Kika Gumi and the Prism Cult – Part XXII: Behold! The Imperialist

What came next was in flashes. Brief glimpses through the abyss of a world, that for whatever reason, seemed unwilling to let me bleed out and die.
First came the carpet, a thick sheet of Tibetan tapestry was swept over, and subsequently tucked beneath my soon-to-be-corpse, my pupils at full dilation, corneas going glossy as the intense floral patterns pressed tight into my face, and I was rolled up like a cigar. Looking back, it was all a nonsensical haze, but in hindsight it’s plainly obvious that Susan had chosen this particular mode of transporting me as the result of my overall infamy. I’d become such a hated individual in that city, it was actually less of a risk to get caught transporting a stiff than it was to be seen wheeling around town with a living Johnny Minacelli. Considering the homicide rates at that time – which I’d taken great pride in inflating – chances are the cops wouldn’t even bother to stop you, as they just simply wouldn’t have had the man-power to make an arrest, and there would be no sense in disrupting any of the already active investigations into the piles upon piles of unrelated bodies for what, in the end would amount to little more than just another drop in the bucket.
From there it was a bumpy ride in a cold, damp trunk. The twisted weave of the carpet wrapped around me became animated by my near-death delusions, lifting off the fabric like a hundred little snakes, breathing in the blood I lost, slipping and sliding across my face, and hissing down deep into my gaping mouth a lengthy list of all those I’d love to hurt, but never had the chance to in my short life. I could hear a pair of voices through the slowing sound of my heart beat droning like an earthquake in my ear. Susan and Valarie, they’d drug me out of there, they’d taken charge, and I didn’t know how to accept it. As I laid there, fully aware of my own mortality, feeling like a goldfish in a pierced plastic bag, watching my chances of survival flow away in a constant stream, it was jealousy I felt, not gratitude. No one ever had an answer were I hadn’t, and I be damned if I was going to let the pawns I’d been playing usurp my role of king, and steer my criminal legacy into the jagged rocks. I’d rather be dead than out of control, so I tensed the muscles around my neck, and did my best to force the blood out that much faster, succeeding only in managing to make myself pass back out.
Regaining consciousness midway through some sort of surgery is never a pleasant experience, much less so when the procedure in question is being performed by a grey-skinned woman whose hands never seem to touch the scalpel, and whose eyebrows float up weightless in numerous wavy three foot tendrils from her face like the arms of an inverted jellyfish. She knew my eyes had opened before even I did, but she appeared in no rush to put me back out. Wiping the cold sweat of pure terror from my forehead, she bent down, and stared holes straight through the back of my head. Her lips never moved, but the words came regardless, comforting, alarmingly comforting. The last time I was awake, I’d been trying to kill myself, and that was only after years spent killing everyone else. As far as I had known, little Johnny Minacelli was far beyond his teddy bear years; the kid within had choked to death on the river of black bile that had overtaken my heart the night I wasted my father and his cronies. Yet somehow – with eyes so cold they’d make yours dry out if you stared back too long, and with my chest split open, and the skin pinned back with forceps, my innards in the open air, my mechanics thumping, and pulsing in tune with the rhythms of my overloaded mind – somehow, she’d broken through.
“Johnny,” she said, with words projected directly into my mind from her’s, “Johnny Minacelli”.
I tried to force out a response, but my tongue hung limp from my lips, and the shock of seeing my own intestines had sent my brain into a state of utter paralysis; basic motor function, and the alphabet among the many deep rooted long term memories that had been wiped out and replaced with flashes of my own personal gore at that very moment. Nothing but air, and just the smallest amount of blood came tumbling from my lips, and I hoped like hell it was enough to get her to throw me a few more of those soothing words.
“Does it hurt?” she said, and I would have laughed, but it did, and most of my energy was already being spent on rapidly wishing I would die.
“Are you afraid?” the words kept coming without any movement from her face, but with a stillness like a black hole that deformed all the light and air around her body.
“You are right to be fearful,” she said, “you are nothing but a man, and you are so very weak, so much more so than your kind already inherently is”.
She pulled back from my face very slowly, floating so gracefully across the room that it seemed as if her feet weren’t really even making impact with the tiles below her. If she was a ghost, she deserved a medal for how well she played the part; my hair stood up so straight as she moved, by the time she made it to the other side of the room, most of my stubble had actually yanked itself from the root in fright, and now lay piled up around my pillow in the shadow of a clean-shaven jaw.
“You may be wondering who I am, but you’d already be mistaken,” she continued, her wax face frozen stoic and stern, “I am not a ‘who‘, a ’she’, an ‘it’, nor a ’they’. I am something else altogether, and I am bigger, so very much bigger than any of you”.
She locked in place, arms, and legs stiff, and straight, and her eyebrows began going to work on the room. Acting like the tentacles of an octopus, they extended from her face, and began punching holes in a variety of computer monitors, intercom speakers, electronic door locks, and the machinery of the gurney I was presently strapped to, split wide like a martyr of some lost Medieval cause, watching helplessly as her hair did things in that room I’d never seen a human being do with its hands. The tentacles ripped wiring loose from its solder, stripped its plastic coating, and reworked it into a peculiar copper mesh. Circuit boards, LEDS, RAM, and cooling fans all came next, joined the mesh, and the whole thing started to whirr, and glow a dim blue around the edges.
“I have come here not to save you. This is very important for you to understand,” she said, floating back over to my bedside, the strange metal mess clutched tight in her eyebrows, “you are only worth the hate that you carry inside you. All I need is that hole where your soul should sit, where the thirst for violence rages like a thousand year storm”.
I screamed so hard when she started to thread the wire mesh through my flesh that I was actually able to see my lungs deflating through the gaping incision in my chest, and ballooning back up suddenly as I gasped with every new pass of the metal through my skin. I lost control of my body, and began seizing violently as she pressed on through the ungodly binding of man and machine, and watched my heart spasm, seemingly trying to wrench itself free from my arteries, and haul ass for a chest in less immediate distress.
“Your kind,” she continued, a fine misting of my blood sprinkling against her cement cheeks, “You would rape this planet with your ignorance, damn it to a future of toxic inhabitability”.
The pain tore through my body like a car battery was hooked to each and every single one of my nerve endings, and joined up at the other end with a burning freight truck. As a flood poured from my eyes, I saw Susan and Valarie enter the room, accompanied by yet another young doctor whose face carried a grin almost as wide as the oner I couldn’t understand why I was wearing. This thing hated me, she wanted to hurt me, and I too wanted to bring her great pain, yet I was so very happy at that moment. As my body was bastardized, sewn back together with wires like a science fiction Frankenstein; as she berated me, crushed my ego, spoke so far down to me her voice seemed to echo across the distance between her mind and my ears; as she presumed herself my master – a position high above me I’d kept open by way of baseball bats and bullets over the years – I fell warm and welcome into the role of her sheep.
“You all should have died,” she continued, fastening the last bit of the implant into my wound, “From the cold, the plagues, the wars. You should be dead and gone, but you thrive, and you destroy more now than ever before”.
I felt a place very deep down inside my self, behind all the muscle and blood, and organs, and cells, and all the other churchy magic my forefathers had tried to clog into my person, make a sort of popping noise, and a wash of warming electricity began to surge throughout my body. I beeped a bit like a television cyborg, and all at once all the pain and misery came crashing to a halt, and the room erupted into applause. Susan, and Valarie, and that strange third woman all beating their open palms bloody and cheering for the reborn, reinvigorated me.
“I save your life only in the interest of ensuring that you will continue to take it from others,” she boomed over the vicious clapping, “If all chaos together can not clean the universe of you human scum, then let it be from man’s own selfish hand that death comes, and let it come swift, and righteously unjust”.
The clapping continued to grow in intensity, now joined by approving screams so animalistic anyone that might have overheard would have a hard time saying whether they were the sounds of cheering, or a violent ritual murder.
“Now rise!” she screamed out, and for the first time I noticed she didn’t even have any lips with which to talk, just a smooth grey patch of skin that caught the mind off guard, and kept me well aware that I was in no position to question her demands, not that I ever wanted to anyway.
“Rise up!” she screamed, “Reclaim your place in this world, and embrace the better version of you, unhinged, and free of fear and doubt!”
“Praise her!” Susan, Valarie, and the other woman screamed out.
“Together we will clean the world,” cried the grey woman, “I, the last of the Imperialists, and you, my servant killers of innocent men”.
“Praise her!” the three all cried together again, and I lifted myself from the gurney as my chest was stitched closed with a needle acting on the telekinetic instructions of her otherworldly eyebrows, catching my heart and lungs just before they came pouring out onto the floor in a more primitive sort of offering to my new god.
“Rise anew my soldier of hate,” she whispered, staring a second pair of holes through my head, “Welcome to my genocide, and your little corner of it, and allow me to introduce yourself…”
Her eyebrows reached across the room and snatched the blood covered scalpel from beside my gurney, polished it off and presented me with my brand new reflection in its surface. The strange robotic implant had taken over half of my neck and looked like something out of a deranged toddler’s classroom doodles, but I smiled at the sight of this horrible new me, because I knew how many people wouldn’t smile back if they’d met it.
“Johnny Minacelli,” she said, “I present Mr. Johnny Throatwound”.

[to be continued]

Copyright Wonder Void Studios 2019

Thanks for taking the time to read yet another chapter in my ongoing sci-fi/action/crime epic. Be sure to follow for a new chapter every Tuesday in addition to a number of exciting upcoming projects. Follow me on Twitter for all sorts of flash fiction and news regarding these upcoming projects. Thanks again for you continued support, I’ll see you next time!

Lazarus T. Brass, Esq. – Part II: An Afternoon with the Cult

Walter Elias Brass, Esq. was a man of traditional values. He’d developed a machine-like study routine during his years in high school with which he went on to graduate from Princeton Law School in 1968 summa cum laude. After serving as lead prosecutor during the landmark conspiracy trial of notorious cult leader Yuri Hilks, Walter went on to establish the Brass, Montford & Cohen law firm with college friends Summer Montford and A.B. Cohen. The fame generated from the Hilks trial led to the firm’s booming success; Walter decided to finally settle down with his then-girlfriend Rebecca Tibulti, and in the summer of 1971 the couple gave birth to a son, Lazarus. Following Summer Montford’s semi-controversial decision to elope with Walter’s brother Horace – which resulted in both her becoming “Summer Brass” as well as a costly name change to all the law firm’s signage – Walter took on the task of imbuing his son with all the tenacity and love for criminal prosecution that had fueled his life up until that point.
Lazarus T. Brass, Esq. sat along the shoreline of Massachusetts Bay, reflecting on his father’s life, fondly flipping through his many memories of statute memorization, and public speaking drills. He’d received word via his secretary of Walter Brass’ passing, despite the event in question actually taking place – precipitated by a undiagnosed heart valve issue – just outside the door to Lazarus’ office. Lazarus had been on lunch at the time, reclining on a luxury leather sofa with a pastrami on rye clenched in his transparent fingers; the very cured beef treat that doctors would later imply was at the root of his father’s heart problems

.
He’d been counting on his father’s aid in tracking down Medina, recalling Walter Brass’ famous independent efforts to apprehend Yuri Hilks and the rest of his so-called “Unit”. Hilks was the focus of a massive manhunt following the kidnap/murder of Boston police commissioner Francis Cahier’s eldest son Marcus, during which over fourteen separate state police departments had unified in their efforts only to be thwarted time and again by the elusive cult leader. Brass’ father had met a rather bizarre pair of teenagers at a local diner called Stack’s amid the far reaching investigation, and posing as an LSD manufacturer, had agreed to join them for a party at nearby apartment building.
The youths spent the journey to the party expressing a deep adoration for a man called “Judas St. Christ” whom they alleged was the messiah reborn, as well as a man that would find great use of a psychedelics supplier. Upon arriving at the building, the pair ushered Brass’ father to the basement where a hole had been cut through the laundry room wall using illegally obtained boring machinery and covered over by the kinds of stringed beads one might expect to find guarding the entrance to an herbalist’s master bathroom. Inside sat Yuri Hilks, posted cross-legged under an uprooted pine tree, fatter than allowed him very much mobility, with a crown of thorns perched atop his head wrought more in the shape of King Arthur’s royal cap than that of any Judeo-Christian idol Walter Brass had ever heard of.
This had been, in fact, the very first time any member of law enforcement had ever even seen Hilks, largely due to the Mafia-esque power hierarchy he’d established within his “community” which kept him far separated – through the use of a variety of bagmen and enforcers – from any of the criminal aspects of his enterprise, and the chance meeting proved a significant break for both the police efforts to apprehend Hilks, and the complex prosecution case Brass would eventually build to take him down. It was during their first encounter that Brass caught wind of a philosophical concept referred to by the group as “The Big Bottle-Up” which, as Hilks explained it in his own wildly colorful, and wholly prophetic words, consisted of the group’s final collective stripping of their “human shells” at which point their spiritual selves would bind into one great hive-mind, and settle in to a new form – that of a “pure” child – who’s body they will rule with their collaborative mind as the “perfect manifestation of total human consciousness”. It was through this psychotic, hazy blend of psychedelic transcendence, and communal reincarnation that Brass first pieced together the truth regarding Marcus Cahier’s death: the boy had been the group’s first proposed “vessel”, and indeed, had not survived the bizarre ordeal. This truth, however depressing and tragic, served as the inspiration for Walter Brass’ ultimate plan to shut the monster Yuri Hilks down for good, and he was determined then more than ever before to ensure that Cahier’s death would not have been in vain. For Walter Brass too had a young son, and little Lazarus Brass may not have been perfect, but he would certainly make an adequate “vessel”.

[To be continued]

Copyright Wonder Void Studios 2018

Thanks for taking the time to read this continuation of my short story Lazarus T. Brass, Esq., their will be more to come as I think it up.  Be sure to follow us for a new short story every Thursday, in addition to a new issue of our webcomic So Fantastic every Sunday, and a new chapter in my ongoing Scifi/fantasy serial Kika Gumi and the Prism Cult every Tuesday.  Follow us on Twitter: @ItsMrGChris and @RinniKipp for all sorts of flash fiction, illustration, and news regarding our upcoming projects.  Thanks again for your continued support, we’ll see you next time!

Bed-Man, What I Know So Far

I’ve been holding on to it all for what feels like a generation, but I believe that today may be the right time to finally talk about Bed-Man.

As a child I was no stranger to medication, prescribed of course, I had a tendency to act up during classes which left the school board little other choice than to turn to the disciplinary power of narcotics. It started up rather slow, a pill with breakfast, a blur of color and time for the next two meals. Still though, I remained defiant in my need to lampoon the lectures of my teachers as if on a holy quest to prove I was a child. To therapy I returned, neither kicking nor screaming though, the whole thing was a little interesting to me. The attention, the questions, the notion that something may be brewing somewhere deep inside me that even I was not aware of. So I gladly interpreted their blotted inks and fed them colorful word associations whenever they deemed fit to request such things of me, all the while basking in the imagination they alternatively berated me for and urged me to let myself sink back into.

I never noticed, but my parents did, the way I sat and stared at the floorboards for hours on end. My prepubescent mind cranking out thought after sprawling thought, propelled on a wave of medical-grade amphetamine that lifted me into a meditative higher-plane of whim while simultaneously severing any conscious connection to the motor skills I wouldn’t need when navigating dreams. Simply put, I never moved, just thought, and my nose had started to twitch in the same exact way every forty-five seconds or so. It was all aliens and superbeings inside my head, but a statuesque stillness on the physical level that seemed to suck any air out of the room that wasn’t helping to flame the “Our son might be psychotic” fires in my parent’s heads. Whether I felt it on the inside or not, the imbalance was clear, and my parents had no desire to live any longer under such an ominously black cloud. So back again to the psychiatrist, more pills, more ink, more cold yet expectant stares.

The first night taking my new prescription, my brain seemed to drop significant velocity, the world stopped spinning, and the silence hung heavy as slate in the midnight air. That was the first time I met him, in the reflection of a pocket knife my grandfather had bought me not three weeks before for my birthday. I loved that knife, it was the tool of a man, a testament to the unyielding nature of he who will not be swallowed by the world, but it had been my face I saw reflected in its blade before, not this new one, all empty and smiling that joined mine that night. He spoke through it, commiserated with me in loneliness, told me it wasn’t my fault. To break the chains, to find my place and make a purpose for myself in this wild mess of a civilization, I would first have to learn to break its hold on me. He told me it was pain that kept a person down, the hurt a stone wall against which dreams are dashed and before which the shuddering masses fall to their knees in forgiveness. Pain is in the head though, all thought, and I had become quite the master of that. I could cut myself strong, he said, bleed the fear from my veins that none among the sharp edges of society might ever be able to bleed from me again; this was his promise, and for the rest of the night, he guided my hand.

Long sleeves for school the next day, no need to flaunt my vivisectional strengthening of spirit, they’d not understand and I didn’t need anymore therapists gorging themselves on the time I had reserved for him. The less they saw, the more I could work, and I was far from finished. As the bell rang that day, and the first smearing of chalk began to flow across the blackboard, I scanned across the faces of those so unfortunate to have never met Bed-Man. I laughed inside and they whispered among each other, I had changed and they took notice. I strained myself to catch a loose noun or verb straying from their conversations, but all I heard was bleach, and then again, and again. It seemed all they wished to talk about, and before long I don’t remember them saying anything else. Full monologues composed of just one word, and with each passing sentence it was growing so very much louder. BLEACH they cried in unison, and by now the teacher had joined in too, her wizened face twisting into that toothy smile he showed me the night before. He was her, and everyone else too, and his chorus still hadn’t gained another word, just BLEACH BLEACH BLEACH BLEACH. All so sharp, so piercing were their words, all at once I leapt from my seat and his gaze and kicked the door clean from two of its three hinges as I stumbled from his classroom out into the main hall. What he meant, I couldn’t be sure, but I had been drawing much larger breathes since the cutting, and if bleach was today’s theme, I’d need to buy my chemical ticket to his ride. The janitor’s closet, the nurse’s office, two more pills then back on home.

Inside my suburban walls, I am greeted with what could easily have been confused with silence, had I not taken the time to notice the strange breathing underneath it. I fall into the couch, tossing the economy-sized bottle of high-strength cleaner onto the cushion next to me, and waited for his face to manifest in one of the shadows hanging around the corners of my bedroom. This time he came in a formless way, no voice to carry his words, only heat, a slow building kind that started in the back of my head and worked its way through to every crevice of my being. A hunger it was, a pit growing inside me, and only one thing came to mind when searching for ways to stem the mental erosion: bleach. He wanted me to know what it tasted like. Bitter? Just as like to be a symphony of flavors for all I knew, like a fine wine reserved for those ready to look beyond the caution labels written out by so many generations of people all too unwilling to think for themselves. I knew it was poison, but did I really? How did I know? How do you? Because they’ve told us, but they don’t know either, and I was tired of living how those before me determined I should. The burning was stronger now, all consuming, it pained me not to sample the solvent, in a way that told me I would only hurt more if I didn’t. Popped the top, peeled back the thin plastic over the opening. I felt his grimace stretching inside me as I poured the cup, just a taste, but as I would soon learn: you give Bed-Man an inch, he’ll take the whole damn world.

When I entered the classroom the next morning, my bizarre actions the previous day had left the other students with a rather sour taste in their collective mouths. Maybe fear, maybe jealousy, whatever it was they had noticed my changing and had enough of the circus I was becoming. Having spent so much time with Bed-Man the previous day, both in my own head and out, I hadn’t managed the time to take a shower and was still wearing the black t-shirt spotted with the brownish-gold patches left behind from assorted splatterings of the bleach. My appearance provided the more extroverted of my peers ammunition to criticize my personality, a not-at-all uncommon tactic employed by malicious elementary school students as a method of climbing the social ladder. Some words at first, hateful ones which meant little to me, but seemed to catch Bed-Man’s attention. I felt his presence in the increasing constriction of my throat muscles, accelerated by the shoving and threats my classmates had moved on to. He smiled again, so much bigger this time, spying the window of opportunity, he urged me to seize the chance to show them all the pain he had taught me.

A cracking, that’s all it was, then a warmness cascading down both cheeks. I saw their eyes grow wide one at a time, all around me, and felt the drop in atmospheric pressure as they all at once filled their lungs and stopped exhaling entirely. No words now, how could you hurt someone who would break their own nose? Bed-Man laughed and urged me to do it again. I balled my fist and let loose, not but floppy cartilage left at this point, but oh so much more blood. He cheered me on from behind my eyes, drooling over the hapless expressions of those who for the first time were watching a child smear his own blood across his face while laughing in theirs. Three of them fainted while the others ran for help, but Bed-Man was not finished with me yet. He took hold of my tendons, yanking them about like the strings of a sentient marionette, and forced my hands to hot-wire the gym teacher’s Nissan Maxima and toss the three unconscious students in the trunk. For the rest of the day the police searched for a kidnapper, the sort of monster that would abduct four innocent kids, all the while me and Bed-Man prepared for that night. There was to be an induction, three new members for our fantastic club. We made them each a special room, one for each of the primary colors, matching suits and lighting too, thick walls to hold in the screaming. They would be the realization of his world beyond these walls, the extra limbs wielding his influence in every conceivable direction. Tonight their pain was paramount, but the bleach would flow like water.

[With Bed-Man there is no End]

As always, I thank you all for taking the time to read my story, and I truly hope you enjoyed it. Remember to follow for a new short-story every Thursday, as well as a new edition of my ongoing art experimentation series Epically Art every Tuesday, and a new episode of my new webcomic So Fantastic every Sunday. Follow me on Twitter: @ItsMrGChris for daily flash-fiction and the occasional poetry. Thanks again for reading, see you next time.