Cry nods. “Let’s do it.”
Jesus backs up a few steps, his hand hovering over the handle of the furry pistol in his belt. Sex bends slowly, stretching her reptilian claws to the back of her thighs.
Before they draw their weapons, they are interrupted by the Telosians around them. Something is happening that has caught their attention:
The Telosians are now killing and fucking at the same time. An orgy of sex and death.
Cry and Jesus drop out of their attack-stances and turn away, investigating the people around them.
“It’s beautiful,” Cry says.
Death just grunts and nods his head.
They look at each other and their lips curl into wicked grins. Then they shake hands.
“We can do great things together, missy,” Death says.
“Wonderful, magical things,” she says.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The wall of the vault collapses and the morning sun shines in. Nixx and Sharp crab-walk themselves awake, then cover their privates with wet pillows and cans of beef.
Telosians are standing in the new doorway that have just formed, laughing at them with stand-up comedy shows on their faces, slapping their knees and tumbling backwards in drunken glee.
“What the hell?” Nixx cries.
They are unsure how or why the Telosians collapsed the wall, but if these drunken idiots were able to do it he can’t imagine how easy it would be for the demons.
Nixx pulls his pants and boots on. Sharp is clutching a wad of clothes against her body, she doesn’t want any of them to see her hermaphrodite parts.
Nixx’s shirt is somewhere in her arms, so he goes shirtless. His green face paint smudged down his neck and chest. His bandage still tight and neat across his rib cage.
He looks out across the town. It has been destroyed. The party is still raging in the streets. Television heads are slamming against each other while fucking or fighting.
Bodies are scattered through the street. Either dead or passed out from exhaustion.
Cry and Jesus have ruined the town.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nixx finds Cry sunbathing nude in the back of a wagon with two sleeping (possibly dead) Telosian girls.
“What have you done?” Nixx screams.
Cry stretches her legs at him and closes her eyes.
“You’ve destroyed the place!”
She sighs and sits up, dangling her legs off of the edge of the wagon at him.
“Don’t be such a Hoak,” she says.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I had a beautiful time last night,” she says. “I don’t regret a second of it.”
“You’re such a disease,” he says. “Why do you have to fuck everybody you come across? Why do you have to rape and molest and pervert?”
She changes the subject. “Did you have fun with Sharp last night?”
His eyebrows tighten.
“Was it cozy just the two of you in that little vault? Pressed together in the heat, sweating against each other.”
Nixx doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know if she’s just teasing or knows he really did get intimate with Sharp last night. Maybe she saw it in her cum, maybe she can just tell by sexual intuition, or maybe in the back of her brain she can see every sexual act that happens everywhere in the world.
“Screw you,” Nixx says. “Screw this whole place.”
Nixx stomps away from her, kicking at the muddy road.
“Where are you going?” she calls out to him.
“Leaving,” he says.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sharp wanders through the bedlam of Telos in her forest skin. A drunken Telosian tries to grab her, maybe trying to rape and hurt her, but his hands fall through her skin and into her forest body. She grabs him by the belt and pulls him television first inside of her, his box head small enough to fit through her chest. But the Telosian jerks away from her before he goes all the way in. He leaps back and ogles her with a boxing show and then runs away.
After a few minutes of searching, she finds Oxy sit- ting on a corner with his television bride. He watches her face and she watches the television painted on his belly.
They are covered in white dust but it doesn’t look like they took part in the party through the night. Oxy has been on his honeymoon. But instead of making love, he just stared into her eyes all night long.
“Looks like it was one hell of a party last night,” Sharp says to him.
He raises his finger at her like Battle Johnny used to.
She goes around to his front and faces him from over his wife’s shoulder.
“Did you see where Nixx went?” Sharp asks him.
“Left town,” Oxy says.
“That’s impossible,”she says. “I was just with him thirty minutes ago.”
“Told me he was leaving,” he says. “Not five minutes ago.”
Sharp scans the street, squints her eyes at the end of the road in the distance. She can’t see anything through the dizzy mob.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nixx outside of town:
He still couldn’t find his shirt when he went back to the vault, but he did get some supplies, his Hoak bow, and wrapped a quiver of arrows across his chest.
He goes west, into the changing landscape.
Today, the landscape has a cemetery theme. There are tombstones stretching as far west as he can see. Some are small wooden crosses, some are large stone angels. From monuments ten feet tall, to little stone slabs on the ground.
A mile of walking and Nixx looks back. He can hardly see Telos anymore. Just miles of cemetery in every direction. He doesn’t know where he’s going.
Maybe this is the end of the world, he thinks. Maybe instead of just ending it is this repetitive landscape continuing on for infinity.
That would be hell for Nixx. The cemetery is already driving him crazy because the tombstones aren’t placed evenly apart from each other. It disgusts him that they aren’t identical in size and shape.
The graves end after an hour and there is a large desert landscape stretching to the horizon. It is empty of bush and cactus, but there are corpses everywhere.
Black sun-dried corpses.
He approaches one of them: a goblin.
They are all dead. The black goblins have died out on their own. Like a virus without a host to feed from.
Kneeling down, the crispy skeletal face is shriveled, lips dried back to reveal cracked glass teeth.
He jumps up and stomps on the creature’s chest. Its rib cage crumbles under his foot and black dust rises from the body.
When the dust settles, he notices something inside of it. Something round.
He pulls the object out of the body and wipes the soot away. It is a snow globe. He shakes it and then watches as flakes of snow fall down on a cabin in the woods.
His eyes go from the globe to the corpse, pondering the globe’s origin. Then he approaches another dead goblin and kicks its chest in.
“Shit,” he says to the body, as he finds another strange object within: a kaleidoscope.
He picks it up and looks through the eyehole, twisting the tube for a psychedelic array of colors.
For hours, Nixx continues smashing corpses and finding little treasures inside of their bodies.
He finds: a baseball, a leather glove, a Tonka truck, a hockey mask, a bag of circus peanuts, a 2-liter of Crystal Pepsi, a teenaged girl’s half-written diary, a box of staples, a glass eye, a Klingon knife (a.k.a. tajtIq), an Easter egg, a collector’s edition DVD of “Cyborg” starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, a rubber band ball, a pack of GPC menthol cigarettes, an iron kitten, Cobra Commander, a rubber hand, and a shark tooth necklace.
Nixx gives up after that, but not before organizing them into neat rows and columns. Four items by four items. He has two items leftover. The only thing of use is the strange- shaped knife, so he puts that in his belt. He doesn’t need the rubber band ball. It doesn’t fit in his con
figuration and keeps rolling around. He puts that one back in the goblin corpse he found it in, then heads back to town.
He’s got to let the others know that it’s safe to leave Telos.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Before Nixx makes it back to town, he sees a crowd of Telosians in the cemetery landscape huddled together like football players. When they notice him, they spread out, blocking him from reentering Telos.
“Shit,” he says out of the side of his mouth.
There’s about twenty of them. They are carrying axes and pitchforks and butcher knifes. He backs away slowly with his arms raised. They slowly close in on him. Then they charge.
Nixx turns to run, but two of them have already gotten behind him. He pulls out an arrow and fires it at a charging Telosian. It hits him perfectly in the center of his chest, but he keeps staggering forward. They are extremely determined to kill him.
“Fucking Cry,” Nixx screams as he fires another arrow, hitting a Telosian in the thigh.
He groans at himself for that one. It was not fired perfectly even. These Telosians are scrambling around him in such a disorganized manner that he doesn’t think he can fire an arrow at any of them straight and even, so he decides not to use his last arrow.
Instead, Nixx pulls the klingon knife from his belt and points it at them as they close in on him.
He tries to calculate the right order in which to cut them, and how he should cut them. The best thing to do would be to slice their throats; cut the jugular at a perfect 90 degree angle. It must be 3.2 inches long and 1.5 centimeters deep. But he doesn’t know who should go first. Perhaps if he arranges them by height . . .
A sledgehammer strikes him in the hip and he crumbles to the ground. He cries out but is happy that the Telosian hit him in the direct center of the hip. He respects that.
Another Telosian strikes him with a pitchfork sloppily, and cuts a messy hole on his arm.
Nixx’s eyebrows curl angry. That is going to leave an uneven scar.
“That’s it!” Nixx cries, and lunges at the pitchfork Telosian.
He stabs him four times in the chest, the holes creat- ing a perfect square. He rolls away from him with four revo- lutions, and stabs another Telosian in the centers of his feet. Then jerks on the cable dangling from the back of his televi- sion head and breaks his neck.
Examining his two victims, it seems that they are both the thinnest of the group. He has decided to kill them in or- der of weight, from lightest to heaviest.
“Here we go,” he says, and charges them.
He catches the axe of one Telosian and rips it out of his hands, but doesn’t kill him because he’s one of the fatter ones. Instead, he cuts the throat of a tall dangly Telosian who was tripping over his own television chord.
But he doesn’t know who to attack next. There is an average-sized man and a short fat man. He can’t tell which one weighs more. If only he had a scale . . .
While he’s touching his finger to his chin to calculate this, an axe swings at his face and cuts the finger off.
“Son of a bitch . . .” he screams, staring at his missing finger, blood squirting out of the stump.
Now he has only nine fingers. He screams at them, “mother fucker,” as he cuts off the same finger on the other hand to even things out.
After it is severed, he measures the stumps and sees that the axed finger was cut halfway between the joints and he cut his other finger off at the knuckle.
“Damn,” he grumbles as he brings the klingon knife to the other stump.
A sledgehammer breaks through his kneecap sideways and he drops to the ground.
The Telosians crowd around him.
He stares up at the Telosian with the sledgehammer and begs him to smash his other kneecap in the same way . . .
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The party is dying down in Telos. Most of the living citizens have vanished.
Cry wanders through the wreckage seeking new people to fuck, but there’s nobody in sight.
She hunts through the streets until she finds Random lying in some shade on the side of the road. She scratches her chin. He will have to do for now.
“It’s your turn,” she tells him.
He squints up at her. Her lizard flesh glistens in the sunlight.
“I can’t take anymore,” Random says.
“It’s time to lose your virginity,” she tells him.
“I’ve already lost my virginity,” he says. “I’ve been fucking whores all night long. I’m beat.”
“Not anally,” she says.
He jerks upright when he sees her attaching a strap-on to her crotch. Instead of a dildo, the strap-on is a greasy metal millipede squirming through the air at him.
“No fucking way!” Random shrieks, crawling backwards.
She slams his face into the hard dirt and rips his pants down.
“Yes,” she whispers into his ear and grips him by the love handles.
The millipede crawls across Random’s butt cheeks, goo drips into his crack, but it does not enter his asshole.
Cry doesn’t lead it inside, her attention has been grabbed away . . .
She pulls up Random’s pants and steps into the street, facing the armed and angry Telosian mob.
They have Nixx’s body draped over their shoulders. Two broken legs and a broken skull. His blood leaks across their television screens.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Death and a few of his thugs stagger out of the saloon be- tween Cry and the mob. He doesn’t see the Telosians as he pukes on a corpse and then chugs a bottle of whiskey.
“What a night,” he grunts at Sex.
She points at the Telosians down the road and he straightens up. They walk down the street. Cry is angry it has come to this, but Jesus is drunk with excitement.
The three horror show Telosians go with them. Random runs off to find Oxy and Sharp.
When they get to the mob, Jesus offers to do the translating. He’s the only one who actually knows how to communicate with them, or so he says.
“They want us out of town,” he drools at Cry, hardly able to stay standing.
“I’m not leaving,” she says.
Jesus stares at the leader of the Telosian mob, a large farmer with The Dukes of Hazard playing on his face. It’s like he can communicate with them through his eyes.
“They won’t let us stay,” he says. “We can either leave or they will fight us to the death.”
“I want them alive,” Cry says.
The metal millipede strapped to her crotch fizzle-waves through the air at them like an electric eel.
“Either way you lose.” Jesus chuckles.
Cry spits.
“If I have to kill them all I will,” she says. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of cowards and wounded left when we’re done.”
“Just go,” Nixx groans.
He is still alive.
“It’s safe to leave,” he continues, hacking up blood. “The creatures have died. I saw them, out in the desert. They’re all dried out.”
Cry pretends she didn’t hear him.
“Fuck it, I’m staying,” she says, whipping her blade out of her thigh and slicing the Dukes of Hazard Telosian in half.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Random, Sharp, and Oxy with his television bride arrive to a battle in the streets. They take cover behind some dead horses and watch Cry slicing up the mob of Telosians like fruit.
Death goes to draw his furry pistol but it is no longer in his belt. He looks down.
“Where the hell did it go?”
He examines his holsters and digs through his pockets. Not sure what happened to all of his guns.
A man with Friday The 13th Part Eight: Jason Takes Manhattan playing on his face comes at Jesus with an axe. Death just pukes on him and the man backs away.
The three horror show Telosians fight against their people to protect their leader, shooting into the mob with their remote controls, but are soon chopped down by
the crowd.
Jesus stumbles to the side of the road and looks under a dead pig for some kind of weapon, then passes out in the mud.
Reinforcements come out of the woodwork.
The surviving Telosians see the mob fighting back against Sex and Death, and they join in. There are now more than a hundred television people coming after Cry.
“Get Jesus out of here!” she screams at Sharp and Random.
They come out of hiding and help Death to his feet.
“Take him outside of town,” she says, “I’ll hold them back.”
Random and Sharp drag the drunken gunslinger out of the battle as Cry cuts through the citizens like a samurai. Her metal millipede dangling between her legs, her stegosaurus spikes covered in blood.
Oxy forces his wife to walk backwards behind the others, so he can watch the rest of The Fall Guy as they leave town.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dragging Death through the cemetery landscape:
“Where the heck are we supposed to go?” Random asks. “There’s nothing out here.” “Let’s circle the town north,” Sharp says. “There’s got to be someplace safe.”
About half a mile north of the town, they see a large structure in the distance.
“What’s that?” Random asks.
“Could be something,” Sharp says.
They wipe ants and dirty sweat from their foreheads as they head towards the building.
“It’s some kind of factory,” Sharp says. “A paper mill maybe.”
“There’s no industry this far west,” Random says. “It’s probably just a barn.”
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