The building is three stories and made of gray brick, painted with splotches of tar. The windows are barred. A loud humming emanates from within.
There’s also a pond-sized dish on the roof of the structure, like a satellite dish. Sharp thinks the building is wearing a big shiny sombrero.
Random drops Jesus and opens the rusty iron door. Inside, there are churgling machines piled all the way to the roof like a metal ice cream sundae.
Cry dashes down the dirt trail, picking up dust like horse hooves. She’s fatigued and covered in blood. It isn’t her blood. Her cheeks are black from all the televisions exploding in her face.
She picks up Jesus and pulls him through the door.
“They’re coming this way,” she says. “We need to seal this place up.”
Before Random enters, he sees a horde of television heads stampeding his way. There are now twice as many as before, smashing down the gravestones and cemetery crosses as they charge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Random and Cry push heavy broken down engines and machine parts in front of the iron door, as Sharp covers the windows with sheets of steel.
Oxy just sits in the corner watching Martin on his wife’s
face.
“What is this place?” Sharp asks, staring across the maze of equipment.
“It’s the color mill,” Cry says. Sharp jumps down from a ladder.
“Look,” Cry steps over to a collection of levers in the center of the room.
She pulls one lever back and everything they see drowns
in a green hue. Then she pushes the lever back in place and pulls a different lever and everything becomes a fog of yellow.
“This is where the world’s color comes from,” Cry says.
Random backs away from the iron door as the Telosians arrive.
“What are you talking about?” he asks. “This place generates color?”
“Yes,” Cry says. “These machines create it and reflect it off the sun for the entire world.”
“Have they been here since the beginning of time?” Sharp asks.
“No,” Cry says. “Color was invented about a century ago. This place was originally in the far east but people kept screwing with the color balance. They had to move it to a place far away. I had no idea it was in Telos.”
“What was the world like before color?” Sharp asks.
“It was all grays.”
“Gray isn’t a color?”
Cry shakes her head and tries to balance the colors out.
“Crap,” she mumbles. “I forgot where they were.”
She fidgets with the color balances but can’t seem to get it right. There seems to be too much yellow in the world, but when she dims the yellow all the colors seem weak and bland. Not colorful anymore.
“Fuck it,” she says, and wanders away.
Sharp peaks at the Telosians through the window as they bang on the door with hammers and axes and torches.
“Are they going to burn us out?” she asks Cry.
Cry says, “They wouldn’t dare.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Telosians stop banging against the wall for awhile and it gets quiet. Just the white noise of a hundred different television shows playing at once.
There is a thunderstorm over the forest in Sharp’s skin. Random sticks his hand in her back to get a drink of water when she isn’t looking but gets a jolt of lighting in his palm.
“What was that?” Sharp asks.
Random shrugs at her. His hand in his pocket, tears dripping from his eyes.
The silence outside doesn’t last very long. It ends with an eruption of screams and agonizing groans.
Sharp looks out of the window.
“It’s Nixx,” she says. “He’s still alive.”
Nixx has been crucified with barbed wire to one of the large crosses in the graveyard outside. Their leader is a Telosian in a preacher’s cassock with an emergency broadcast system alert on his screen. He wraps the barbed wire around Nixx’s naked body and the cross, cocooning him in it.
Another Telosian with a 70’s family sitcom on his face stabs him with a rusted screwdriver between his ribs. He shrieks with every stab.
“Let me see.” Cry pushes Sharp out of the way.
She watches as they torture the pathetic Hoak.
The emergency broadcast system Telosian wraps the barbed wire around Nixx’s scrotum and then begins yanking the wire like he’s trying to rip off his testicles.
Nixx’s cries pierce the eardrums of Sharp and Random. They grind their teeth and clench their fists at the noise.
“Open the door,” Sex tells them. “I’m going to kill every one of those fuckers.”
Random grabs her from the behind, his hands carefully between the razor-sharp blades on her spine.
“You can’t,” he says. “You’re going to get us all killed.”
“We’re all going to die anyway,” she says.
“Not if we can hold them off until Jesus sobers up,” Sharp says, in front of Cry, pushing on her chest.
“He drank enough to kill a man,” Cry says. “He’ll be too hungover to fight for days. We won’t last that long.”
“When it comes to killing, he’s miraculous,” Sharp says. “Even hungover he could take them all himself.”
The lizard woman blows air at Sharp.
“Nixx is going to die anyway,” Random says.
Cry jerks out of their grip, cutting Random’s arm with her stegosaurus spikes. He freezes with his mouth wide open as he sees blood gushing out of him. She pretends she doesn’t know she cut him and sits down on an oiled engine by the color controls.
She pushes the red lever all the way up to show the world how angry she is.
“Besides,” Sharp says, “they’ll stop torturing Nixx once they realize we aren’t coming out there to stop them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Five hours pass, the sun goes down, and Nixx is still screaming out there. His voice has gotten rough but he’s yelling out for mercy. They have been cutting off pieces of him. His fingers, the tips of his elf ears, his nose and lower lip.
Emergency Broadcast System Face seems to enjoy cutting him. Perhaps his wife or daughter was raped and killed during the party last night. This is his bittersweet revenge, and he wants to make it last.
Inside the color mill, everyone has tuned out the Hoak’s screams. The only light inside comes from the Telosian girl’s face.
Random has passed out. Sharp is trying to sleep, but the thunderstorm in her forest skin is cold and keeps her awake.
Cry gets bored and masturbates onto Oxy while he watches Hogan’s Heroes. He doesn’t seem to realize the reptilian woman behind him, not even when she squirts it into his sideburns.
She frowns at the back of his head for not paying attention, then leans down to watch his wife’s face from over his shoulder.
He laughs hysterically at the concentration camp sitcom but Cry doesn’t get any of the jokes. She doesn’t know why some people on the show are heil-Hitlering and other people on the show are prisoners. The Telosian’s naked body is much more interesting to Cry than the show.
The woman’s face turns to a crime investigation show and she begins struggling to free herself from the ropes.
“Damn it,” Oxy says, and turns a knob on her face to change it back to Hogan’s Heroes.
She stops struggling and relaxes.
Cry flicks her claws at the hermaphrodite’s thick head and strolls away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jesus wakes at the crack of dawn and pukes bile all over Random’s wedding shoes.
Random wakes up and almost kicks Death in the face before he realizes who is puking on him. The boy decides to ignore the fact that he’s being puked on for awhile and daydreams about the world before his wedding day.
Times were easygoing in his old life; he didn’t have to worry about demon plagues or angry television mobs or getting raped in the ass by a strange tattooed woman
. In some ways he feels relieved to be free of the pressures of his family and Typi and her family. They all had plans for him. Plans he didn’t want for himself.
If he survives this ordeal he thinks he’ll go back east if it really is safe. Look for survivors. There’s got to be some out there somewhere. Maybe he’ll be able to find a woman who doesn’t have a television for a head or metal spikes growing down her spine.
After Death finishes vomiting, he cleans his mouth on Random’s pant leg and crawls across the floor searching for his gun.
Random pulls himself to his feet and shakes the goop from his shoes. Oxy is still watching his wife’s face. She tries to go to sleep on him, but he won’t let her, smacks the side of her head when her screen goes fuzzy on him.
Cry is coiled around the color generator, fast asleep. The world isn’t red anymore, so she must have balanced out the colors during the night.
Sharp is lying on the ground with her arm over her eyes.
Out the window:
Random sees Nixx out there, dazed and groaning. He’s a bloody mess. Mostly dead, but Emergency Broadcast System Face keeps him alive so he can torture him more.
Nixx isn’t crucified on a cemetery cross anymore. He’s been barb-wired to something else. A large metal spiral thing.
The landscape changed again overnight. It’s no longer a cemetery theme. Now it is a drill farm theme. Random gazes out to see the drill farms are just now appearing out of the soil, solidifying from gases that drift out of the clouds.
There are small shacks everywhere filled with electric drills. From handheld drills to giant construction drills that can burrow a hole a mile into the earth.
The Telosians leap out of the dirt with the appearance of the drill farms. Emergency Broadcast System Face hands out drills to the army. Four of the drills are as big as a man. They each require two men to operate them.
These large electric drills turn on as they advance the color mill and loud buzz-grinding noises fill the morning air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cry wakes up to the buzz-grinding noise. Holes are being drilled into the walls around them.
She stretches herself awake and frowns at the wrecking crew. Licks her black puffy lips and gets to her feet.
“Time to kill,” she says, squeezing Death’s shoulders.
Oxy’s eyes red and swollen, watching infomercials. He doesn’t even know what’s going on.
Random climbs a ladder along the side of the machine towards the rafters of the building, but Sharp decides to stay with the others in case she’s needed.
Death digs through the pile of metal junk, looking for something he can fight with.
“Here,” Cry says, handing Sharp and Jesus a couple of lead pipes.
Jesus looks at it like it’s from outer space.
The walls are turning into Swiss cheese around them. Sharp attempts to jam a drill with her lead pipe, but the drill keeps churning.
“Where the hell’s my gun?” Death says, looking around at his feet.
“You lost it yesterday,” Cry says. “Make due with what you got.”
Death grumbles at her.
Cracking noises from above.
Cry looks up.
She sees Random is all the way up near the ceiling, trying to balance on a jungle-gym of aluminum beams dangling from the ceiling by thin wires. The wires are breaking one by one.
“What are you doing up there?” Cry screams at him. “That won’t hold your weight.”
But Random is too terrified to move. His arms are wrapped around the bar, holding tightly for dear life.
Another cable breaks and the mesh of beams swings out, Random dangling upside-down, held up by a single wire.
“Don’t move,” Cry yells. “I’ll come get you.”
But before she gets to the ladder, the last cable snaps and Random falls. His body breaks against black machinery, then gets chewed into it. He doesn’t scream. Just whines a little. Then he’s already dead.
The aluminum beams rain onto the color generator, landing in the chains and gears. The machine grinds to a halt and a metal tinkle-noise crickets as smoke fills the room.
“It’s going to explode,” Cry says, waving Sharp and Jesus back.
But it doesn’t exactly explode. It just falls apart. The machine becomes an avalanche of parts that rain down on them, filling the color mill with mounds of junk.
And when it’s over, all the color vanishes from the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Everything in shades of gray:
Two holes break open in the front of the mill, bigger than doors. And the Telosian mob floods in.
They come at Cry with electric drills and axes, but stumble over all the metal junk. She’s able to cut them down with her blade one at a time.
But she’s soon overwhelmed by them. They come at her from all sides.
Sharp tries to fight off the Telosians with her lead pipe, but there are too many of them. She retreats behind a large mound of metal scraps where Oxy is sitting. He raises the volume on his wife’s head. With all this racket around him he can hardly hear his program. It’s bad enough that everything’s in black and white. Now NASCAR racing is on and he’ll be damned if he misses a second of it.
Death is doing just fine with his lead pipe. It took a few kills to get used to it, but now he’s breaking heads and impaling chests left and right. But those little drills move too fast for him. He keeps getting drilled in the sides and back by the little Telosians that creep up on him.
A hole pops open on Jesus’ chest. Something has flown right through his body. It makes him smile. Somebody has just shot him with his furry gun.
He looks up to see his gun is in the possession of a Telosian with Family Matters playing on his face. Carl Winslow and Steve Urkel are doing a dance in a living room together, as Death approaches. Two more bullets are fired into his chest before Jesus is able to grab the Telosian’s arm and rip it out of the socket.
He takes the furry pistol out of the television man’s hand and shoots Steve Urkel in the face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cry’s blade is knocked away from her by a Desperate Housewives-faced Telosian man. Then he laughs at her with a McDonald’s commercial, pointing his two-handed drill at her chest.
He lunges at her, but Cry dodges to the side and changes his channel to Scooby Doo. While he’s disoriented, Cry slams his neck into a spike on her upper back and blood splashes across the metal junkyard.
Now that Death has his gun, he showers the Telosians with needle-like bullets. Corpses pile up around him.
Cry backflips and her stegosaurus blades cut a Telosian in half while she’s in midair. Trying to find her sword, she has to fight with the spikes on her back. Flipping and cartwheeling into attackers, lunging at them back-first.
Sharp just stands back and watches as the mill becomes drenched with dark gray blood. Smashed televisions piled up. Some of them are still partially alive with sparkling fuzz on their faces. Others have shattered screens, revealing bloody skulls within.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cry smashes a young Telosian man against a wall back-first and impales him on her spikes. But when she steps forward, the boy is still attached to her back. She shakes him and pushes at him, but he’s stuck. The spikes have hooked him in good.
And he’s still alive, wiggling on her as she kicks other Telosians back.
Death shoots at her attackers but one gets through and drills her in the stomach. She cries out and pushes him away. Bullets tear through his television before he can strike again.
Cry sees the end of her blade sticking out of a pile of engine parts and she pulls herself toward it. But before she can reach, the boy on her back stabs a two-handed drill through the back of her chest, just below the collarbone. Then turns it on.
She thrashes around as the metal twists and grinds against her bones. She reaches around to the boy on her back and rips his throat out with her reptile claws.
The drill stops. It is still inside of her and the boy is still on her back. She looks down. Her chest has been shredded, but she’s happy to see that her both of her breasts are okay.
As she sighs with relief, her body goes limp and she falls through a hole in the wall.
“Cry!” Sharp screams.
The hermaphrodite raises her lead pipe like a baseball bat at a Telosian that charges her with two cleavers and a haunt- ing episode of The Little Rascals playing on his screen. After seeing Cry’s death, she puts all her anger and passion into the swing, but the television man ducks out of the way.
He brings both of his cleavers together inside of her neck and her head pops off. It disappears into the thunder- storm raging inside of her forest skin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
With Cry out of the way, the Telosians are really able to pile in and swarm Jesus.
He shoots them full of needles like he’s a sewing machine. But he doesn’t see Little Rascals Face coming at him from behind with his cleavers. The Telosian chops his arm off just below the elbow and the hand flies across the room with the furry pistol still attached. He punches Little Rascals Face in the stomach and dives over a few of his friends to reclaim his severed arm.
With his other hand, he takes the furry pistol and fires into television faces. Spinning in a circle like a merry-go-round, with his only arm outstretched, he cuts down the mob with bullets as they come at him from all directions.
Sex and Death in Television Town Page 9
