Twisted 50 Volume 1

by Wessell, Stephanie

  You'd never think a big guy like Tommy would be such a lightweight when it comes to booze, but it's a fact. Last night it only took a couple of Yukon Jacks to get him singing, and a couple more to start him talking. About Us.

  In short order, Bucky and his pals booked out of there, stiffing Tommy with the tab because Tommy wasn't Sasquatch to them anymore – he was just a big, furry freak.

  Tommy immediately texted Kayla about what had gone down, along with a thousand apologies and the no-shit-Sherlock news that Bucky, his boys, and their videocams were on their way.

  Nobody messes with my boy Tommy. This time around I was of like mind with the rest. When The Buckman et al breached our boundaries a few hours ago, we were more than ready to tap into months – no, years – of pent-up, pissed-off rage; rage at a world that didn't want Us but didn't have the decency to leave Us the fuck alone.

  Once we started wielding our implements of destruction, things (“things” being Bucky and his posse) fell apart fast. You start spreading the human body around, it goes a long, long way. We spread four of 'em right across the porch, onto the patio and into the woods – not in the most organised fashion, I must admit. You had to watch where you walked. I skidded down the steps on gobs of pink something – almost fell on my ass. Georgie actually did take a shitter when he was chasing the new kid, swinging a rope of intestine like a cowboy after a calf. Phoebe and Marilyn – coupla goofballs – slid-slammed into each other playing Ultimate with fat little frisbees (ear lobes, actually).

  Yet, all good things must end. When it came time for Us to start the arduous task of cleaning up the Bucky bits, I cut out and came back here to my room. Hacking up cheesy guys in cheesy hundred-dollar suits in the heat of battle, that's one thing. Shovelling them into dishpans afterwards is something else entirely. No thank you very much.

  Anyhow, that's the dealio.

  I'm assuming, Dear Person Who's Reading This, that you showed up at some point not too long after my exit. (We probably should have partied less loudly so as not to pique your curiosity). Possibly you arrived in a roiling wave of villagers who stormed our castle with torches and rakes and whatever you could get your vengeful little hands on – then went souvenir hunting and found this missive.

  Or mayhaps you barrelled in with carloads of cops who cuffed and “subdued” any of Us still in situ, then pillaged our rooms looking for “evidence”. Well, here's your evidence – and it sets the record straight.

  Whoever you are, and whatever happens from hereon in to whoever you get hold of, just show some mercy, OK? It wasn't Us that started this.

  As for me, as soon as I finish this I'm getting the hell out of Dodge; pocket my pen and a pad of paper, grab a hoodie, slip into town on the down low. Maybe that townie chick's working the night shift. I'll whip her up some excellent prose with at least ten good reasons she'd want to drive me to the highway.

  Maybe I'll even score a kiss goodbye.

  Flight 404

  by Bartholomew Cryan

  The sky is burning in fast forward, the wind blowing backwards. Formless effervescing plankton expand and dissipate, consuming one another for growth, popping like pixelated fireworks in super-imposed bioluminescence. Their silhouettes scar the conflagrant sky with a silent, salted fear. Eyes roll into darkness, and there is the sound of grinding rocks, cracking hungry bones. The sun splits into fiery jaws, descends onto the shivering earth. Ripped skin is born from flames, shapeless matter whirrs in suspended animation. Hills are formed and defiantly rise. Mountains cough and explode in drowning fire.

  Red worms are pulsing in soup. The pan is blackening, the worms ignite. Muted invertebrate screams echo. Worm-broth shudders and splits, and piercing sunlight floods in.

  "Sir, will you please close your blind."

  My eyes open slowly and I swivel to look at the speaker with incredulity, a blank, humming heat in my eyes.

  "Sir? You’re blind?"

  Gradually, lines are forming in the whiteness. A lady in a blazer. A hat rests, precariously slanted, upon her head, her hair in a tight bun. She is looking at me strangely.

  "No, I can see," I say. She squints at me in bewilderment and gestures past me to a window. Beyond the panes, there is the soft lap of blue sky on cloud coast. The rising flare of a new day blushes the billows from beyond the horizon. My view is cut abruptly to alabaster infinity as the woman's hand slams the blind shut.

  She rights herself and looks at me with a face of composed confusion. "Please keep your blind down for the duration of the flight, sir."

  "Who are you?" I say, kneading my scalp between my fingers and trying to focus my nervous pupils.

  She keeps her eyes fixed on me and shifts her weight, taps a silver rectangle name-badge emblazoned in dark print with 'Karen'.

  "Karen," she says.

  She turns to leave.

  There is a pressure in my head that is building with my disorientation. She begins to walk away and I realise with an anxious twist in my guts that I want her to stay.

  "Karen, wait!"

  She glances back at me, looking tired and bored.

  "What?"

  "Where are we?"

  "Please keep your blind down for the duration of the flight, sir," she says again, emphasising the word 'flight'. "We are on a plane." She makes a frowning face and heads down the aisle.

  I look after her, feeling betrayed without knowing why. Passing four rows, she turns, quickly looking back at me, meeting my eyes, then passes out of sight.

  Beads of cold sweat emerge from my forehead as my heart begins to pump previously docile blood. My lucidity is returning in unwelcome high-definition. The snores of my fellow passengers are increasingly transmuted to bitter rasps, and the clogged pores of the sleeping woman to my left look like dirty sinkholes.

  I fidget in my seat, the anxiety of reality grating on me, filing me to a sharp point, skewering my nerves. I neurotically fiddle with the buttons on my shirt, twisting one off by accident, then decide I should look out the window again.

  You've done it before, I think, but what if it's different this time? You're getting more and more awake now. The pills are wearing off. Try not to panic. What are the odds you die in an airplane crash? Just look out the window and don't panic, never panic. You might make a scene again. It could make everything worse, much worse and then it would really have been better to never have looked at all. You're already biting your nails. I nip into the quick of my nail by accident and blood blossoms underneath.

  I close my eyes and press my forefingers into my temples for a moment.

  Peeling the blind up a tiny bit, I glimpse the wing. It jolts up and down under the power of the wind. I recognise the airplane's turbofan engines from Google images, but they look much bigger in real life. The noise they make seems to emit from inside my own head, the sound of dying machines, robot screams. A wintry palm grips my throat at the thought of mechanical failure. Charred rubble.

  I shut the blind quickly and look around. Probing my blazer pockets, I find an amber prescription bottle and shakily unscrew the lid. I summon spittle into my mouth and coax two yellow tablets down my gullet. Leaning over my armrest, I look at the person behind me. Drowsy woman of mid-forties. Her handbag is knitted with bits of fabric and held affectionately to her stomach, her hair clean but frayed. She looks back at me through pinched, tired eyes.

  Weighing on the chair in front of me is a corpulent Colonel Sanders lookalike. His furry maw dances to the rhythms of his snore.

  The sound of slumbering breaths is constricting the air around me, making it heavy and claustrophobic; the incessant wail of the engines making my eye twitch. Everyone is asleep. Why can't you be like the others?

  I am jittering in my chair, uncomfortably praying for sleep, when out of the corner of my eye I see movement, a leg changing positions. I lean over to get a look at the person. They are dressed in a grey suit, with a tie-less white shirt and black brogues. He is looking into the desolation of the closed blind. I co
ugh and he turns his head towards me.

  My teeth clamp together, pre-empting the surge of quivering bile up my oesophagus.

  The man has no face.

  Where his face should be there is a void. Like a perpetual cigarette burn on film, as if reality has not processed his face, it is not there.

  He seems to look back at me, measuring, waiting.

  Are you losing it? You only just swallowed the pills. I dig my nails into the back of my hand, twisting the skin for clarity, willing myself to wake up, my heart to quiet. I cough again, maintaining my stare, and he raises a hand to where his mouth should be, and releases a garbled sound as if imitating my cough. He drums his hands on the tray in front of him, then rises and slips down the aisle.

  I unravel a piece of scrunched napkin from my pocket and wipe my forehead, watching him leave. He heads in the direction of the toilets and cockpit. I try to restore order to my timorous breath and begin to viciously chew my thumbnail. What if he tries to – I hear the turbofan engine splutter – crash the plane. I tear the blind open and look out while starting to intently fold my napkin in half and then in half again and then in hal – he's going to kill us all – f and then unfold it again and – and you'll be too busy – the plane shudders – folding a napkin – the engine is trailing a light stream of smoke. I tear the napkin into shreds, crushing the detritus between my sodden palms and rising from my chair.

  With trepidation writhing in my stomach, I stalk down the aisle in pursuit of the man. I can feel it, a rattle in my bones, a sureness, a palpability of his impending depravity. He is standing outside the toilets and turns to watch my approach. The hollow gaze sets my nerves alight, convulses my insides and strengthens my conviction. The black depths are evil, you know it. As I get closer to him, a pungency grasps me, like melted plastic. My lungs are frantically flapping inside my chest.

  He turns away from my advance, towards the cockpit door and starts trying the handle. An ebony ooze trickles treacle-like out from his facial-rift and onto the door handle. A tired-looking old man emerges from the toilets in time to watch my clenched hand sailing into nothingness.

  I am instantly struck by a consistency under my knuckles, like meat in a plastic bag, imitation flesh. The faceless man jerks under the force of my blow, away from the door handle and I take the opportunity to restrain him under the arms of his suit jacket. Instantly the old man from the toilet raises his voice: "What are you doing, you maniac?!"

  He tries to wrestle the faceless one out of my grip but I hold on even tighter.

  From the chasm of my captive, a piercing noise begins, like a dial-up modem, like robot screams, like the wail of the engines. The man is shouting: "Help, help! This passenger is being attacked!"

  "Can't you see? He's going to kill us all! Are you blind?" I shout as the man tries to pry my hands free.

  "He's going to crash the plane!" I scream in his breathless, sagging face. The man stops and looks intently into the suited murk. "Can't you see him?! Can you not see the void?!" I shriek. He stares into the facelessness with scrutiny, then back at me.

  He turns his head down the aisle leading to the cabin and roars, "Help! This man has gone insane!"

  You've gone mad.

  The thought washes over me like cold water, sucking the wind from my lungs. The grey suit-jacket and its occupant dodge out of my grip. I feel myself sinking to my knees.

  The rough hands of the aged man grab my shoulders and I hear his voice, husky and sombre, ". . . whatever possessed you to do a thing like that. . ."

  I feel like crying. The man with no face is standing nearby and gesticulating at me as static drone pours from him.

  I catch a glimpse of the cockpit handle. The ooze has melted through the lock and the door clicks open. The sound draws our attention and for a moment the three of us are still.

  Then the faceless man lurches towards the door, pulling a pistol from inside his blazer. The man holding me starts shrieking “Help!” again, as I scramble to my feet. I clatter to the door in time to have it slammed in my face. On the other side, I can hear frenzied machine squeals, interspersed with the shouts of the pilots. I start ramming the door. A tremor in the plane knocks me off my feet. Beyond the door I hear a gunshot, then hissing air.

  *

  Finally, the intercom crackles. Karen's voice echoes round the cabin: "Ladies and gentlemen, please do not be alarmed if you heard a slight disruption in the cockpit. This was due to a technical fault that has now been dealt with. If all passengers could make their way to their seats, we will be arriving at Glory in 10 minutes.”

  I breathe out deeply. Passengers have begun to wake up. They peer lazily out of their windows. The adrenaline seems to have made the pills kick in and my head swims dreamily on the pulsing waves of my steadying heartbeat. I linger weightlessly outside the cockpit, waiting for Karen.

  The intercom coughs into life again: "All passengers back to their seats"; emphasis on the word 'all'. I rap weakly on the cockpit door with my knuckles, beginning to feel encumbered by my own body, as eyes settle on me from the cabin. She's probably fine. My standing feels scrutinised and wrong, warming embarrassment flickering up my body. All passengers back to your seats. I walk quickly and ashamedly down the aisle to the cabin.

  A worried but familiar-looking man is sitting in my seat so I look for another, pointedly avoiding the vacant one left by the faceless man. I wander around, row after row of red, newly-woken eyes studying me from afar, before rising anxiety forces me to duck into the obscene space.

  At least you're close to the cockpit. Just in case.

  I fidget and try to look out the closed window. Someone coughs behind me and I turn to find the man in my seat staring at me. He looks as if he's seen a ghost. I awkwardly wave to placate him and mouth the word "hi".

  He goes white and fingers an amber prescription bottle out of his pocket, shakily coaxing two tablets onto his palm. I drum my fingers on the flight-tray and study a scuffmark on my black brogues to try to forget about the burning stare of the pale man boring into my back.

  I get up to escape to the refuge of the toilet. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the man beginning to fold a napkin over and over in his hands.

  The inside of the bathroom is lit like purgatory and purrs with pressure. Shapeless matter whirrs in suspended animation. I feel an odd new weight to the inside of my suit pocket and investigate with a shaking hand.

  My timorous fingertips close on the cold steel of a pistol.

  My eyes widen. I feel sick.

  Coughing into my hand, I try to massage my constricting throat which is clogging with a thick mucous. My oesophagus tightens. I notice the palm of my hand. It's stained with black ooze.

  I look in the mirror.

  Our Tormentor

  by Duncan Eastwood

  It’s surprising how much you can remember.

  My brother never stopped fighting right up until they slit his throat. The last time I saw his eyes filled with anything other than terror was seconds before we were captured.

  We were play-fighting in the field when the man with the cap grabbed my brother by the neck. I was trapped between the instincts of wanting to run but also wanting to help my sibling, and before I could make a decision it was made for me.

  The other man with long hair grabbed me and ushered me gently toward the vehicle. He spoke softly: “Come on, come on”, while the capped man’s form of coercion involved violently dragging my brother as he kicked and screamed.

  The man with the cap giggled, but when my brother’s lashing out struck him, the laughter stopped and the blows began. My brother was hit in the back and then in the leg. I could see his eyes dim a little with the sensation, then glow with surprise and fear as the pain began to circulate.

  My brother would keep fighting but there would be consequences every time. So my journey was quieter, as I reasoned that if I could just stay away from the pain there might be a chance to escape.

  The man with the hat
pushed my brother onto the truck. He turned, grabbed my ear and threw me inside. My head crashed into the wooden slats lining the side of the vehicle. I searched for my brother but this wasn’t easy as there were so many others in the darkness with us. Their bodies were difficult to make out, blending into one another, but their eyes stood out like darting fireflies in a cave. Filled with the same terror that I could see in my brother’s eyes and that was no doubt bursting from mine.

  Where were we going? Why had they gathered so many? What was the purpose? There were so many questions, and as some talked to each other I realised no one knew the answers.

  The truck doors separated and we stumbled into the light, struggling to keep balance as we tumbled down a ramp into a wooden corridor. Many rushed ahead, into an open cavity up ahead, the only exit from the corridor.

  I stayed back until I saw my brother in front and ran toward him. We embraced long enough for me to feel his heart thumping in his chest. We both turned as we heard the clang. At the end of the corridor, the cavity had closed. A metal door had dropped and cut off one of the others.

  We could hear him screaming.

  The sound of his feet scraping on the concrete floor.

  Then another clang.

  Silence.

  The door rose again. No one was inside. He was gone.

  “Next in line!” the man with the cap yelled. The next in line was my brother.

  We were both pushed into the corridor. It was so tight we couldn’t turn. My brother in front of me tried to swivel his head, his eyes pleading as he pushed back and into me. But I had nowhere to go. We were jammed against the back of the corridor, unable to move anywhere but forwards.

  Even though forwards was the only option, my brother refused to take it. The man with the cap leant over the wooden corridor with a large metal shaft and touched it to his behind. The shock sent my brother’s legs kicking as he scrambled to get away from the electrified prod. He called out to me as he moved toward the open cavity. I didn’t know what to say. My attempts to calm him were futile.