by Mark Tufo
“You can’t hurt me!” Seemed to be the gist of it. Blood was spraying all around as he shook it back and forth. If I wasn’t so frightened for my life, I would have been completely grossed out by his nearly disconnected hand flapping around like an elephant ear, as it tried to cool its host on a hot summer day on the savannah. “I’m going to fuck you up, asshole.”
You’ve got to be kidding me? I thought as he came at me again. I was scrabbling on the ground, trying to get my feet under me to get back up. Just as I did, he struck out with the said damaged hand. Those two severed bones hit me in the cheek, ripping through the meat on my face and once again spinning me to the ground. The victory I’d achieved was rather short-lived. What normal fuck still tries to attack when they get their hand chopped off? I kept wondering why everyone was trying to bust up my face–I could not help but wonder if they had talked to Linnick. Maybe it was blood loss or the realization that he was forever going to be called Rightie the Clown, but after he punched me he took a second to look at his severe wound. He even propped it up, like he’d poured a healthy dose of super glue and was now waiting for it to set the arm back in place. This, at least, gave me enough time to stand.
“You’re dead, Talbot!”
I had all sorts of witty comebacks. My personal favorite was “if I had a nickel for every time someone said that to me I could put a down payment on a house, or retire in the Bahamas, maybe build my own amusement park, fuck maybe even pay the bondsman to get your mama out of prison.” I didn’t have it in me to say it aloud, though. This thing before me was pure savagery. If he’d ever been a man, as he claimed; he no longer could be, could he? This was something possessed. I wanted to bury that axe into his head, repeatedly, I just didn’t want to get close enough to do it. His look alone could have murdered everyone that I’d ever known, if looks could…do that. Still, he held that hand up and it finally dawned on me what he was doing. Much like with the thigh injury, he did have some kind of super glue. He was somehow healing himself. I was fighting a hydra monster with a big rubber nose.
“Just a second longer.” Either he mumbled it or I was thinking it–I was out on an island with this one. I’ve fought more vile creatures than I can imagine but this one might have them all topped. He wasn’t the biggest or strongest, but there was something so disconcerting about fighting what should have been more human than monster, not to mention validating every childhood fear, and it was fucking me up in the head. I could not let him have that hand back to start the fight anew. I went after it with a single-minded determinedness; probably why I never saw him let go with his right and drive a fist into the side of my skull. I toppled stiffly to the ground like a hewn oak tree. My eyes closed before my head touched down, my mind screamed “tiiimmmber!.” Surprisingly enough, it was the sudden pain from making contact with the ground that woke my ass back up. My motto is to fight concussions with concussions; it’s always better to pile them on. Just ask any neurologist.
“Get up, Tallboat! It’s coming!”
I’ve seen professional fighters pretty much get their bell not only rung but cracked through like the Liberty Bell and somehow muscle memory kicks in and gets them up off the mat, even though they are pretty much dead on their feet. Yeah, that was me right then. Turns out my stumbling around may have saved my life. Tim had sent another fist-sized locomotive to travel down the tunnel of my throat–as luck would have it my left leg buckled and I dipped to that side. His fist mostly grazed the side of my cheek, but since the nerve endings were exposed, the brilliant electric shock of the pain was enough to burn the low-lying fog out of my head before he could follow up. How the hell I was still holding onto my axe is a mystery; there were probably so many things wrong with me I no longer had the ability to tell my hand to unclench–that seemed the most logical explanation.
I swung out to my side and kept turning with the momentum until I lodged that blade into the small of Tim’s back. There was a satisfying crunch and a sickening snap as I did some major spinal damage. He yelled out something about making my mother his bitch as his legs caved in. One moment they were supporting the monster and the next they just no longer worked. Much like the Silver Bridge of Mothman fame, I had severed the connection. I wrenched the blade free and walked a few steps away. I was winded and wounded and a little bit terrified. He was face down in the dirt but that stupid polka dot material was still rising and falling with his breaths.
“Just fucking die,” I said with my hands on my knees. I was hunched over but keeping a constant vigil on Tim. I wasn’t going to be like those horror movies in the seventies where the hero/heroine always turns away from the psycho killer after they confidently delivered the killing blow only to discover the twisted maniac was playing possum. I mean really, how many times has that been done? I was going to guarantee it didn’t happen here. And damned if his legs didn’t start to twitch like something inside of him was rebuilding the connections. I could picture little workers throwing repair cables across the span of the downed bridge.
“What kind of demon are you, Tim?” I asked softly as I crept up closer.
He turned his head, a wicked smile was the first thing I noticed. “I’m not one of those scum. I came down here with nothing! Nothing! They thought they were going to make me pay for my sins! Isn’t that rich?” He laughed until he coughed, very unsettling. “For fifty years they did things to me that only I should be allowed to do to others! Then I got a chance, my chance. I tore Kalder’s wings off–well chewed through one, ripped the other clean off. A funny thing happens when you take a demon’s wings; they don’t lose all their power, but they lose enough–yeah, just enough. I put him in the same restraints he’d kept me in all that time. Then I carved him up…piece by piece. I can’t say I’m overly fond of demon meat, but each bite of him was a savory-sweet victory. It took me a year to eat him. Want to know what the beauty of it was?”
“No. No, I really don’t.”
“Gonna tell you anyway. He was alive for most of it. Of course, those last three months he was in and out, might even say clinically insane, but yeah, he was alive. Those demons are some mighty tough fucks. I choked him down and made him watch. One of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. But even that is going to pale in comparison to what I have planned for you.”
This, boys and girls, should have been the time for me to go screaming into the night like a wild banshee. Not figuratively, but quite literally. I did a quick ball check, guys know what I mean, and I moved in. I brought that axe down into him so many times that if someone stumbled onto the scene they would have a difficult time telling where I stopped and Tim began. Dog food companies would have rejected the substance I made of that fucking clown.
“Fix that, Blowzo,” I said. As I stood up, heavy chunks of viscera fell from my lap and chest. Blood sluiced off of me in great runny runnels, pooling in puddles that even the ground would not accept. “You alright, Linnick?”
“What was that?” she asked. Not sure if she meant Tim himself or the frenetic beat down I’d just pulled on him.
I shrugged my shoulders; more slop fell from me. “I sure would like to get cleaned up.” I was just about carrying an extra person’s body weight on me. I wiped my face, but when your sleeve is just as gross as the rest of you, it’s difficult to make any headway. I waited for my heart to slow to a more normal pace; the cranked-up adrenaline finally sputtered and quit and my arms were leaden when I started to walk away.
Linnick had crawled from my pocket and up my shirt to sit perched on my shoulder like a pirate parrot. “Tallboat…” she said softly. “Tallboat, you should turn around.”
“I’d rather not.”
“I think you should.”
I had a good idea what I was going to see. I’d already foreshadowed it by talking about all those campy horror movies. I’d turn and Tim, in all his comic ugliness, would be standing there, polkadot pajamas, red wig, red nose, and white makeup–good as new. The oversized red lips would be pulled back i
n a huge, frenzied sneer when he came at me with a chainsaw. I mean, that’s how these things go, right?
I turned. Sure as shit, Tim was lunging towards me. He had a scimitar the size of the Reaper’s. The edge looked sharp enough, so odds were I wouldn’t feel too much; naturally I’d have a couple of uncomfortable seconds where I looked up at my body as my head rolled around on the ground. Eventually, my body would fall alongside my head and my brain would stop functioning. Those last few seconds, though, they were going to be a drag. Do you think all those things we heard about the guillotine were true? Is that why they held the head up? Icing on the execution cake? Would you have enough faculties to actually realize you were looking at your own body? You would. Terror is all in your head, along with your eyeball function. What a fucked-up thing. Pretty sure they already made their point by separating your most vital piece of equipment from the machinery, but then to go and rub habanero-infused salt into the wound? Well, that’s just taking being a dick to a whole new level.
But it wasn’t Tim getting ready to off my head, not saying that would have been a more welcome sight, but it sure would have been a lot less weird. His parts were starting to meld together, not like the liquid metal Terminator, where it pooled together and reformed–nope nothing that normal-ish. All his scattered pieces had sprouted insectoid legs and were scurrying to get to where the other pieces were, and it was in a completely hectic fashion. There was no order to it. The best way I can explain it is they seemed to just run around crazily until by sheer chance they hit another part, and then when that happened they fused with a hollow, drawn out popping sound and as the parts got bigger those damn legs got bigger. Inch worms were becoming caterpillars then becoming millipedes, and then there was a damned weasel-sized centipede. I was beginning to look for an exit sign from this fucking circus side show when Linnick spoke.
“You can’t leave him like this.”
For a mistaken second, I thought she wanted me to help him. Then she got specific, and it was worse.
“The head. You have to take the head.”
As of yet, the caved-in skull had not sprouted any legs. It was still canted on its side, one eye closed, the other lying about a foot away, still attached by a thick, wet rope of optic nerve. It was right this very second, I thought maybe I was back in my own world and I had finally slipped over into the uncharted waters of true insanity as that loose eyeball began to track me. It was watching me. I’m as sure of that as I was of Azile’s undying love. Wait…scratch that one for now; I’ll revisit it later.
“No fucking way, Linnick. First off, the thing must weight thirty pounds and secondly…just fucking ewww.” I’m glad none of my manly friends could see me saying “ewww” to a tiny female buglet giving advice from my front pocket.
“He’ll be back together in an hour; less if you don’t grab that thing.”
“We can get a good jump on him in that time.” I could hear the little legs clacking along as they did their hideously disgusting job.
“He’ll come for you; he’ll never stop.”
“Have you seen The Terminator, too?”
“Tallboat! You cannot let him re-form.”
“Sure I could.” But of course, I wasn’t going to let him, I was moving forward, just at my own pace. I halted my progress almost immediately when I saw something move down my leg, Then off my boot and down my jacket. The pieces of him that were stuck to me were moving to join the fray, either by their new locomotion system or just by liquefying and rolling off me like I was made of Teflon. On one side of the spectrum, it was pretty cool that I was getting cleaned up, but the other side…well it was kind of freaking me out a bit, like a meth head who believes there are bugs crawling all over and under their skin, freaking out. Only this was true and I didn’t even have the benefit of being high out of my mind. I was not opposed to stripping naked, pouring gasoline on myself, and doing a little spring cleaning.
“What is going on here!?” I pleaded, though no one was listening.
“The head. Take. The. Head,” she repeated through tight lips, like a broken record stuck skipping on a song I can’t stand. Something was poking inside Tim’s cheek and finally broke through–it was a leg, nearly the width of a finger; another sprouted from his mouth, then the vacated eye socket. Like his damn noggin knew what I was going to do to it and was going to make a run for it. Five more legs popped out, some at impossible angles to be able to do anything but flail. When it started dragging that trailing eyeball around I was sick–yeah, I've seen a lot, but a spider clown head was more than I could stomach. Once I finished getting rid of the little bile rising in my throat, I was going for Tim’s head. I used to think I had a cast-iron stomach back in my Corps days, with the amount of alcohol I could drink and not get sick. Some things do change. Unlike all the other little pieces of him, his head had the power of sight and was actively, err, headed, for its stumbling parts so I couldn’t mess with it. On one side, it wasn’t all that fast or agile, like all the legs really weren’t on the same page kind of thing; on the other it was a damn shame because I caught it relatively quickly. And by “caught” I mean I squashed the optic nerve under my heel to halt its regrouping effort.
The legs started stabbing at my boot, thankfully ineffectually; finally, something funny about a clown. There was no way I was taking this horrendous thing with me. I couldn’t do it. I could, however, make it extremely difficult for it to find me when it became whole again. I reached down and in one deft movement, freed the eyeball from its constraint. The other one swiveled up at me in panic. The legs started scurrying when they realized exactly what I was doing, though they could not free themselves.
“This just sucks,” was all I could manage to say as I brought the flat of my blade down on the top of Tim’s skull. The crunching of skull plate is a uniquely disgusting sound and unfortunately, I’d heard it more than anyone should have to. It took five good whacks until his right eye finally popped free, though I could not stop myself until the tenth or eleventh. If Tim was to recover from this, I wanted to make sure it took as long as possible. I cut that eye free, grabbed the spongy red nose and scooped both orbs up into it. Almost stuck it all in my pocket when I realized that there was no reason to think that these things wouldn’t grow their own legs and then they’d be scuttling around in my pants. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. While I had been busy working up the nerve to hinder Tim, his body had been gaining steam in the regeneration department. He had a couple of pieces that were as large as rabbits stumping around now. It wouldn’t be long until he was performing his routine again.
I stomped on one of the larger pieces, a forearm or maybe a calf, I don’t know, I just wanted the material covering it. I cut the pajama-like silk free as the body part struggled against me. I made a hobo bindle and stuck my prizes inside it. I was wishing I had a long stick so I could carry it over my shoulder. I cinched it tight and then tied it to a belt loop. It was now going to be important for me to forget what was in there so I could focus on getting out of here.
“We should go,” I told Linnick as I surveyed the general area, recovering my wits. A horror writer with a sick, twisted imagination who had been off his meds far too long could not have come up with a more disturbing scene. I mean, I suppose he or she could, but why? I don’t know how I was ever going to forget watching all those Tim parts running around. Booze—and lots of it.
“We should go,” Linnick echoed from the bottom of my pocket. She’d also seen enough, so it would seem.
I was sort of in a fugue state, so I’m not sure how far I’d walked or how much time had transpired, but when Tim let go a full-throated scream that he would find me, that shook the cobwebs free and I picked up the pace. The clown bag was thumping against my leg, I did my best to pretend it was the movement of my walking that caused it to do that; the illusion quickly dissipated, though, when I stopped to get my bearings and it still kept struggling. The next best thing I could come up with was Mexican jumping beans; that was t
he band-aid I chose to slap over the gash in my mind. Worked pretty good, too.
Chapter 16
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 13
“Do you think it wise to stop?” Linnick asked. Just as I was sliding down what could be considered a tree, though I doubt anything this warped and stunted would ever have a chance to live in my world.
“I’m just kind of at a loss. I’m a little worn out, both mentally and spiritually. Physically, I’m pretty good, but I’m in the midst of a serious head-fuck and I need to sweep around the edges in there.”
“Not only are we in hostile territory, but we are being actively pursued on many fronts.”
“Linnick–yeah, I know, but my son tried to double cross me and my wife might be in on it. I don’t know much about your world but that shit is most definitely not normal where I’m from. It happens, but it’s more likely one of those things you see in a movie and you’re like “how fucked up is that?” Then drink your coke and eat some popcorn, not dwelling on it too much because it doesn’t apply to real life. But when it happens to you, when those closest to you–the ones you’d trust with your life–are the ones trying to stab you in the back? It kind of makes everything else look trivial. Oh, Oggie, I miss you. He’d never try to screw me over.”
“Did your father ever bring you to an auction site and sell you off to the highest bidder?”
I halted my personal pity party to look at Linnick. “I am so sorry…I had no idea. No wonder you turned out the way you did.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, definitely taking offense.
“I…I’m just saying that might be why you’re here, though that doesn’t seem fair…how could one that had evil perpetrated against them be held accountable when they, in turn, did evil acts? One of them perpetual motion machines type of thing, I guess.”
