakes just missing a lamppost before bumping back into the traffic.
I didn't have to turn around to know what happened next.
I could hear the squeals and horns.
Pete jumped up and down, beating his fists on the wheel in triumph.
"Now that, gentlemen," he said taking a breath, "is how you deal with a fat brainless idiot."
There were five of us on this boys" outing aged seventeen to twenty with me mister average eighteen and very much squashed in the middle and suddenly I just didn't want to be part of them anymore.
But too late as Pete ruined gears and burned rubber, hammered pedal on metal, ground metal to axle and screeched us along on a cloud of dust and exhaust ignoring every speed limit on the way.
Grant's head was bobbing and rolling from side to side with drool hanging out his mouth.
"Is he okay?" I asked Pete.
"Who?" Boyd said turning to me.
"Grant," I said.
Pete shot out an arm, smacked Grant in the face and slammed him back into the seat.
"He's had too many barbies," he said in this really calm voice.
"Eppy boy," Titch said.
"Shut up you little creep," Boyd said around the front of me.
I'm only the guy in the middle, I thought. Don't get me involved.
But after a while there was a truce, a no cave in to the other mutual truce.
And so the yelling stopped, and both Titch and Boyd crossed their arms so tight in front of them that it was like sitting in the middle of electrified high-tension coat hanger wire.
And all the while Grant's eyes stayed closed. I swear that if that guy sat for more than three seconds they were closed.
He was strapped in tight in case he keeled forward and smashed his kisser into the dashboard.
Grant the big lanky guy, epileptic from birth, and strung out on barbies and God knows what else since, just to keep him breathing.
I felt sorry for him, because even when he stood up his eyes were hoods that dropped like shutters at the earliest opportunity. After years in twilight his body had taken on its own conscience after his brain had given up on him and the rest of him realized it was on its last legs.
I looked straight ahead into the setting sun but I could still see the speed cams flashing, one after the other, flickers of white against a jelly orange sky.
"Pete?" I said.
"What!"
"The speed cameras," I reminded him.
"What about them?"
"Yeah, what about 'em?" Titch lisped in my ear.
I gritted my teeth.
"It's going to cost someone a fortune," I said wanting to bash Titch in the face.
I didn't even turn to look at him.
"It's not me that's paying, Jack," Pete said very calmly.
He had one hand on the wheel with his arm leaning on the open window.
A can flew back between the seats and smacked in my crotch.
"Shit!"
"No, Jack," Pete laughed. "It's only coke."
"What did you have to come along for anyway?" Titch said to me.
But I wasn't listening to him, just looking at Pete looking at me in the rear view mirror again.
But after a while it began to settle down. And the atmosphere went out the windows to infect some other innocent suckers passing by as we headed for the pass.
We started to laugh and joke around. Including Pete who should have had his eyes glued to the road.
Instead he kept looking over his shoulder, yelling, laughing, coked out.
Pete the rich kid.
The kid without worries, except for the aimless youth he should have hatched out of years ago.
Nothing was funny. But we laughed we did and hysterically too.
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Either politely or maniacally, because none of us wanted to be seen to be the one not getting it, the one not getting the joke.
No one wanted to be seen as the one that was so dumb he would be kicked out in the cold in the heat of suburbia.
The speed cameras tracked our way and joined up the dots of our roller ball ride into nowhere taking picture after picture, same car, and same number.
With Pete driving high on speed, even higher on frustration, because nothing was ever fast enough for us.
The setting sun blinded out the cameras flashy flicker impact anyway, so why worry?
Besides the fines would arrive at Pete's dad's door as always, and as always Pete's dad would pay for Petey boy's mistakes.
Only Pete didn't see it like that.
This was punishment.
What was the point of his old man making all that money if it wasn't for spoiling Pete with anyway?
So this was revenge for his dad not giving him a decent set of wheels in the first place.
Only this time it was worse.
It was the one and only time Pete's dad had actually challenged Pete to do something, to earn something for himself for a change.
Only it wasn't working.
It only made Pete mad, reactor mad. Because, it is very hard on a guy like Pete to survive on less than what he has taken for free not a long while before, for what the whole of his life up to the pinpoint of ego impact, he has had for free.
It made Pete's growing up harder when he had had only nature and time to force-grow him before.
So now it was less dough, can only have this, can only have that, not both.
Not like it was.
Pete now had to make choices, downsize choices, which meant Pete had less to impress with.
So Pete's solution was to act like a kid again, an angry kid.
A kid with the savvy to know where to push all the wrong buttons on the old man who had taken away the goodies free once for the asking.
And there's more than one way to be an annoying dangerous Brat.
He lit up a cigarette then tossed the pack over his shoulder into the back.
They landed on me but this time I didn't move.
Titch twisted his head to me and I could see the desperation in his eyes, a real smoke for a change.
But the smokes where in my crotch, and there was no way he would dare go for them there.
I could smell him sweat.
And before he could whine at Pete if he could have one, and thus, I guess, force me to pick them up and hand them over to him, I did it before he had a chance.
Revolution Page 8
