by Unce, Bo
A shriek arose from a nearby customer. Heads snapped in our direction and I saw many pairs of widening eyes thrown upon us.
"Le'ss book," Koochy said quietly and began to move forward quickly towards the crowd that had backed away from us.
That turned out to be a bad move.
Chaos broke out. The mob of shoppers panicked at the sight of the zombie black man charging them and erupted with sound and movement. Screaming store patrons fled in every direction, stumbling over each other in a mad scramble to escape the horrific Koochy.
"Ay, naw, it ain't like dat," Koochy tried to explain, but the compute-pad could not be heard over the cacophony of the riot. He shrugged. "Come on, den, y'all," he waved us forward after him.
Despite the madness of the surging shopping horde, they stayed fairly clear of us as we beat a path to the back of the store. Once there, Koochy began ripping at a small metal box that was affixed to the wall.
"What is that?" I inquired.
"Sat-lite hub, sucka!" Koochy explained. "Goan hook up ta dis bitch and get tha DL on my whole se'f, ya' hear' me? Keep dis set on lock while I be doin' dis deed, a'ight?"
I nodded and turned my attention behind him. The once crowded aisles were now vacant. Food and other goods had spilled out from the shelves where they had been perfectly placed, and now lay strewn or smashed on the ground. The front door lay lazily open, letting frigid air stream in freely.
"Oh yeah, my ass is in!" Koochy exclaimed happily behind me.
I saw bright, white lights appear outside of the glass door of the store.
"Good! Now fuckin' hurry!" I called back over my shoulder to him. "We're about to have some company."
"Say what?" Koochy asked.
"Bluhhh!" Junior announced, pointing at the armed guards that rushed into the store. They had been dispatched to deal with the menace that was us, I was fairly confident. There were three of them; they were wearing armored winter camouflage and carrying sleek-looking assault rifles.
"Looks like the Good Man's found us again," I grumbled. While I was eager to face the President Julio Dominguez 消防公鸡 Obama himself eventually, I was not quite ready for that at the present moment. It would be nice if, at a minimum, Koochy was not still dead when I did face him.
I needed a plan, and quick.
"Yvonne," I found the first, most expendable thing I could. "Hurry, get Junior out of the way. Move your scooter thing over here," I pointed to a spot that would place Koochy in the safety of her shadow.
Mindless, she had no choice but to comply. Yvonne mutely maneuvered her disability cart the few feet to where I had suggested. I deftly leapt behind her enormous bulk. Alphonso, as dim as he was, managed to understand what I was doing and also sneaked behind her.
"Citizens!" a harsh voice asserted from the entrance. "Get off of your vehicles and down on the ground!"
"Um, excuuuuuuse me!" snarked Yvonne in return. "My son and I are disabled! How dare you talk to us like that!"
"Yes!" I accidentally whispered audibly. My plan was working! Yvonne's overall absurdity would likely buy us a few precious minutes. Enough, ideally, so that Koochy could complete his download and come up with a better plan.
BRRADDDDADDDAADDDAPPP!!
I heard the staccato of automatic gunfire and my jaw dropped. Yvonne did not cry out, but I saw her heavy form sag forward as numerous crimson stains blossomed and grew quickly to cover her back.
"Bluhhhh!" Junior called out with finality as he expired. His death rattle ensued, but sounded as if it were smothered under a wet pillow due to being crushed within his fat throat.
"Shit, man, wha' tha fuck?!" Koochy barked at me. "Thought you was takin' care-a shit, P!"
"You're fine, Marcus!" I waved him off. "Hurry up. Stay focused! How much longer do you need?"
"Ay, I'm almost dere, playa," he informed me. "Jes make sho you takin' care-a my son, lil' Kooch-Kooch! Bllllunnnnghhh!"
I bit my lower lip and grimaced. He was not going to be happy when he discovered that his recently rediscovered family had been just been massacred. I wondered if Alphonso was smart enough to realize that I had been the cause of their deaths. His blistered and expressionless face was directly to my left as he also sat crouched behind the mortally wounded whale that was Koochy's ex-girlfriend.
Even though I could no longer see our foes from my position of cowardice, I was fairly certain they were still approaching. They were probably very close to the front side of Yvonne's body by now.
"Hurry, Koochy!" I hissed. Looking around frantically, I could see nothing of use within reach. I so badly wished I still had the teledestructo.
Carefully, I peered underneath Yvonne's heavy thighs and managed to catch a glimpse of our assailants. They were not nearly as close as I had feared and were foolishly approaching in a single file line, down the aisle directly in front of us. I realized Yvonne was roughly the width of the aisle and, in that moment, a new plan was hatched!
Without a word, I reached forward, disabled the emergency brake on her cart, pushed it into Forward Gear (Sport mode TREXXX), and pushed the dead-weight of her heavy foot onto the power pedal. I moved much faster and with more precision than I had expected, yet even so, a hail of bullets nearly found me. Instead they sunk into Yvonne's dense flesh with sickening TWHHWT sounds.
Once her foot fully engaged the pedal, the disability scooter lurched forward with a high pitched whir. The rear rubber wheels squealed on the slick vinyl tile and it careened forward, crashing down the aisle from side to side like a floppy bowling-ball/bean-bag combination.
The soldier-looking guys cried out in surprise as Yvonne's corpse bore down on them. I couldn't see what they were doing, but I heard more gunfire and cursing.
"Wha' tha fuck man, what tha fuck?!" Koochy was yelling. "Okay, I got it! I got it! Le'ss go! Let's go! Let's go!"
I flipped around so I could see exactly where we were going. I noticed Koochy didn't turn back to look for Yvonne and Junior. I took this to be a good thing, as I did not want to suffer the delay of his many-worded reaction to their demise.
Alphonso followed me and I followed Koochy as we darted through a nearby door into what looked like a maintenance and electronics closet of some sort. There was barely enough room for the three of us in this space.
"Close the damn door, Alphonso!" I snapped at him.
"Oh, right!" he cheerfully obliged.
We pressed further into each other in order to shut the door behind us.
"We won't have long," I muttered into Koochy's stinky and decaying ear.
"Bitch, we got long e-nuff!" Koochy ripped out a handful of wires from a nearby connection point and jammed them into the side of my suit. "Now, son... hol' on."
Despite his warning, I was in no way prepared for what happened next. I tasted copper in my mouth a moment before my entire consciousness was flooded with white light. There was no feeling in my body, just shock. I lost all sense of time and my surroundings. A penultimate awareness washed over me. Every molecule of my being felt super-charged now. Strength surged through me and I felt impervious. I was also aware of a new, and distinctly alien sensation in the vicinity of my torso.
I had a new limb. Was it a third arm? It felt like it was jointed to my body at my rib cage, but it didn’t feel anything like my other two arms. And it was constrained within the surgipod suit I was wearing, so I could not see or touch it.
Did I need this healing suit any longer? It didn't feel like it. I felt better than I could remember feeling in a long time; In fact, this may have been the best I had ever felt.
Suddenly, I became extremely disoriented and confused. The door to our electronics closet was wide open. I didn't recall it being thrown open, but yet here it was, fully opened. Not only that, but Alphonso had been shot. He was doubled over clutching his stomach, his burned face howling in surprise agony.
What the hell is going on? I couldn't understand my apparent skip forward in time.
"Oh wow," I thought on
the tail of that last thought. Was I seeing the future?
And then it began to happen. In slow motion, Alphonso uncurled himself and stood up straight. As he did so, bursts of blood materialized from thin air, came together in reverse-time, slow-motion, and disappeared into his body while bullets backed out of him. After the bullets returned into the barrels of the guns that had fired them, the armored guards closed the door and the air around us began to shimmer in a familiar way that made my stomach clench.
It was back.
My power was back! I could remember the future again! Well, at least the worst possible future. Which made me wonder why I was seeing Alphonso getting shot in the stomach. Compared to the rest of my pitiful life, that didn't seem very terrible at all. Had something reset since I had died and been reborn twice now?
I knew I had only moments before the future I had just remembered came to pass. It was inevitable, as my former life had taught me time and time again.
"Unless...." I thought. There was at least one new twist in the story this time.
"JESUS CLEVELAND!" I thundered out just as the door was wrenched open.
A thunderclap shook the building to its foundation. Everyone, except for me, fell to the floor. My suit, despite having survived the pummeling of countless coeds, was torn asunder by a supernatural force. I felt a short, sweet pain at my ankles and saw my dicktoes scatter with the remnants of my surgipod.
There I stood, naked and unashamed. Now that I was no longer covered, I understood the new-limb-feeling I had first had minutes ago. It was the prehensile penis from Clarabelle69's last stand! I supposed it must have somehow grafted into my baby Jesus body as a result of being trapped in the surgipod with me throughout the regenerative process.
"No..." I said quietly as I watched the ten feet long phallus unwind itself from around my hairy torso.
The guards were equally thrown off by the sight of my new appendage and remained frozen on the ground. I capitalized on the current situation by willing my new wang to streak forward and smack the shit out of the three stunned soldiers before they could get back to their feet. It snaked out with deadly accuracy and within a split-second, all three attackers were laid out cold and sprawling on the floor in front of us.
"Ohhhh shhheeeeeit!" Koochy exclaimed from the compute-pad. "You got knocked the fuck out! P! What tha hell dat shit, mane?! You trade yo' dick toe fo' a damn dick arm?"
I took a moment of non-response to rub my stubby fingers over my protruding, hairy belly. Damn, it felt good to be fully healed. I noticed a large, Caucasian tentacle/cock was rubbing my belly along with my two hands. This was going to take some getting used to.
"Whoa, Preston. That's... scary," Alphonso confessed.
I didn't have a witty response for him. Truthfully, I was little concerned myself. I looked down at my ankles, where my amputated feet should have been. My third life was off to a rough start. It wasn't even the end of day one yet.
"I think my power is back," I told Marcus.
"What? What power?" Koochy scorned in return. "Sheit, only powa I see is growin' dicks! Yo ass do got a lotta dick fo' a lil baby-ass baby, son!"
I rolled my eyes.
"My power to remember the future, Marcus," I called him by his birth name to irritate him.
"Ay, bitch! Call me-" he started.
"I know, I know," I held up my palm. "Look, get on with yourself. Alphonso and I will go check for more of these clowns."
"A'ight den, P!" Koochy agreed. "Ay, where my boy Junior? Where he go?"
"Uh... I think they hid in another closet," I lied. "I'll...uh... go look for them."
"Sweet, thanks, P! You muh main man!"
I frowned as I ushered Alphonso out of the closet and closed the door behind me. It had been hard to walk on my dick toes at first, but it was much more difficult to move on ankle-nubs. Nonetheless, I found the will to stumble forward one limp at a time. Limping wasn't easy.
The once-perfect-looking store was now completely destroyed. Yvonne's dead hump of a form was lying on the red-smeared floor roughly half-way up the aisle I had sent her down. Pieces of the security guards were wedged under her steel-reinforced tires. Junior was still sitting on his disability scooter, but collapsed forward on top of himself in a lifeless heap. Marcus was not going to be pleased when he found out Yvonne and Junior were dead. I needed to find a way to blame this on Alphonso.
Blood and bullet-holes were everywhere and ruptured food bags on the store shelves had vomited their contents onto the scene with indifference. There were no more soldier-types in sight. The exterior of the entrance to the store was still bathed in spotlight, though, making me think that we were likely still besieged. There was no need to face whatever was outside of the building yet; at least not before Marcus was more fully recovered.
"Preston," Alphonso said quietly. "What're you going to tell him about Yvonne and Juni-"
He stopped mid-sentence as the lights in the building dimmed in a manner that gave me the impression that something was putting a heavy draw on the power system. I knew what that something was: Koochy. The dimming of the lights coincided with the sound of something large and industrial winding down under protest. The lights stayed very low for what felt like minutes.
Koochy must need a lot of power, I thought to myself as I marveled at his capability. I mean, the man was about to recover his corpse, which had been dead for who knows how long now.
"Do you think we should go back and check on him?" Alphonso asked.
I shook my head. "No, he can take care of himself. We need to keep watch out here," I told him.
As if on cue, the sound of a tinny, horrendous, tortured screaming came from Koochy's closet behind us. It quickly rose in volume and intensity and, as it reached its peak, all of the power in the store went out.
"AHhhhhhHHHHHHHRHHHRHRHGGGhHHHAAAA!" came Koochy's primeval roar as I heard the closet door thrown open in the pitch black surrounding me. "AHhhhhHH! Ooohhhhh! Unnnnghhh!"
"Marcus! Marcus, is that you?" I called out to the darkness. The sound of something staggering around in the debris littering the store floor echoed back at me in response.
"Unnnghh.... P?" I was overjoyed to hear Koochy's voice with real depth of bass, not through a compute-pad's piezoelectric speaker. "Dat you, P? You dere? Ohhh... muh thuckin' head."
Stumbling over an obstacle blindly, I cursed. "Fuck! I can't see anything, Koochy. Where are you?"
"Ohhhh...." more moaning from Marcus. "Shit ain't right, mane. I ain't right. I feel... thiick... BLARGH!" I heard retching in the inky darkness.
"Ew," Alphonso commented. Since I couldn't see him, I had forgotten he was next to me.
Just then, a tremendous explosion consumed the front of the building. We were knocked to the ground by the force the blast. Luckily, a toppled display of junk food broke my fall.
"Thit! Dey comin' fo' uhh- BLARGHH!" Koochy began to talk again, but again was interrupted by vomiting.
The darkness that had covered us was now dispelled by the fires that were raging. Thick smoke billowed around me, making my eyes water and causing me to cough.
"Marcus!" I gasped as I saw my friend in the flickering firelight.
He was indeed reanimated. His skin clearly had some life in it now, and was twitching and swelling all over his face. His jaw was still unhinged-looking and his tongue was grossly enlarged and weeping pus.
"Come... come on, mane, uhhh," he staggered towards the other corner of the back of the building.
Alphonso and I followed him and soon we reached the far wall, which supported an iron ladder that had been painted to match the pale yellow of the store's interior. We climbed through the hanging ceiling and onto the roof.
The night sky was peppered with countless brilliant stars. Flames tore at the side of the building that was farthest away from us, sending a shaft of black smoke high above us. It was easier to see Koochy now that we were outside.
I cringed.
"Uh, Marcus," I nudged
him.
"Wha... what, P?" Marcus drooled. I was amazed his body had already recovered to the point of producing bodily fluids.
"You... you don't look so good," I didn't know how to tell him.
Koochy started to laugh, which appeared to pain him greatly.
"Theel like thit, thon," he said with much effort. "Needa thind my ath... a betta thurgi-pod. Cova my thace an' thit." He swayed back and forth frailly as he spoke. I realized that he may have been more of an asset when he was dead and the suit was responsible for his movements. He didn't look ready to take on any kind of challenge at the moment.
He looked at my third arm and the bloodshot whites of his eyes grew big.
"Thit, P! Dat thit ith thucked up, yo," Koochy recoiled in disgust.
"Come on, let's go check out who's out front trying to kill us," I changed the subject and jaunted my naked ass off to the other side of the roof top.
Immediately it was clear to me that this was not the work of any local Old Cleveland militia. A small GMS warship was parked on the snow a short distance from the burning store we stood atop. Four or five soldiers stood in front of the warplane, bearing arms.
My heart leapt. I could rescue TK with that kind of firepower! I hadn't thought about TK in some time now, and I was too frightened of what I might get in response to a telepathic outreach. The woman had a healing factor. No matter what was happening to her at this very moment, it would eventually be okay, right?
"Koochy, how are we going to get in that ship?" I asked.
"Ooh! I know!" Alphonso blurted.
"Hey, wait a minute!" Koochy shouted surprisingly coherently. "Where tha hell 'vonne 'n' Junior be?!"
"Uh oh," I grimaced and snapped my head to Alphonso, who did the same thing.
"Uh..." Alphonso procrastinated.
"Awww, nah!" Koochy slowly turned his gaze to the fire that blazed furiously beneath us. "We left dem down dere? Naw! Thay it ain't tho, P!"
