He hadn’t talked to her since that night. He’d almost told her about the voice, but she’d never believe him. Dr. De Graat didn’t believe him; he thought it was an auditory hallucination. Walter didn’t know what to believe. But he knew he couldn’t let Katherine see him until he got his mind back.
The voice was now playing the Name Game: “Walter, Walter, Bo-balter…”
He finished the champagne and then headed back to the liquor store. It wasn’t long before the voice was pushed down so deep that it felt like the memory of a dream.
His bender lasted two weeks. When it was over, he awoke with a splitting headache and a pink slip. He barely heard Thom’s message, because the voice in his head was singing the Scooby-Doo theme song. (The voice somehow made the tune even more obnoxious.)
“I’m going to blow my brains out,” Walter said, “then you won’t be able to torture me anymore.” He was serious, too. He had a revolver in his desk drawer, which he got after the apartment down the hall was burglarized.
“That’s kinda insulting, you know. I thought we were friends.”
“We’re not friends! You’re an auditory hallucination!”
“Hey, hey, hey, come on. I told you from the beginning I’m a telepath. You have issues, but you’re not crazy.”
“Why are you doing this?”
The voice didn’t answer.
“Why me? What’s so special about me?”
After a long silence, the voice said, “You were the only guy who ever answered me. Telepathy is a two-way street, you know. Sender and receiver. You must be a natural receiver. I guess I could say you complete me, Walter.”
“What’s your name? Where are you?”
“I’d rather not de-vulge my name and locale. I could get in trouble.”
“Get in trouble with whom?”
“Can’t tell you, Walter. They’d probably court-mar—”
“You’re in the Armed Forces! Is this some experiment?”
The voice exited Walter’s head so quickly his ears popped.
He immediately Googled telepathy and army. The third link was for a Discover magazine article titled “Army Plans to Turn Soldiers Into Telepaths.”
He clicked it and learned that a group of scientists was working with the army on a “thought helmet,” which would allow soldiers to communicate silently with one another. The technology behind it was called “synthetic telepathy,” which had something to do with reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph. But the clincher: the research was being done in Fort Hull, about twenty miles from his apartment.
One of the photos accompanying the article showed a scrawny red-headed guy with an Adam’s apple practically the size of a real apple. He was wearing a huge helmet connected to dozens of spaghetti-thin cables. The caption read: “Volunteer Pvt. Kenny Wayne Kearney attempts to create and send an email using only his thoughts.” Kenny was already able to create Morse code messages on an EEG by controlling his brain’s alpha waves.
A natural sender?
Walter was sure this Kenny was the voice in his head. Had to be. He could picture that stupid voice coming from that stupid face. He Googled Kenny Wayne Kearney and found his Facebook page. He scrolled down the page and hit upon a post that read: “Dang! Look @ da rack on dat broad!!!” That was all the confirmation he needed.
Walter thought two things almost simultaneously: “I’m not crazy” and “I’m going to stop that goddamn redneck.”
Most afternoons Walter would sit in his car about a half-mile down the road from Fort Hull’s front gate. He never stayed too long. He didn’t want the MPs getting suspicious. Sometimes as he waited the voice spoke to him. Walter would try to get more info out of him, but he was extremely tight-lipped now. It was just Questions and bad jokes and terrible songs, mostly Taylor Swift stuff.
It took three weeks until Walter finally saw Kenny strolling down the road. He was wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and trailing a group of young men.
Walter got out of the car and followed him on foot. He watched Kenny catch up to the group. Kenny was talking a mile a minute, trying to get one guy’s attention. The dope probably wanted to tell him a dirty knock-knock joke. But the guy kept ignoring him. Then, suddenly, he pushed Kenny into a chain-link fence. Kenny bounced off it and fell to the ground. The men laughed and walked off, leaving him struggling to get on his feet.
After Kenny got up, he continued on his way as if nothing had happened. Walter followed. He watched Kenny enter a small convenience store at the end of the road. He hid between the store and a Laundromat. When Kenny came out, Walter pulled him into the alley.
Kenny was a real lightweight, maybe five-foot-four and a hundred twenty pounds. Walter pushed him against the wall with little effort.
“What the hell, friend?” Kenny said. “Do you know who you’re messing with?” It was a positive ID on the voice: redneck on helium.
“Do you know who you’ve been messing with?”
Kenny froze, dropped the grocery bag he was carrying. An adult magazine and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon spilled out.
“Never seen you before in my life,” Kenny said, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a buoy in a hurricane.
“That’s true. You’ve only heard my thoughts.”
“You got the wrong guy.”
“I don’t think so. I saw your picture in Discover. You’re part of the telepath experiment.”
“Man, that article is six years old. The project was abandoned four years ago. It never worked. I never communicated telepathically with anyone. Leave me alone, friend.”
“You’re not fooling me. That’s the word you use when you talk to me. Friend. You sound just like him.”
“I’m not the only person in the world who says friend, friend. Take a hike or I’m getting an MP.”
Walter pulled out his gun.
“Whoa, whoa! What the hell, man? You’re having some kind of meltdown. You need to see a shrink.”
“I do see a shrink. You made sure of that. But it does no good. Because I’m not crazy, am I?”
“Get a second opinion. Because you’re loony.”
“I think you’re trying to drive me crazy. That’s what I think. I’m drinking every day. I lost my job. I can’t sleep. I can’t even propose to my girlfriend.”
“Hey, you’re getting married? Congratulations!”
“I’m not getting married, you idiot, and it’s because you’re always in my damn head!”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
Kenny laughed and Walter’s skull tightened.
He pointed the gun at Kenny’s chest.
“Hey, hey, don’t you think if I could communicate telepathically, I’d be famous? The project would still be alive? I’d be more than a dang private after eight years in the military?”
“No. As you told me, you could communicate only with me. Our brains were on the same frequency or some bullcrap. So that gives your talent an incredibly limited use, doesn’t it? The only thing you could do was annoy me and that’s what you did because you’re a stupid, pathetic redneck with no life.”
“Let’s talk it over, huh, over some brews?” Kenny picked up two cans of Pabst. “I’ll tell you all about the project. Ask me all the questions you want.”
“Questions? No more damn questions! I don’t want to ever hear your idiotic voice again! I want my brain back!”
“Relax, friend. I can see your freaking temple throbbing like your head is going to explode.”
Kenny stepped forward and reached toward Walter.
Kenny’s body dropped before Walter even realized he had fired.
Walter knew prison would be bad, but he didn’t think the worst part would be the loneliness. He was confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day and got only one hour in the yard. But the serial killers and rapists wouldn’t talk to him. They were a cliquish bunch, he discovered.
If he had visits from Katherine to look forward to,
then the days might have been bearable. He wrote to her, explaining everything, but she never responded. He even would have taken a Dear John letter. At least then he’d have something to touch, some connection to the outside world.
He never did get to see her in person. She didn’t show up at the trial. That was probably for the best. His lawyer had wanted him to plead insanity, but Walter refused. He wasn’t crazy. Kenny had proved that. Still, no one believed the telepathy story and he came off as a drunken wacko. In the end, Walter took a plea deal to avoid a lethal injection and got life in a supermax prison.
He stretched out on his cement-hard cot and found himself thinking about Kenny. Maybe if Walter had talked to the poor bastard, instead of shooting him, the pestering would have stopped. He never did give him a chance.
Walter exhaled and opened a copy of The Hobbit, which had both its covers ripped off. It had been a while since he could focus on a book. Now there was nothing else to focus on. Two paragraphs in, he remembered how much he hated reading.
“Dang!” said a voice in his head. “And I thought it was boring when I was alive! It’s just cold and gray around here.”
Walter jerked up from his cot. How could this be? Kenny was dead.
You must be a natural receiver.
But there was nothing natural about this. This was insane.
Walter pressed two fingers into his left temple and shook his head. Then he remembered Kenny’s stupid puppy-dog eyes looking up at him in that alley just before he pulled the trigger. The poor bastard. He put down the book, closed his eyes, and said, “Wanna play Questions, friend? I’ll go first. What’s your favorite ’80s buddy cop movie?”
Walter could almost hear Kenny smile.
Simon Clash: The Galaxy’s Greatest Hero
(Originally published in Nature magazine’s Futures)
A brzzt-brzzt-brzzt came stuttering through the air as we sped over the black sands of Desolation. Something hit the repulsor-cycle’s rear fin, sending it into a vicious spin. Ja-bot was immediately thrown. I fought to regain control, and had nearly stopped the ever-widening gyre, but the cycle caught the edge of a dune and pitched me into the burning sand.
I was unhurt, beside what appeared to be a pointy shard of bone poking out just above my boot. I stood, tightened my laces, and watched as a sand skiff swooped down from the supernova-bright sky. Harvesters! The organ-jackers must have been desperate if they were operating on this miserable rock.
I gripped my sonic wand, and when the six Harvesters leaped out of their skiff, I gave it a sharp flick—which should have produced a long, pulsating laser whip. Instead, it coughed up a limp noodle of a stream that died at the Harvesters’ feet. My trusty sidekick had only one responsibility before we set out to save Princess Velouria from the Dominion: to charge the damn wand!
“Ja-bot, you waste of metal!”
“My sincerest apologies, Master Clash.”
Oh well, a hero of my caliber doesn’t need the most powerful and versatile weapon in the galaxy. My fists have been declared weapons of astronomical destruction in seven systems. I cracked Harvester jaws and noses with the ferocity of a three-headed Gandavian megapig, and the tiny, enshrouded creatures dropped at my feet. Except one. How the runt knocked me out with an electro-stunner, I’ll never know. Ja-bot must have been blocking my view.
I awoke minutes later staring up at Desolation’s triplet suns. I tried to move, but it was futile. I was pinned, naked, to a biomagnetic surgical table on the skiff’s deck. Ja-bot lay beside me. The Harvesters had already disconnected his head. Unfortunately it was still operable.
“It’s hopeless, Master Clash,” Ja-bot said. “We’re doomed!”
“A hero always finds a way, Ja-bot. That’s what makes him a hero.”
“Of course, Master Clash. Forgive my lack of faith.”
A Harvester stood over me with a plasma scalpel. In his pipsqueak voice, he said: “Your organs should fetch a good price on the Ondorean black market. It’s rare for a human to be found on Desolation.”
The Harvester severed my left arm at the shoulder. Thanks to the surgical table, there was no pain, no blood.
“Sacrifice, Ja-bot. It’s all part of the hero’s struggle.” I glared at the butcher. “Is that all you got, Harvester scum!”
It wasn’t. The Harvester raised the plasma scalpel again.
The hero faces many challenges before his eventual triumph. What was one more?
The scalpel slid about three centimeters into my shoulder before bright bursts of purple erupted before my eyes.
When my vision returned, I was looking up at a masked figure who was nearly twice the size of a Harvester and wore the black and silver uniform of the Dominion. The Harvesters lay on the ground, both cut neatly in half.
“Dominion scum!” I said. “My day is finally looking up.”
The figure slowly shook its head and then removed its mask.
“Princess Velouria!”
“Clash, you’ve seen better days.”
“This? You should have seen me after I saved Princess Dreakia. You don’t want to know what they cut off me then.”
Suddenly the other four Harvesters appeared from below deck and rushed towards the princess.
“Free me, princess,” I said, “so that I can rescue you.”
But she must not have heard me in her terror and panic. Instead, she drew a sonic wand from her back pocket. With a flick of her wrist, a thick rope of pulsating purple light lashed out and sliced through three of the Harvesters. They fell to the ground in six pieces. The fourth Harvester leaped over the laser whip, somersaulted in the air, and with an electro-stunner in his hand, bore down on the princess.
With amazing luck, she slid to the side at the precise moment, snatched the Harvester’s foot, slammed him to the ground, and with a shake of her wand fired a laser blast into his head.
The princess wiped a piece of the Harvester’s brain matter off her cheek. “What was that about a rescue, Clash?”
I didn’t dignify her with an answer. The princess was well known for her inappropriate sense of humor.
“We have an hour to get off Desolation,” she said. “I’ve sent a self-tunneling antimatter bomb to the center of the planet.”
“Why the hell would you do that?”
“After I rescued myself the first time, I discovered that Desolation is a living cosmic being. The Dominion plan on using it to destroy the Confederation.”
“Then you’ll be needing a ride off this doomed body?”
“I was on my way to the space elevator, but I’ve probably wasted too much time here.”
“Simon Clash is my name, rescuing princesses is my game. My ship is just two klicks to the south. I’ll have you safely back in the Confederation’s arms in no time.”
“Speaking of arms. Don’t forget yours.”
Princess Velouria had retired to my ship’s sleeping quarters by the time Desolation went critical. The poor thing must have been exhausted after her harrowing abduction. She had said she was on Desolation as a spy. I chalked that nonsense up to delirium.
“Another princess saved, another evil empire defeated,” I said and flexed my left hand. Ja-bot had restored me in the medic bay. At least he was good for something.
“You truly are the Galaxy’s greatest hero, Master Clash.”
“No, no, Ja-bot, true heroes don’t take credit for their heroic deeds. We let our actions speak for themselves.”
Bad Poets Society
(Originally published in Cast of Wonders)
Kilgore Birch never thought a bowl of thin pea soup would be his undoing, especially since he stole it from a blind vicar, but here he sat in the poet-king’s dungeon.
He still wasn’t sure how the vicar had identified him. Perhaps he smelled guilty.
His wife, Martha, was always harping on him to stop breaking the law and get an “honest job.” But honest jobs were still jobs, and Kilgore treasured his sleep more than his integrity.
Of course dungeons weren’t great places to catch up on one’s sleep. And as dungeons went, this one was particularly dungeon-y: full of oily shadows, moist stone walls, and anguished cries. The worst part, though, was the food; namely, the fact that there wasn’t any.
When the guards came for Kilgore, his thoughts weren’t on food but poetry. They were the kind of thoughts one has just before one starts talking gibberish and foaming at the mouth.
When Kilgore was brought to the great hall, he was surprised by King Rokenfort’s appearance. He expected a thin man with sunken cheeks and dark circles under his eyes—in other words, a poet. But the king didn’t look as if he had missed many meals or naps. King Rokenfort sat, plump and ruddy, on his throne, his head resting on his hand.
“I beseech thee to read with a keen and cunning eye,” the poet king instructed the first man brought before him, “minding the delicate imagery, the tender tropes, the subtle play betwixt the tragic and the comedic.”
As Kilgore watched the proceedings from the back of the room, he wondered if he would ever see his dear Martha again. Then he imagined her standing over his casket with an “I told you so” expression on her face. Hopefully, the undertaker would sew his eyes shut.
The king nodded at his chief advisor, who removed a piece of parchment from a velvet-lined box and handed it to the defendant. He took the document, holding it at arm’s length as if he feared it would attack him.
“Hold thy wagging and slagging tongues!” the king ordered, even though the court was already silent.
The accused man set to reading, and it wasn’t long before the parchment began to flutter like a spastic bird in his quivering hands. Four times he stopped and looked up. But the king only nodded.
When the man was done, he returned the parchment to the advisor, who placed it back inside the velvet-lined box.
King Rokenfort rose. “Poetry,” he intoned, “is the epitome of truth and beauty, God’s greatest gift to the world; therefore, it stands to reason that if one doth not appreciate verse, then one must necessarily be a godless, cretinous malefactor. How better, then, to determine guilt or innocence?” The poet king glared at the defendant. “If thou are dishonest in thine opinion, so much the worse thy punishment will be. Dost thou understand?”
Madness & Mayhem: 23 Tales of Horror and Humor Page 2
