by Jordan Krall
The streets are aching for rain, for violence, for some great big BOOM. I ride the subway back and forth, all around, underground. I come up to the surface and I’m shocked by the lights. I’m the great white worm filming this shit for the masses. Cameras are more expensive than I thought. Must have sold blood, sperm, and anus for a machine like that.
I’m waving my light in the air and saying: take me now!
Nothing, nada, zip.
Some French creep tries to rub his come-hand on me as he steps out of the skin flick shop. With my fingers I blind him like a newly shaven saint. That’ll teach him, yeah. Fucking tourist. He mumbles something about being a member of some ‘cable regime’ whatever the hell that means, I don’t know. I don’t care. I wipe my finger off on his pea coat and tell him to pray to the stars, motherfucker. That’s your only way out of here.
Fucking freak fuckers.
Some other guy is finished with the donkey film and steps over to another machine and puts in his tokens. A handwritten note tells us what he’s watching: Rose Well in COCKEYED SLUTS IN OUTER SPAZE.
Not worth the money, I’d say, but the guy doesn’t give a shit, I know. He’s slobbering all over himself. It’s pathetic but I understand where he’s coming from. He doesn’t know the truth, that he’s only a flaccid skin puppet dancing around Times Square for their entertainment. Poor guy.
He sees I’m looking at him and gives me a dirty look (not as dirty as the movie he’s watching) and the finger.
Eh, fuck him. Fucking puppet.
Fucking freak fucker.
I ride the subway again, back and forth, back and forth. Clears my head. The graffiti speaks to me like gospel. The messages are there if you know where to look. Space codes in ghetto script. Not only does it clear my head but it cleans out the vat of psychic retardation that’s been plaguing me for the last week. Thoughts have been burning a hole through my perception and making colors appear as people and people appear as sounds and smells. I feel like a child drowned in rainbow wax.
Two hours later I’m back on the streets, running my own game, being my own hustler. The talent on the street know better than to ask me if I want a blowjob (the best blowjob in Times Square, I’m told by every other head-hole). Shit, they know I’m all skin, hair, and metallic bone: rebuilt from debris from dozens of crashes. They have to know because I’ve told them time after time after time. I’ve told them to spread the word. I spent some time in front of that flea circus, telling the patrons my story.
Looking into the sky I see them circling and I’m reminded of when they were following the Jews in the wilderness. So many years of experiments just to create a few dozen freaks for fucking, freaks for solar systematic pornography, planetary snuff films involving living skin flaps and teeth monkeys and five-headed prophets with gargantuan penises in dead bone towers. These people and the goats and donkeys and camels all reach orgasm in primitive atom splitting. Mushroom clouds cover the promised landscape until all freaks are forced underground into the hollow earth.
Look at those fucking saucers go. Gigantic things, very intimidating, enlightening.
Now they’re circling Times Square and I’m wondering if they’ll just take me back up there or leave me here to ride the subway for eternity. Eh, who gives a shit? I’m dead either way.
Fucking freak fuckers.
HIS JERUSALEM
Ash Lomen
Dorsnag hefted both of his launchers above his biomechanically-muscled shoulders, letting out a deep sigh in that same sweet-musky scent as his rotting endoskeleton. He screamed a battle cry for the entire ruined world like a Husqvarna chainsaw revving up for slaughter.
His eye-growths spotted two Arabs, or what looked like Arabs… they had brown skin after all (but not for long) as his launchers fired not rockets or grenades, but condensed white phosphorus that burned like hell on earth…..and in seconds the suspected combatants would have no skin at all.
A.K. fire to his right tank-flank.
An old woman draped in purple rags was firing the powerful rifle with one hand, holding it amazingly steady (as he could sense no bio-implants in her frail frame) and cradling a small infant under her free arm. The rifle’s heavy shells were nothing but bee stings to the hulking former-human before her. He turned up the Death Metal in his brain-speakers….thresholds of Nocturnus….
Dorsnag opened both the gun doors in his bulky neck, blasting fresh holes in the old bag’s abdomen and shattering the soft egg-like skull of her infant, the grey yoke dripping and sizzling upon the hot desert sands.
Dorsnag turned to see what else was still alive in this wasted desertscape that had once been called Jerusalem by some. He was about to make a call to his commanders when he shook, his titan-frame dropping to its knees as if by an errant bolt of lightning. He felt the dim pang of a conscience he had had before all the surgeries. Something was wrong with him. He had killed infants before so what was different?
After the slaughter he would have to talk to his programmer/physiotherapist and most likely get beefed up on some new mind-numbing medications. Dorsnag could already feel his grey matter begin to crystallize.
Those pills that had made him stop believing in God were still giving him a skin rash after all these years...
Dorsnag was distracted by his thoughts but even if he had not been, he would have never seen the slithering Valdrott move across the sand and envelope him in its alien dervish of purple-black tentacles….
THE NUDES LIFT SHIELDS FOR GALAXY WARS
Jordan Krall
Robert Smith was sitting in a pub, minding his own business, and scribbling prose poems on napkins though he knew they’d turn out to be complete rubbish: love this, loss that, surreal image here and there, tentacles and blood, cold cavernous imagery symbolizing his ex-wife’s vagina.
It’s all just shit.
He needed his mind right. Smith worshipped productivity. His mind moved a million miles a minute and he knew why. Despite the medication (legal and illegal), despite seeing the psychiatrist twice a week, despite the constant walks up and down Sentinel Hill, Robert still could not escape the realization his time was up.
Those goddamn dreams that turned out not to be dreams. He remembered being sucked up from his bed like a paper doll, curling into the air as if his bones were wet newspapers. Oh no, those weren’t bloody dreams, Robbie, they were some nice fellows taking you on holiday.
Right, mum, right.
He finished his pint and threw the napkins down to the pub floor. Let some other pathetic fucker find them, read them to his girlfriend, let her think he was a genius or some shit. Poetry was for pathetic wankers. Robert vowed he wouldn’t write another line for as long as he lived….which wasn’t going to be much longer.
The walk to his car was warm but still chilled him to the bone. Above him, the stars winked like sinister old men with motives, ancient and profane. That wasn’t far from the truth, Robert knew.
He looked at a large stone someone had thrown into the road. In the starlight he could see his name carved deeply: Robert Smith, paper doll torn to shreds.
With a shake of his head, he erased the words and kept walking.
The thought of his getting into his bed to sleep was no comforting. He considered finding a place to rest near the old Campbell plant. There was a patch of woods there and he was fairly sure they wouldn’t be able to find him.
But who was he kidding? They would always find him.
They’d find him, fuck him, torture him, and turn him into a million monstrosities until they finally dropped him back like a pile of wet laundry. So what was the use?
Yes, he’d go to his house. If they were going to finally take him forever, he wanted it to be on his terms. When he got to his house, his neighbor Donny Howland was outside watering the lawn (who waters the lawn at ten to midnight?) and Robert gave a final wave to the man who, despite being an annoying neighbor, wasn’t that bad of a guy.
Once inside, Robert poured himself a glass of milk,
added honey to it, and sat down on the most comfortable chair in the house. Then he put his headphones on and started listening to his favorite song.
Billy Idol’s New Future Weapon.
By the end of the song, Robert Smith could feel his skin burn and his bowels heating up like an oven full of fecal bread. Idol’s voice lulled him into a hypnotic state as the visitors entered his home and took him away.
(to be continued in RAIN HELL FROM ABOVE)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jordan Krall is the author of Piecemeal June, Squid Pulp Blues, Fistful of Feet, King Scratch, and Beyond the Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys. Readers are encouraged to contact him at jordankrall.wordpress.com
Ash Lomen is clinically insane and currently hiding from the mental wards in Southern Louisiana. His only friends are cats and an imaginary mechanical worm with the head of Willem Dafoe. He is also the author of Swallowed by the Horizon, a chapbook of bizarre and deranged Western poetry/short fiction.
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