Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  Wombag might look like an idiot and sound like an idiot even more often, but he really wasn’t all that stupid, not in comparison to someone like Senator; the young kid –she knew she was only something like five years older than Wombag, but she felt so much older than that, all thanks to Ziggurat- had enough on the ball to stay out of sight and out of mind.

  But that couldn’t last for much longer. They were on the outside, he was on the inside. A small itch was growing in the back of her head, a mounting fear that the longer the guy was trapped on the inside but still having access to Ziggurat –she’d learned to anticipate the odd, nearly terrifying pinching feeling in her pocket moments before that glorious vial arrived- meant that very soon, Wombag was going to be feeling the effects of long-term, continual access.

  And that meant that any day now, more of those secret changes that no one ever spoke of would come burning up through the gangly moron, filling him with more strength and more speed and –more importantly- utter conviction that he’d become invincible.

  Cherry Cristal didn’t know much about what was going on inside that compound, not really, not even after staring thoughtfully at the guards and memorizing faces and everything else she and the others were doing, but she did know that they were tougher as a group.

  One little Wombag on his own would wreak some havoc, cause some damage, but it wasn’t enough.

  She didn’t know what to do. Rushing the compound felt like a mistake because of all the guards with guns.

  Something had to be done, and soon. Whispers along Cherry’s skin suggested that if she didn’t move this along, the steady supply of Zigg would disappear overnight, and if there was one thing she knew more than anything else, it was that when you stopped being able to score all day every day, the poison in your veins killed you stone cold dead.

  And that was a fact.

  Cherry shifted her feet, eyes still staring at the ever-growing compound full of people.

  There had to be something she could do…

  ***

  Slinkydog couldn’t stop playing with his face. Like, at all. And he knew that the normal people –the moms and the dads and little boys and girls and everyone who seemed to be walking around all the time, nonstop, everywhere- kept staring at him, whispering things to each other and thinking those good, shining thoughts about their choices in life, how good they were, how much better they were than he was and one day soon, Slinkydog knew –even as he pulled so hard on his lower lip that he worried in the back of his head if he wasn’t going to pull it all the way off this time- that they. Were. Wrong.

  Dead wrong.

  The glorious golden light that poured out through his skin proved them wrong. Every time. When he filled himself with precious Ziggurat and his insides turned into a seething mass of muscle and unbridled speed and that excellence began to leak out of his skin, burn through his clothes, to fill the whole world around him into a shining, blazing star, he knew he’d made the right choice.

  An old granny walked by, with her hair up tight in one of those old lady buns that always made Slinkydog think of the cinnamon buns he used to get from his granny when he’d been a little kid, only instead of acting like his granny –who would’ve smiled wide and bright and given him five dollars while telling him not to say anything- this one made a nasty old mean face.

  Some words came out of his mouth. Slinky wasn’t sure what they were because he was still pulling on his lower lip, but they sounded like curse words, so, still pulling on his lip –which felt like one of those worms you used for fishing- he started cackling, which sounded so weird that he started laughing even harder.

  Slinky wished more people would take Ziggurat. It’d help their moods. For sure it would, wouldn’t it? Though right now he supposed he wasn’t in the best of moods. His buddy Wombag was on the other side of the unfair, cold gray wall surrounded by people not on Zigg. Slinky couldn’t stop thinking about the skinny guy, all trapped and alone and trying to figure out what to do.

  This mission was weird. Slinky wasn’t entirely sure if he liked it, but he did like the free Ziggurat.

  Moving from lower lip to earlobes, Slinky thought about the Zigg they’d all been taking, the stuff that magically appeared in their pockets every night at the same time. It felt stronger. Smelled the same. Tasted the same.

  Didn’t have the same effects, though, oh ho ho no, not at all.

  This stuff made you feel stronger. Helped you see better in the dark and you could smell things from forever far away; right now, in fact, Slinky could smell tacos and hotdogs and sizzling hot fresh beef and all kinds of things that had his empty stomach twisting and turning into tight, painful knots.

  Slinky –yanking so hard on his earlobes that the one on the left started bleeding- knew exactly what he was going to do the moment they decided they were going to attack the building. He wasn’t going to look for the man they had to kill or look for Wombag or anything like that.

  Oh no, oh ho, oh no. He was going to head for one of those food carts and he was going to eat everything in sight.

  Quite possibly people included, that’s how hungry he was.

  ***

  “Fuckyou. Fuck YOU. Fuck YOUUUU. Shitballasscunt.” Frigget loved swears. Loved how they bounced off surfaces. Concrete, glass, trees, cars, people.

  People were surfaces. Frigget had tried to explain it to everyone, including Cherry, who was smart as smart could be, but she hadn’t gotten it. People were surfaces. Hard and shiny bright, soft and warm, wet and … spackly. And other kinds of surfaces, too. Sometimes, you found someone who was hard and warm, which was weird, but if you could burrow in through the hard, you found someone warm, like his dad, but his mom had been hard and cold and spiny all the way through and through, hugging her had been like hugging stinging nettle…

  “ASScunT bloodybag Frigget town USA fuck you sideWAYS, biTCH!” Frigget twiddled his fingers at the young couple holding hands and nearly pissed himself with laughter as the young lady with cornflower yellow hair and pretty pink butterfly clips holding ponytails in place nearly started crying.

  He winked and twiddled grimy, dirt-stained fingers at the kid, prominently displaying the long, sharp, diseased-looking nails and winked again. “Hey, hey, fuckit, am I right? Gotta go someTIME, fucking slobbery dickbag. Come at me, bro.”

  Frigget watched the couple hurry away, wondering at the last time he’d had someone hold his hand. Well, technically, that was probably Senator, from when they’d fought, but really, that was really, really technically, because Senator had in fact been trying to pull his hand right off his body.

  But they were all so strong now, so pulling his hand off had been like trying to pull off his own hand, so Senator had given up and had gone on to other methods of attempted murder of friends.

  Frigget could feel Senator on the far, kitty-corner side of the compound, so he perked himself up and started hollering, hoping his best friend could hear him. “Should take off the mask, you dumbass futhermucker! Can’t bite anyone with your teeth then, can’t chew off a finger or nothing, fucking hell! BITE THE FINGERS OFF, fuckBAG!”

  Frigget did a little dance on the spot, a quick little jig that was mostly stamping his feet and wiggling his arms around. Holy hell, he was bored off his pants. No one even paid him any real attention anymore when they came by and he started swearing at them. They were used to his swears, which was why he was shouting so loud now.

  Because people were surfaces and they didn’t like swears, if you could find the right swears, you could bounce those words right inside, right to the soft gooey middle parts and maybe make people cry or scream or try and fight you because that was what it was all about.

  But most of the people in this stupid fucking neighborhood, they’d gotten used to him. They threw coins at his feet, as if he was begging for money to buy food. You didn’t need proper food when you had Ziggurat scorching you from the inside out, no you didn’t. Some old churchlady had tried giving him some pamphlets on how
the Church of Who the Fucking Fuck Cares, You Dirty Old Lady could save his life, and he’d actually had to piss on them in front of her to make her go away!

  Who did that? Who made someone pull out their dink to pee on papers in public to make them go away?

  “A crazy person, that’s who the fuck WHO!” Frigget loved shouting almost as much as he liked swearing, and this new type of shouting, which he’d gotten from watching stupid rap videos growing up, was just so much fun. “Old LADY inna churchy outfit FUCK YOUUU.”

  Frigget looked to where he could feel Cherry Cristal pacing back and forth, forth and back. He hoped they got the go ahead soon. Wombag was trapped inside and he was trapped inside his own head out here, swearing at everything. If they didn’t attack soon he was probably going to eat someone just to pass the time, no matter the white hot fire-words burned into his bones said over and over that he had to behave.

  “Find THE man! Kill the MANN! Fucking fuck his shit right the FUCK UP, motherFUCK!”

  ***

  Senator made sure his mask was on nice and tight, sealing his insides away from the tough and cruel outsides. There was a tiny little bit of pressure hissing in by his left ear, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that right now; all his spare masks were tucked away nice and safe inside that little cubby hole by the bridge and if he tried walking away right then to get a new one, Cherry would pull his innards out through his asshole.

  The hissing sound was like a blinding white noise, a stabbing dagger in his ear, but he couldn’t do anything. He tucked the long part of the mask there under the collar of his torn suit jacket as best he could, then spent a good five minutes wiggling his head this way and that until he found that if he tilted his head just like this and didn’t move it, the whole of his insides were packed away tight.

  And suddenly, all was dead inside. Dark, black, quiet. Warm and sweaty, just like Senator wanted his grave to be.

  His tongue ran reflexively across the sharp edges of his shattered teeth hard enough to slice tiny little cuts every time. Senator wished he could stop doing that, then even as he wished he could stop, his tongue went and did it again. He was sure he could control the urge, if he just worked harder at it.

  Through the squished-up corners of one of his mask-eyes, Senator watched people walking by. They stared, he stared. They looked away, he kept staring. It was a good time. Every now and then, someone would look back at him, over their shoulders, eyes all hooded and dark with concern. Senator screamed at them from inside his mind, and the insides of his mask filled with heavy psychic pressure at the effort, but the people who looked at him didn’t die or anything like that.

  Senator turned to look at the buildings and the people, and the corner of the mask where the hissing came in popped loose and for a frightful minute, all he could hear was a high-pitched whistle, like air coming through a leak on an airplane as it hurtled through the sky. He fought with the mask, and the mask gave in.

  The noise went away. Senator went back to watching the building, remembering the last time he’d been in an airplane. There’d been drinks and handshakes and smug smiles and congratulations and all that kind of thing, but then he’d found the first of the vials of Ziggurat in his pocket later that night and that’d been that.

  Senator’s tongue ran across his razor sharp teeth. Were they longer than they’d been? He remembered the gap between broken teeth and whole teeth as clear as day. Were they growing?

  They might be. They might be growing. There was definitely something growing inside of him. Inside of all of them. How could there not be? His brain –when he wasn’t dealing with the howling outside world trying to deafen him forever- was full of whispers and commands and strange urges to hurry along inside and kill someone named Garth Nickels.

  Senator wanted to do that. Wanted to get in there and kill basically everyone, but especially Nickels, because other than the screaming clamorousness that was the outside, that man’s name was even noisier and … screamier.

  Wombag was in there, somewhere, doing something, too, which was more than could be said for any of them out here.

  Senator hoped things got moving along. His real face was falling to pieces and he needed to get another one from the secret stash of faces under the bridge. If he didn’t, he was going to start screaming.

  And screaming and screaming and screaming.

  ***

  Wombag could feel the thunder of men’s footsteps above him.

  Close to quitting time, he thought, he thought it was close to quitting time.

  Their heavy footsteps made the earth and the dirt surrounding him on all sides shiver. Tiny little bombs of dirt fell onto his face and chest and neck and broke apart, sending trails of soft puffball earth falling this way and that way. Felt like spiders. Millions and millions of teeny tiny little spiders crawling all over him, looking for a hole to climb in.

  But they weren’t spiders. Wombag knew that. But they could be spiders. Any single one of those frightening poofs of dirt raining down on him from the roof of his small little prison could be spiders at any second, and so as he lay there in his handmade, quickly dug personal coffin made of earth and stone and dirt, Wombag lay still as the dead, breathing shallow breaths, and waited.

  Waited for one of those balls of dirt, those clods of dirt soil to start moving in the other direction.

  When that happened, Wombag promised himself he’d do his best not to scream and run from his hiding spot, but he knew just as well that if something skittered across him as he tried to hide, the chances of him staying still were a number smaller than zero.

  With the heavy footsteps came complaints. Wombag wasn’t deep enough in the ground yet –he hoped he didn’t start to grow, he was already too tall and if he did, he wouldn’t be as fast as the wind anymore- to stop hearing the voices of the workers as they toiled and toiled and toiled in building the enemy’s great lair.

  In the morning, when they stomped like giant gods on their way to fight monsters in the labyrinth, they talked about what they’d done the night before. Most talked about drinking and fucking, some talked about video games –Wombag missed his PS4 sometimes because sometimes when Ziggurat wasn’t a hornet’s nest under his skin, he stood and watched commercials outside pawn shops on televisions and some games looked really good but not better than Zigg- and some, some talked about how lonely they were, working in San Francisco when their homes were in California or even further away.

  That was an interesting thing. Wombag missed his home. Missed it a lot. He couldn’t remember coming all the way here from New Jersey, but he must have somehow because … because here he was, in San Francisco. It was too warm for him, but he stayed because … reasons.

  At the end of their day, when they were doing fighting monsters in mythical mazes, their complaints were of the valuable kind, the kind Wombag wished he could give to Cherry Cristal; he could feel her out there in the darkness, super-charged Ziggurat brain screaming in the twilight, but he was either not smart enough or strong enough to scream back.

  He wished he could. He wished so, so very hard, all so he could tell them, tell them it wasn’t going to be as easy as fighting each other in the park.

  Another spider-ball of dirt fell smack dab on his forehead and burst apart to release a million rivulets of soft earth that traipsed merrily down the sides of his forehead. Dread filled him from bottom to top and side to side. One of those dirt trails had fallen right to his ear.

  Was there something crawling in his ear? Was there? Wombag tensed his entire body until it was ramrod straight and fairly vibrating. Was there? Something crawling in his ear? He held his breath now, too, because if he was holding it, maybe he wouldn’t be able to scream.

  The walls of his coffin –dirt and soil and earth and rock and the occasional dropped screw- grew closer and closer. The darkness combined with a tiny little smidgeon of light played tricks on him now, filling the corners with … wiggly darker shapes, like … like starfish with lobster cl
aws and octopus tentacles and with mouths full of big old teeth.

  This was it. He was going to scream and scream and then he was going to climb out of the only hiding place he’d been able to find and that would be that, he’d be out there in the midnight air killing anyone and everything he saw …

  The dirt dislodged itself.

  Wombag laughed, only quietly. Just dirt. Just dirt again.

  Spiders didn’t live underground. Spiders lived in trees and in houses.

  But worms… worms lived underground. Wombag remembered reading about that in class, before Ziggurat. So many worms and sowbugs and …

  Wait.

  What was that?

  Was that … something wriggling under his bum?

  ***

  “I wish I had a recording of that song.” Garth said to himself as he deftly piloted his now completely airborne, homemade predator drones over the worksite. Down below, picked out easily through the high-def optics built directly into each one of the things, workers on their way home or to local hotels for the night did their usual thing, which was lollygag until all the fucking gags had been lollied.

  Garth wasn’t entirely certain he’d ever really had a real job –you sure as fuck couldn’t count his time in Specter- where you went to work and did, like, your eight or your ten and then went home only to wake up and do it the next day, but he was certain of one thing.

  The last thing he’d do was fucking waste time leaving.

  “That’s right, boys and girls,” Garth watched a few departing workers and –for shits and giggles- tagged them for processing through the upgraded facial rec software, “as much as I might like working with you motherfuckers on a day to day basis, the moment the old steam whistle toucan screams, I would bounce so hard. So. Hard. And then, I’d like, just … sit. Around. Doing nothing. Because I would, in theory, be working hard for my money.”