aliens

Prey 2006 retrospective

See I called it a ‘retrospective because it’s fucking old, that’s what you do with old stuff, you don’t ‘review’ it, you retospectivise it (that’s not a word.
Yeah well I was gonna do the Outer Worlds review I hinted at, well I call it a review, it’s like five thousand words already, so it’s more like another shitty essay. But I decided to give it more time and finish it and I think I’ve almost completed it. The reason being it has gotten better as I played it. Like the first part was kinda eh then I got the ship and it started to be more interesting and now going to different worlds is giving it a little more mileage and it helps that it kinda reminds me of Genesis Alpha One which is an indie game I fucking love for some reason. It’s like Alien Isolation if it was a ship builder and the aliens were more annoying than terrifying… terrifyingly annoying. I mean it gets scary when an alien is fucking up your shit and you’re running around trying to stop your ship falling apart and getting sucked into the vacuum of space.

So anyway Prey 2006 what’s that about? It’s a human head studios game, what did they make, not a lot of stuff because after this game they got the beady eye of Bethesda on them and had to choose between cake or death and they chose death which is why they’ve pretty much never been heard from again except some really bad games (like bioshock infinite fuck you). Essentially Bethesda is a little bitch and they like money but they don’t like developers under them showing them up so when a studio comes along that seems to have fresh ideas and talent they have to either buy them out or destroy them. Human head and Obsidian are two such companies that Bethesda tried to bash on the bonce, human head is pretty much dead at this point, Bethesda cancelled the original Prey 2 sequel and then used their buttmonkey studio Arkane who basically just churn out mid-level filler for Bethesda to fashion a nice suit from it’s skin that they could wrap a generic system shock clone in it and sell it for full price. Which goes without saying is pretty shit as a business practice and just on a basic level.

This giant corporate entity basically just crushed them because they made the mistake of sticking out and then not falling in line.
I’m not trying to say this game is amazing, it’s basically just a decent Turok clone using the doom 3 engine. The only reason I played it was because I wanted to see if it was any good and it was dirt cheap on amazon and it was reverse compatible on my xbox one.
I remember at the time when it came out my friends raving about because of the insane level design and innovative physics but it never interested me because I was more into realistic shooters. I preferred shooting zombies and human like npcs, I thought killing aliens wasn’t very immersive or interesting. It just didn’t do anything for me at the time and honestly I probably would’ve been too scared to play it as a kid because this game is pretty dark both tonally and just literally haha. You get like a lighter that runs out and that’s your only light source on this ship that looks like the inside of H.R Geiger’s shitter. Kinda makes me think of that new game Scorn that’s trapped in development hell and probably wont ever come out haha. It looks good but I doubt it could top how ahead of it’s time this game was. The only way I can see it being impressive is just the art style and atmosphere.

So Prey 2006 is about a cherokee called Tommy who lives on a reservation with his girlfriend and grandfather, but then they get abducted by aliens and he has to save them and destroy the alien ship that’s abducting people for nefarious mysterious purposes.

The game’s story is pretty simple but it has this really nice half life feel where you’re not constantly bombarded with narrative or shitty audio notes and there aren’t a million emails to read. You’re just dumped into this completely ‘alien’ environment and expected to adapt and survive and get back the people you love. It’s sort of simple but really good.

Recently I watched a video comparing the weapons and enemies of Prey 2006 to Prey 2017 and the comment section was amazing, I could’ve read it for hours. It was just full of people amazed at how much better and more varied the weapons and enemies were in the original. Just the art style is ten times more imaginative than the remake. Sure you don’t get lame alien powers in the original but you get more than two guns that don’t need to be upgraded at all, you just pick up a gun and it’s just good, it does what a gun should, it kills enemies. You don’t need to rub it and make wishes so that it kills things, it just does. You can’t aim down the sights (except with the first gun because it has a scope and turns into a sniper rifle) but that means that button is for the secondary fire so technically every gun is two guns because it has two modes of fire. One of the guns even has two ammo meters one for general machine gun ammo and the other for explosive rounds. One of the guns is technically four guns in one because it absorbs various forms of energy to fire different projectiles. It can freeze enemies, shoot out fire balls like an imp, fire lightning bolts (my personal favourite) or like a sun doom beam.

But more than that it’s the little things, every gun has it’s own idle animation. I don’t mean Tommy like moves his hands or tinkers with the guns I mean the guns move, some of them are literally alive. The designs on the weapons evoke this really strange alien lifeform that has been turned into a weapon somehow, it’s really weird and cool. And you compare it to Prey 2017, it’s almost shocking how much effort went into just one weapon you might not even use.

And although there isn’t a shotgun in Prey 2006 there is a gun that shoots out a shotgun blast of projectile acid haha. Or you can fire the whole vile of acid like a grenade.

There’s only one grenade in the game which is the weirdest weapon in the game because it’s these little creatures you think are enemies but then you pick them up and they have two functions one is a standard grenade and the other turns it into a proximity mine.

There’s also one gun you get in a boss battle (yeah this game has bosses because it’s a classic shooter modern gamefags btfo) that’s literally the bosses arm you cut off by closing a door on it. And I didn’t even know you could do that I just did it by accident, I ducked into a little alcove to get some cover and he couldn’t follow because he was too big but he sticks his arm in and starts to fire and I noticed a switch for the door and I was like ‘hmm’ and I cut his fucking arm off and then picked it up and killed him with it haha.

The enemies are also very varied, there’s lots of different enemies and they’re very imaginative, I mean more imaginative than black goo marmite monsters. Also they’re a lot more reactive, like there’s an enemy that like has weird robot legs and you can blow its legs off an it will try to crawl away to heal, it’s weird ok. The enemies and environments are strange, the ship is pretty much this horrifying mix of metal and flesh and so are the enemies, the enemies almost feel like the white blood cells fighting you off as this foreign body. The tone as I mentioned before is also pretty dark as in kids dying and you having to dispatch their bodies being inhabited by the fallen spirits of the dead. One thing I forgot to mention that on top of the aliens there’s a weird supernatural element that comes entirely from you because you have weird native american spirit powers. So it’s like the world of magic and technology colliding in a cool way that works and also it comes together narratively at the end in a really nice way. It also reasons why you come back to life, because when you die you enter the spirit realm and have like a mini game where you have to fight the spirits of the dead for your soul so you can come back. Kinda makes the game a little too easy but it’s enjoyable.

The most fascinating and groundbreaking part of the game by far is the physics, it was really ahead of it’s time in a lot of ways, there are things in this game Portal most likely ripped off. This I think is the first game that has functioning portal mechanics. You can’t lay the portals down but you used them in puzzles and traversal to new parts of the ships and they’re how enemies spawn in. But there’s also these cool areas where the gravity is inverted so you can walk on walls and it creates these really interesting fights where you’re fighting enemies on the floor while you’re on the ceiling or the wall and it adds this insane level of verticality to the level design. But sadly you can’t turn into a mug, we’re all aware that’s all that matters to the soyboys who love Prey 2017, they just love wowjustwowing over the ability to turn into a drinking implement. Never mind having fun gameplay or interesting environments/guns/enemies, all that matters is the muggening.

It’s not the most amazing game ever, if I’m honest I prefer Doom 3 but I’m a crazy person. I just really like that game for some reason. But I finished this, I’ve never finished Prey 2017, not because it’s hard but because it’s not fun. Prey 2006 is fun and the ending is actually pretty satisfying because it sort of lowers your expectations with this generic ‘save your girlfriend’ plot and this awesome opening abduction scene. But then the story throws you a fucking curveball and a half and *spoilers* if you care about spoilers on a game that’s over ten years old. Your girlfriend has been turned into a weird genetic abomination and you have to kill her while she screams for help, it’s pretty fucked up. And then it’s revealed that not only do the aliens just see humans as a source of food they harvest every now and then but it was the harvesters who seeded humans on earth in the first place as a source of food and to use as biological material for experiments. So basically earth is a truck stop for these guys and humans are essentially cows and how the spirit magic and the aliens collide is that the aliens are the ancient evil gods of the cherokee people and they invade the spirit worlds because it’s actually just another dimension through which they can access with portals. So basically you’ve been traversing portals astrally and physically this whole time.

*Spoilers end*

It’s pretty surprising because it comes off as just generic shoot mans but then it blind sides you with a pretty cool concept and really innovative mechanics and level design but you can’t turn into a mug though. You can fly around in zero g in a little space buggy and it’s so much better than in Prey 2017 haha.
I just like it more overall, Tommy isn’t a boring generic science guy Gordon Freeman knock off, he’s his own character and he’s constantly commenting on stuff and he really adds life to the game. He isn’t just this generic silent protagonist guy who’s silent for reasons. Like why is Morgan silent when you hear him talk in audio logs all the time? I mean I get why but its a dumb reason, the twist and story of that game is dumb.

‘But Prey 2017 has multiple endings though!!!!11111’ Yeah but they’re all dumb, Prey 2006 has one ending and it’s good and it should’ve had a sequel but it didn’t meet bethesda “quality standards”. Needless to say Outer Worlds was not a good replacement for Prey 2 as I fantasised briefly. It’s basically Fallout 4 in space but even more casualized as if that’s possible. Like there a multiple endings when going to a party at Michael Barrymore’s house but that doesn’t mean I want to go (too soon?).

There’s not much more I can say about it really, it’s not Half life 2 tier but it’s pretty good, if you don’t believe me get it yourself it’s like under a fiver. All I can is I enjoyed it a lot more than the remake and it had a lot of potential for a sequel in a universe where humans are basically a snack for intergalactic cenobytes. But sadly no one can be the cool kid in the games industry, that’s only for bethesda and they had to can a game that according to the developers was like 90% done. I seriously don’t why there isn’t crowdfunding out there or a some kind of build of this game floating around. I mean we live in the age where crowd funded games can not only exist but be better than triple A titles… I can only think of Kingdom Come Deliverance off the top of my head but the Witcher was funded by a Polish government grant so that’s like ancient crowdfunding.

I probably wont replay this game, which is why I say I prefer Doom 3 because I have and definitely will play that game over and over. Why? I don’t know why I just think it’s cool and it takes the demons seriously, unlike Doom 2016 where it’s borderline stabbing it’s tongue through it’s cheek which I hated. It’s like a Doom game that was embarrassed or too cool to be a Doom game with it’s shitty dubstep soundtrack, good gameplay but the world and story are shitty and the game is kind of overhyped imo. It’s a pretty good classic shooter, it’s better than Halo or whatever but *man hates thing that popular grr*.

Yeah so go play Prey 2006 or just watch youtubers play it and then compare to the shitty remake and cry about never getting a sequel. Then think about entering a portal in the original to a dimension where we got Prey 2 instead of Prey 2017 and Fallout 76.

See you…

October 31, 2019 0

Men in Black international review

This movie surprised me taking the lofty title of ‘most okayest movie ever’.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I went into this movie, I’ve seen all of the MIB movies but never been that impressed with any of them bar the first one and even then I just thought that movie was above average.

And then of course I stumbled on all the political bullshit surrounding this movie as it appears that Tessa Thompson is trying to topple Brie Larson from atop the totem of ‘most wokest person in hollywood’ which you’d think would be easy since she’s a woman and mixed race and is probably some made up gender she hasn’t fully made up yet (probably waiting on focus group testing for that one). But you’d be wrong, as nothing will top a huhwhyte wamen and her shrill white guilt from being the most woke person on earth nomatter how many african babies she has to adopt and then turn into some kind of gender experiment, looking at you Charlise Theron *shakes head*.

Yeah she was being a total nob and I guess trying to kick up controversy by saying it should be ‘People in black’ or something lame like that, you know just trying to ungender the language for some reason. When in reality ‘men’ is actually a neutral term which just means people and they added ‘wo’ to it to single out the distinction in people. Men classically is just a collective term for humans, you use women when you want to get specific on the type of human from the bog standard to the special one that creates other humans.

Putting the fedora away for a moment, that shit doesn’t really matter because facts never matter when you’ve got an agenda to push. But in all honesty the movie didn’t have a lot of politics in it, of course there were politics in it, can’t get a movie without it in these days in some form or another. It’s always there looming in the background of all movies in a way.

There are the odd subtle reference to immigration, well Tessa Thompson’s character at the start helps this cute little alien escape alien ice (MIB) and spoilers for this epic twist which is almost completely inconsequential to the rest of the movie and totally obvious to anyone five and above; the little alien is mildly relevant to the plot later. In that he’s like the enforcer to an alien arms dealer and because she helped him he helps her escape the arms dealer.

So I guess the moral of the story is you should help illegal aliens escape the law so when they become hired killers for other alien criminals they’ll maybe remember you and spare you when you end up in the clutches of said alien criminals. Not the best argument for immigration I’ve heard, but it’s up there.

Also not sure about this in the other movies but they referred to the aliens a lot as ‘refugees’. I don’t really get why alien refugees would want to flee to earth of all places when earth seems to be the focal point of a lot of alien fuckery and the first part of the movie is about how Hemsworth’s character has to take this alien dignitary around and show him some fun or his people will grind the earth into dust. So tell me again why it’s such an alien hot spot, of all the places in the galaxy why pick earth a planet where most of the people aren’t even aware of aliens? And also why aren’t people aware of aliens? What harm could it be to let people know that aliens exist? I mean aliens are aware people exist and they’re pretty chill about it, I don’t get why humans are the only people in the universe not allowed to know they’re not alone, it’s just levels of contrivance that shouldn’t be possible.
I was just thinking what would really change if people knew about aliens in this universe and the answer really is ‘nothing’. There’s a bit where they’re riding this alien hoverbike thing through the streets of morocco and they take the time to neuralise some of the people who initially see them but then they’re driving through the streets not bothering and I was like ‘so what was the point of neuralising those people if you don’t also subsequently neuralise everyone around you now?”. It’s just contrived and silly and like why bother neuralising people at all when there are supposedly aliens everywhere. It makes me think that people do know aliens are real but the MIB are just so stupid they don’t know everyone knows and people are just pretending they don’t know to humour these total retards who think camera flash bulbs erase people’s memories.

I get the whole point of it is to make us think that the MIB could be real and they’re keeping the existence of aliens from us but does that ever make it seem more real? Not really. I mean you had people planning to storm area 51 recently hoping to bone green women, do you think anything would surprise these people anymore?

Jesus fucking christ, I didn’t think I’d have anything to say about this movie and I’m already almost a thousand words in and haven’t said anything about it really haha.

Ok well, I kind of enjoyed it, I guess, it’s an ok popcorn flick to turn your brain off to, some of the jokes are ok, kind of post ironic humour bleh, but passable. The contrived origin story of Tessa Thompson’s character sucks though and I wish they’d skipped it, but it was thankfully very brief.

She’s just someone who saw an alien once and wanted to be in MIB and she’s ‘muh mary sue super wamen genius!’ and they have to let her in the MIB for reasons. She basically just shows up at MIB headquarters and they let her join for reasons. I thought it would’ve been more fun if they neuralised her and she had to remember and get back there. But this movie can’t be bothered with origin stories, because they have a bunch of other origin stories in a row to tell. Right after her origin story its Chris Hemsworth’s turn and then like a quarter of the way in it gets into the villains story. The villain was sort of bleh honestly. Just these two guys who looked like (and probably were) backing dancers in a *insert modern popstar idiot*’s music video.

But I expected Liam Neeson to be in it for like five minutes and he’s actually in it a lot longer than that. I liked some of the action, Chris Hemsworth is always pretty watchable and they actually cut some of the cringy stuff that was in the trailer which was great. Back to the political shit, there was a shit bit where the chick who is the leader of the U.S MIB is implying she’s trying to change the name to be more gender neutral and I don’t remember it being in the version I watched so that’s cool.

So the basic plot is Chris Hemsworth is basically 007 but goofier and with aliens and Tessa Thompson is his new rookie partner and they’re doing stuff. It’s not the best, the plot is mainly serviceable but it didn’t drag or feel poorly paced. I didn’t feel bored or unsatisfied. It’s length was just right in terms of it’s act structure, the characters were enjoyable, effects looked good.

Maybe I was just expecting it to be really bad and was just pleasantly surprised because I rather enjoyed it, it was just a fun popcorn movie. I’d probably never watch it again but I can think of worse ways to waste an afternoon.

August 27, 2019 0

Gage Epilogue ‘Effigy’

Hey hey,

Here goes that experimental nano story I did that kind of didn’t work out how I expected, maybe I should stop trying to write novels in 30 days haha. Eh but I had fun doing it, it was different enough to hold my attention and be fun and for me to actually finish it despite not making the time limit because of work and that I forgot about nano until a few days in haha.

My one fan who read this said he hated the ending because they all die and no, no they don’t this is just satire on how the news lies and it’s all bullshit, kind of the main theme of the story, of course their press will say whatever they want, paint whatever narrative fits them. There are planned sequels but I don’t know when that will come. I need to do a sequel to Diana before I can even think about one for Gage or anything else. The next Diana book is just too juicy to pass up.

Not much been going on as of late, oh yeah it was my birthday haha. Funny seeing all those people I barely know on facebook sending me happy birthday messages and not being able to respond because I’m banned, I guess they’ll think I’m an asshole, eh they’ll probably forget in a year.

Still reading that new Parker book and I haven’t got that far into it but it seems like a return to form; slow plotting methodical story about a heist. Lots of interesting new characters and some old.

I did watch probably the greatest horror movie I’ve seen maybe in a decade last night and I’ll probably do a review of that just to align my thoughts. Because it’s one of those movies that you really need time to unpack. I should watch it again really.

Anywho I’ll leave you with this little epilogue and try to do some real work, going over the editing for Diana. Really hoping to make a jump on that soon.

See you…

–

Further news of this event are not in our record but one news clipping from the New york daily reported as follows;

GRUESOME MASSACRE A TOWN GONE MAD!

CABIN FEVER REACHES PEAK AS SPECIESIST GROUP DESTROYS TOWN AND GOVERNMENT FORCES HAVE TO RESPOND.

Sept 14th

Reports received earlier this week indicate a speciesist riot broke out in a small border town in Arkansas called Tupelo.

Earlier terrorist and anti-government activity has been reported in the area. It seems the gang activity had culminated around the town resulting in chaos and death. Even reports of rape, sodomy and cannibalism as well as predation of children.

The leader of the group one Phineas Gage who has been assumed killed in the resulting bombarbment of the town. Was reported as being a religious fanatic. He followed an outdated and archaic religion that still clings on in parts further away from civilisation. Reports lead us to believe that he was a sexual pervert. Taking many of the townsfolks young daughters and even sons to bed, some as young as eight or nine years old. He was also known to practice polygamy and human sacrifice.

Subsequently a rally will be held. Where upon the dreaded terrorist killed in the event will be burnt in effigy. So as to send a beacon to anyone that would emulate such a repugnant act of defiance. We will burn this traitor to democracy into out memories so as never to forget the aliens killed that day. Our heart goes out to the Cylon and their families who have suffered and who continue to suffer. At the hands of despicable speciesists that continue to persist in our society today.

In a more sombre note a brave attempt by a noble military unit of Lug troops was brutally thwarted by the gang. Who cooked and ate these noble American heroes. Subsequently we believe sodomizing them before and after sacrificing them to their evil god. These brave souls who died protecting their country will never be forgotten. Their noble sacrifice will remain long after their deaths and live on in the heart of the people who carry their memory.

They fought valiantly and will be remembered posthumously in a candle lit vigil in time square late this afternoon. All members of the unit will be posthumously promoted to General 1st class.

Unfortunately their bodies could not be recovered for burial as they were most likely eaten with their remains fed to animals. The resultant bombardment from the Spartan two orbital lazer left very little of the town remaining.

The government issued a statement later that day decreeing that ‘Hate would never win. And all those with hate in their hearts were on the wrong side of history’. A move that has been criticized by many heads of state as drastic and heavy handed. Nevertheless it was met with favourable support from the public after a poll was taken. With a whopping 90% in favour of vaporouzing the small border town and only 9% no and 1% undecided.

August 28, 2018 0

Gage Chapter 12 ‘Passover’

Hello hello again,

Greetings on this fine tuesday coming from my shack in the middle of murky nowhere to bring you more weird stories and general musings on life (or the lack thereof).

Been getting on with some decent writing and a lot of slacking off, still trying to get back into the swing of things with the 2k a day word count, not quite managing it but saying that the stuff I’ve been putting out imo isn’t too bad. It’s taking shape, it’s getting there.
Is it as good as the start, I don’t but I’m reaching the tipping point now, the story is peaking and I like the way it’s shaping up.

And tbh I’m looking forward to doing something more silly and fun again, so as soon as I’m done here gonna get straight back into 3 ring for the next instalment of that and then maybe start thinking about a sequel to Diana after dark if the time is ready for that. Been wanting to write that one for a while.

But the moon and the stars have to be aligned for that, it has to be perfect and if you’ve read the book you’d know that is pretty topical haha.

Not that I don’t love writing serious stuff and intense stuff, it’s just a little draining being in that head space constantly, you have no idea how worked up I have to get to write stuff like this. It’s like I meditate but not to get calm and serene but to get the complete opposite. I get so worked up it’s like I’m trying to rip the keys out of my laptop haha.

It just takes up a lot of energy to run that hot, I’m literally trying to make myself feel like I’m in battle flinging a battleaxe into someone’s face haha.

Talking about battleaxes in the faces I haven’t been reading or listening to the witcher much, I just don’t care enough to follow the story honestly, the characters are boring and unlikable and I feel like I was cheated out of the witcher series I should’ve have gotten. I keep lamenting to my polish buddy at work that if the series had been like the first story it would have been perfect. If Sapkowksi had kept it a tight almost pulpy action packed terse tense fantasy thriller it would have been my favourite fantasy series hands down.

But it just gets lost in the weeds with this generic crap and shitty characters I just lost interest. I mean most of the books are just about Ciri and completely unrelated stuff honestly. For a series about a monster slayer it just uses his monster slaying as like a character trait, it’s not what the story is about at all and plays no part in the narrative whatsoever.

Geralt being a witcher is just something he likes to tell people like he’s on a speed date but he never actually does any ‘witching’. It’s just astounding that CD projekt red can get it so right with the games but the creator of the character can get it so wrong. It’s weird because it’s usually the opposite for adaptations like it’s the total reverse with Dexter. Sure they hired a great actor to play Dexter but they completely fluffed the story and the character after season one. If the show had followed the books religiously it would have been amazing.

But it’s equally amazing that CD projekt red (jesus I sound like I’m doing marketing for these guys haha) could turn a cool shorty story (which could be a rip off of elric, I need to read elric) and turn it into one of the biggest game franchises in history.

I also finished that Parker book it was taking me ages to get through and yeah it kinda goes nowhere like I thought it might. They kill the only interesting villain off halfway through and replace him with an old guy on a golf cart who doesn’t do anything except shout at people. And the whole book is about Parker trying to escape this amusement park while getting besieged by this criminal organisation and spoilers yeah at the end he escapes and then goes home and makes himself a sandwich. That’s literally the end, I’m not making that up. The last line is him eating the sandwich and then thinking about getting the money he left there.

He doesn’t even get the money, or even try for it there’s no tension at all. He just escapes and thats it, no epic show down because the person he would have had the showdown with he already killed, he was literally the first guy he killed, it was pathetic. I mean why the fuck couldn’t you just have killed off the guys buddy and continued the story with the interesting villain instead?

That tiny change would have changed the entire plot and made it ten times more interesting and it would have been so easy to do. You just have the other guy walk into the hall of mirrors. Why would this smart villain be the first to walk into a trap like that? It made no sense and basically destroyed all the tension in the book.

I complained that the last book was kind of small and uninteresting and the heist was a little boring because everything went right. But that still had tension and interesting characters and a more dynamic story, it had legs. This book is just lazy and hacky honestly.

But still this is like I dunno the 14th book in the series and it’s the first real stinker, so that’s amazing. I’ve been burning through these books and loving each one more than the last. I just hope the next one returns to form a little.
Oh and I’m really excited because I just found out that someone turned all Stark’s books into graphic novels so that’ll give me a reason to read them all again which is great. I can’t wait for that.

I didn’t think the book was shit, I think if it had a few tweaks it would have been decent. Just have that interesting villain you spent all that time building up live til the end and have this awesome battle of wits of which I expected. And maybe have a little more set up to the actual job and the park itself. Just to give the story a little more breathing room and not be this claustrophobic almost like stage play set in one room.

Yeah so that’s my rant for the day probably be back for a poem tomorrow, I don’t know yet, been feeling a little up and down about that. I definitely have material let’s leave it at that.

Oh that reminds me I finally got to the part of the story where my bardic poem is used in Cur, so that’s cool. It is kind of a pivotal point in the story and the lore, the celtic mythology. Bards are held in high regard in that culture, their power to influence people is quite literally seen as a form of powerful magic and curses.

Anyway gotta go and do some proof reading as usual, finished the Diana pitch chapters but I’m gonna start working on the whole book soon enough. But I will put out another Cur chapter soon enough.

See you…

–

They came for us at night.

Me and my friends watched from our rooftops as they snaked through the back alleys. That bookish one with the moustache behind them fiddling with a tiny pencil and paper trying to write in some kind of journal.

They crept quickly and quietly to the centre of town. The town was so quiet you could hear the sand moving in their boots. A ghost town silently watching as they worked their way closer to the saloon they hoped Gage was sleeping in.

I could see on the hill where they set up camp, those weird pods were still there closed up and not moving, just sitting there like warts on a frogs ass.

They had strange weaponry and stalked the alleys ways watching every corner as they went. Feeling the eyes on them, slits of boarded windows following them as they passed holding their breath.

They must have felt us watching, the big one with the beard looked up at us but we ducked too quickly for him to see. They hurried along passing us off as curious birds.

He was waiting for them.

Just standing so tall, alone in the centre of main street, a cold wind blowing. His shotgun hanging loose at his side.

The men fanned out in formation and surrounded Gage in a semi circle in front of the saloon.

The man with the moustache shouted and tried to push past the men.

“Ryan, we have to take him alive.” He shouted as he approached the man with the white hair.

The man at the front said nothing, he just spun around and hit the pudgy moustache guy in the guts dropping him flat to his knees. Then he turned back to Gage and shrugged his shoulders.

The man on his knees tried to get up as the other men attempted to keep him down.

“If you kill him and others hear about it, he’ll become a martyr”

The man with the white hair, he must have been the leader turned to each of his men and he pointed, first at the woman. He said “Are you gonna tell anyone about this?”

She shook her head.

Then to the large man with the beard “You?”

“Not a soul.”

Then to the mexican.

“De nada”

“You?” He said to the younger man.

“No sir” he grinned.

“Well that’s everyone.” He said looking at the man with the mustache and quickly shooting him in the head with his strange alien weapon. There was just a quick flash of light and a strange noise and the man’s head was gone and his body became dead weight in the arms of the men carrying. Stained as they were with a light dusting of pink mist.

Disgusted, they threw his body down like a sack of potatoes in the dry loose top soil.

Gage watched the dust settle around it as it stopped being a person and just became scenery.

Ryan stopped and looked Gage up and down and scoffed. “We travelled all this way for this” He sniffed and spat on the dirt next to the mustache man’s body and said “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do that.” He smirked and put his e-cigar in his mouth and sucked on it looking at Gage. “I know you” He said.

Gage tossed his gun out in front of him on the ground. It landed with a heavy thudding noise.

Ryan let out a laugh and said “Well that was easy.”

Gage didn’t move or say a word, his one eye burning staring through Ryan who tried too hard to hide a boiling fear in his gut. Destiny staring him right in the face, looking at the bare pit where his soul was supposed to reside.

Gage took his duster off of his shoulders revealing a mountain of man in a stained grey longsleeved under shirt that was once white. Ripped and torn and bitten and stretched with the sinewy muscles underneath forged through nothing but hard work and sweat and toil. The work horse bitten and turned sour and vicious and lame biting back at the hand of his master and running madly and wild and free to it’s own doom.

He took his suspenders off his shoulders and clenched his fists.

Ryan scoffed again “Oh so you wanna do it the old fashioned way.” He took another suck on his e-cigar and put it back in his pocket. He took his gun out of it’s holster and lifted it over his shoulder at which point the younger guy with the shaved head took it off of him.

He was wearing some kind of weird skeleton suit over his body that went over his arms and legs and connected at the hips. Under it he was just wearing a fitted shirt and a pair of pants.

Ryan didn’t take a stance he just smiled with his cocky smile and said “Well what are you waiting for?”

He let out a mocking breathy laughter and said “Ok, I guess I’ll be the one to lead”

He moved so fast I thought I was dreaming at first. I’d never seen a human move like that, it was like he was there one minute and then there was just dust and dirt and he was barrelling at Gage. He didn’t throw a punch he just launched himself right into him like a cannonball and swept him off his feet with enough force to kill a horse.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. He couldn’t have been more than six foot nothing this guy but one minute he was standing there the next he was on top of Gage. He toppled the gigantic man in two seconds flat, felled him like a great oak tree in a single strike.

–

Check out the rest of the chapter on inkitt.

Passover

–

August 14, 2018 0

A quiet place – Review

I wasn’t really planning to review this movie but then I saw all the insane buzz around it and my contrarian senses were tingling and I had to get it out. Honestly I didn’t hate it, it was just like ‘bleh’ it was a nothing burger of a movie for me. Tired re-used ideas done before, better and worse a hundred times and it really didn’t work for me. But fuck me if rotten tomatoes aren’t sucking the sweat from this movies balls.

It’s disturbing, and I don’t really get why. I understood why they were fanning get outs balls, it was the same reason black panther negative reviews were deleted, it was the race angle. But for this I have no idea why everyone has to like it, are deaf kids the new black guys?
I watched it with my brother who is an avid pirate arr and I just couldn’t get into it. The movie seems to never get going then it ends. I remarked to him that it was kind of like tremors meets it comes at night but not as fun or interesting as either. Actually this movie really makes me appreciate it comes at night more, despite the fact nothing actually comes at night the movie could have been half an hour longer at least. But it was suspenseful and interesting and did the end of world scenario in a fresh interesting way.

A way this movie doesn’t do. This movie is basically the road without the road, it’s stakeland without the land. It’s I am legend without the legend, can I stop this now?

I’m not going to get bogged down in the lazy/non-existent world building or sperg out about the many many plotholes and inconsistencies, if we did that we’d be here all day and all we’d have to show for it would be a headache.
The main problem I have with this movie is there’s no journey, there’s no attempt at a story or an arc or a goal. And it’s so easily done. The whole movie is centred around Blunt’s character having a baby so maybe there are complications and they need to find a doctor, or they hear a radio frequency about a settlement or something, anything but nothing like that happens. The movies plot could fit into an episode of tales from crypt, farmhouse attacked by sound monsters the end. Nothing happens the whole movie is just a circular mess of chasing around this farmhouse and pointless filler to get to the main beats of the bath scene and the *spoilers* dad’s death sequence *spoilers end*. And that whole scene is sad but it feels unearned and shoe horned in to a point that it makes the rest of the movie seem pointless.

The bath scene particularly I didn’t find tense at all because I knew she’d be fine, I knew none of the kids could die because they already made a big deal about killing one of their kids in the opening of the movie. So it’s completely without tension because I know none of these characters can die and there aren’t any other characters around them to act as monster fodder.

So there’s no story but movies like this can get by with no story as long as there’s a tense character drama like Cloverfield lane but there’s no character drama either because no one can talk. There are only four characters, beard shooshing dad, pregnant mom, deaf kid, none deaf kid. Emily Blunt and Krasinski are married in real life and they have a lot of chemistry during interviews but in this movie they’re playing a couple with little to no chemistry there’s no levity or romance. You’re supposed to believe these people care about eachother but their kids are running around a corn field with sound monsters that somehow took out the entire of america’s military and they’re like ‘they’ll be fine the script says so’.
The deaf kid is ok as long as it said in the script to do your best Dustin from stranger things pretending to be a fish impression, then she was spot on, the other kid is just a non-entity.

The main beats of the movie are painfully predictable, when the thing with the earpiece came up as a plot device for defeating the monsters my brother turned to me and said “Swing away” and he nailed it, it was just like that. It was a stupid Shamalamamadingdong premise, oh the sound monsters don’t like weird frequency noises, no one in the whole of america thought of using sound weapons on monsters that hunt by sound, wouldn’t it be awesome if we had something like sound cannons. Yeah that’d be great.
It was painfully dumb and I think honestly it’s just because I’ve seen too many movies I can just work out every beat of the movie and see the structure. This movie’s structure is mess, it’s a circle, they don’t go anywhere, no story is progressed, there’s no arc, we’re supposed to feel like they’ve been on some epic journey by the end when they’re on their front lawn.

By the end of the movie where the epic plot twist is that the monsters are powerless without their heads I turned to my brother and I said; “Emily Blunt is going to cock the shotgun and then the credits will roll” and would you guess that’s exactly what happened.

And we couldn’t believe it, that was the cheesiest and worst ending I could’ve imagined to this movie that was going for this serious grounded tone, it suddenly becomes aliens. I almost burst out laughing. It was so cheesey and unselfaware yet all the critics at rotten tomatoes are totally drinking the coolaid.
I mean is it as bad as Tom Hanks on like an actors guild video saying Get out is the greatest movie ever? Not really, it’s pretty bad but not that bad. I was talking about that to my brother and I said ‘Can you imagine if he was talking about It follows, people would laugh in his fucking face’ and It follows actually was a really clever horror movie with great atmosphere and genuine scares but no one would dare elevate it to the level of get out because it wasn’t directed by a half black guy and it wasn’t about racism, or whatever the fuck that movie was about.

I mean Quiet place isn’t bad, it’s just derivative and unoriginal and really unsatisfying, just watch the road or stakeland or war of the worlds, they’re the same movies but ten times better. People actually have arcs and they do stuff and go on a journey, there are characters and dialogue and goals and emotions not just people signing “I love you” at eachother. Fuck it ignore the critic group think behind this movie and just go watch Tremors, it’s like a quiet place if it was any fun.

See you…

June 7, 2018 0

Gage Chapter 6 ‘Leaders of Men’

Ok so I just went ahead and made a spot for 3 Ring on my inkitt page, gave it a little cover and a blurb and all that good stuff so you can go ahead and check that out and give it a little read and review and a little kissy and a cuddle if you’d kindly follow this link good karma will come to you in the form of hot topic gift baskets filled with cancer cells harvested from infected rhesus monkeys. So go do that.

The Man with the Laughing Sword.

So what’s new? Well I finished the witcher book and thought it was ok, although the ending was a little creepy and the story is just sort of thrown together, it has no cohesion, there isn’t really a beginning middle or end, it’s just loosely connected stories and then it details how Yennifer and Geralt met and fall in loves, spoilers he fucking wishing on a Genie to force her to be in love with him haha. I’m not even kidding. This was sort of talked about in the Witcher 3 but I didn’t really put a lot of thought into it because I hadn’t read the books at that point but it puts a lot of stuff from the games in context and just adds this little creep factor to the whole thing.

And I totally get the whole ‘Team Triss vs Team Yen’ thing now because although I haven’t read the other books yet I’m guessing Triss actually loves Geralt and isn’t brainwashed by a fucking magic lamp and probably also wasn’t an ugly hunchback who used magic to be beautiful, at least I think that’s what she was.

I really thought reading the books would make me like Yen and Triss more but Yen is pretty much a thot and an asshole from the moment you meet her until they fall in love and it’s not much different in the game. I got to the bit where he wishes she falls in love with him and I was like ‘y tho?’. He literally just met her and she was in another man’s bed and she was nothing but rude and conniving and literally mind controls him to do her dirty work potentially putting his life at risk but this somehow endears him to her.
I didn’t get that, specifically considering he literally murdered a woman in the first part of the book for attempting to do the same thing after fucking her.
It just didn’t make any sense and honestly I didn’t give a shit in the games when both Triss and Yen snubbed me for fucking around with them both. I didn’t care but having read this I’m gonna be in camp Triss until she annoys me in the later books haha. The main thing that put me off of her in the game is just her annoying accent.
Don’t you just fucking hate it in fantasy games where there’s that character that just has this grating overt american accent in a game set in some mythical universe. It just completely breaks immersion for me to hear people talk like that. I become so aware I’m watching a game cutscene or a tv show or whatever.
Everyone in fantasy should have english accents or some variant on that like irish or scottish or welsh, something like that. Geralt is an exception because his voice is just dank the way it is boi.
Geralt’s is more subtle, Triss sounds like a new yorker ordering a bagel. Just annoys me.
Honestly I wouldn’t have begrudged a game like Kingdom come being all in Czech with english subtitles, not that that game needed to be more immersive but that extra level of passion of the christ immersion could be cool and I might see on my next playthrough if I can set that up.

I will definitely be reading the next book though because the action and the writing is perfect inspiration for my fantasy book I’m planning and 3 ring and I enjoyed it despite the fact it didn’t make much sense.

Anyway can’t stay long, could waffle on indefinitely, I need to do more proofreading for 3 ring so I must dash.

See you…

He couldn’t say how long he waited or if he even slept like that. Days could have passed, weeks of waiting. Waiting for what? A sign? God to reach a hand down? A white winged horse? Maybe he was waiting to die.

Gage couldn’t say until he saw it and he eventually did. It came up as a dot on the horizon getting ever close until it took the shape of a group of men. As they got closer to the whorehouse they waved at Gage seeing him sitting on the stoop in his rocking chair. He just nodded and watched them come. There were about five of them on horseback leading a sixth on a rope.

Eventually they stopped their horses in front of the stoop and he could get a good look at them with the gun still on his lap

They were relatively young but looked capable and had a wry innocence about them as if they were all farm boys fresh from the tit.

Gage offered them a greeting and they returned it cordially and smiled although he could tell they held a heavy countenance.

“Good evening mister.” One of the young lads said as he approached with a wary smile on his face. He squinted with the sun in his eyes, lighting up boyish freckles on a ruddy irish face. “You wouldn’t happen to know the way into town would ya?” The boy asked earnestly like a child would. But he was tall for a boy and wore a man’s duster and stood as one and was broad with a light strawberry blonde hair and stubble on his chin. Loose springy hair on his head.

Gage shook his head.

“Oh that’s too bad” The young lad said sighing and stopping to look around. “Ya see, we was transporting a head’a cattle up from Bronson when this gang of escaped- err – you know. Them Kafta folk.” He sucked his teeth reluctant even to talk about it sighing heavily as if he were more disappointed than mad, as if it were his fault somehow. ”Well they robbed us sir, kilt one of us, lad by the name of O’Hare just cut him down like a beast.” He swallowed remembering it. “Butchered him like a hog for slaughter.” His eyes got narrow as he realised that he was probably closer to the truth than he realised. Lugs weren’t too choosey about the source of their food, we were different animals to them entirely of course. “They took as much cattle as they could and the rest stampeded off a cliff.” He spat on the ground. “But you see they left this one behind.” He gestured over to the tied up lugger, a smaller scrawny one. The runt of the litter certainly but no less dangerous. It was dressed as something like a plainsman or a farmer in a light coloured smock that was torn and dirty on bare feet. Although his kind rarely wore shoes and usually had no need of them as their feet were ususally clawed and toughened like the feet of a dog or cat. “One of the little ones and well sir, we’re planning on taking him into town to face justice there”. He paused and cleared his throat “We thought if we couldn’t get the cattle back we could at least see this done and go home with our heads held high.” The young lad smacked his lips and said “Who knows, he might even have a bounty on his head”.

“Why bother?” Gage scoffed. There was something Gage respected even in his mockery. Something only in men and only then of a certain kind, a sense of duty, even misplaced, a sense of making things right that only existed in men. Despite how bastardised this sense of honor was by a system that had learned to manipulate and putrefy it. He could still respect that but not in abstract. There was no duty to ideals or concepts or company only in blood and the soil it fell on, only that mattered. For the ideas could be soiled and stolen and changed ever so slightly as to flip them entirely.

The ideals could be and more than likely were based on lies. The concepts half baked drivel formed from the minds of men never to spill blood except with a pen. But the blood and the soil had been there much longer and would remain on when all the high minded ideals were dust and buried in rubble.

“Sir?”

“I have a rope here”

“Erm, well” The young lad dithered earnestly. “Wouldn’t it be better just to take him into town Sir?”

Gage knew that taking him into town was a waste of time, they’d take one look at the little beast and start blaming everyone but him. To the state the luggers were a class of retarded children incapable of being responsible for their own actions. And any violence they commited was the act of a mislead minor. And any violence enacted upon them was the act of a savage monster to be scourned and derided and spat upon in the streets. The state would bring down some Cyclon lawyer or magistrate to blame men for making him work, oppressing him somehow. There had to be some way his actions weren’t a product of his own nature as nature was something the Cyclon abhorred in all forms. The idea to them of creatures having a nature was almost like a challenge to them, something to be tested and broken and moulded and changed.

The human officials would just ring their hands and differ to someone else too afraid to even make comment on it. They’d think about their little wives and children and their mistresses before saying anything that could put that in danger. A danger that was very real. Such controversies erupting from the most benale of mistakes or misteps or resistance. Just some loose tongued person taking for granted that they’d grown accustomed to living in a ‘free’ country. And could say whatever they liked were of course layed low. As all free men would be in turn until they were all gone. It was only that the land was so big and the list so long that they could grow to doubt that they would be next although not next as they were waiting in a queue.

They’d say it wasn’t the lugs own beast nature but it was the speciesism and bigotry men had shown the lug. This forced him to become the wild animal he was always meant to be. It couldn’t possibly be the other way around. No that would make sense, but that’s what the cyclone did. They made up down, left right and it worked, if it didn’t it confused people long enough that it didn’t matter if they realised they’d been had, it was already done. They’d been so skilled at it they’d completely flipped the moral teachings we had had only twenty years prior. Without our even noticing it as it had been done so gradually and enacted so henpeckingly.

We didn’t ask for these beasts in our land and we could’ve built our tracks without them and been better for it. It was the Cyclon that brought them here from some different world, or maybe they made them who knows. It was them that wanted them here because they were cheap and dumb and easily controlled. And if ever something went wrong it would never be them caught in the jaws of the monster. It’d always be some human dolt who would get the axe and if he was unlucky enough to live, the hammer would come down if he ever spoke up. He’d be called every name in the book, the names that stick and he’d never work again.

There was a pause as the wind blew and the rocking chair creaked.

“Hey wait a minute” Another lad from behind said. “We can’t just kill him without a trial, that’s speciesist.” The boy looked older than the rest and had dark curly hair with freckles on his cheeks and dark beady eyes. “We gotta take him to town.” the kid protested. Something told Gage it was this kid’s idea to take him to town in the first place. Overriding the natural recourse which would have been to bash the beasts head in with a rock on the spot. The Cyclon loved rules, they loved codes and dictums because they were always for everyone else to follow but them.

There was another silence and blowing wind and they knew what justice called for and since they couldn’t do it right now the one beast would have to do.

Gage looked at the sorry thing, it was younger but given a year or two and it would be just as deadly as the others. It had an arrogant look about it. It knew it was beaten and looked sorry but it was sorry it had been caught, not sorry about any crime it had done. The luggers never could feel sorry for crimes against humans because in their minds they were justified. They were owed whatever they stole for some past grievance told to them by the Cyclon. Every killing of a human was a revenge for some long gone gripe that may or not have happened. The Cyclon would have them believe that humans and Cyclon were one and the same and it was men that had enslaved them. There was no subtlety nor a mind capable of distinguishing it in a lug.

“If you even think of hurting this fella I’ll run into town myself and tell them everything” The nasally voiced kid with the curly mop of hair said. “He has rights, they’re thinking feeling people just like us, they’re our equals and we have to treat them that way or-“. He got off his horse to get around to the front so they could see his hand wringing and gesticulation like he was making some address to public office. Taking a few steps onto the porch and talking down to them like some cutpurse evangelist. “It goes against the very nature of this countries founding to kill this free man without a trial, we’re a nation of immigrants bound by our principles.”

The other boys made faces like they were swallowing some harsh uneccessary medicine, a lie forced down with teaspoons of sugar and grit. Their faces contorting as this little rat told them that this monster was their equal. When every sense told them that it was a monster that didn’t belong on this earth. A mix of shame and revulsion at the thought of swallowing this lie and someday even believing it themselves. And forcing it down the throats of others made them sick.

Gage snorted.

The boys looked at him with astonishment. The little rat boy had said all the magic words that made normal men cringe and prostrate themselves. To make the strong bow and scrape, make even their own fathers become humble and small and itinerant but not Gage. To Gage they were just words.

The little rat boy squinted angrily almost in tears and said “I’ll report you all and you’ll be the ones that hang!” He snuffled and continued pointing at them in turn before waving his arrogant little hand in Gage’s face as he sat in his rocking chair. Then turning around to address the boys once again as he could feel some movement amongst them “My father-“

Gage had heard enough and interrupted his feeble chatter with a blast from his shotgun into the boys side knocking him headlong into the dirt. He fell like the devil himself yanked the little snots chain. Hitting so hard he broke apart like a child’s doll wrapped in meat into squishy flabby pieces.

The gun smoked under his blanket as the boys shook with fear but only for a moment. Because people only feared what they didn’t understand, and this made some sense to them instantly and the gun was only a surprise. They’d probably never even seen one this close before. There was a time when farm boys like this would be steeped in guns right out of the womb. They’d have been bouncing a shotgun on their knee while their father bounced them on his. But years of gun confiscations had left them little more than babes in the woods. Victims waiting to be robbed and murdered by monsters that roamed free, bound by no such laws. It was lucky they’d only lost one and hadn’t been raped for their troubles.

But there was some spark of boyish wonder in them looking at the gun and what it had wrought, a terrible wonder.

Gage stood throwing the blanket off his lap and said “I’ll get the rope.”

There was a little grumbling from the boy who had spoken to him first. He later introduced himself as ‘Jameson’ his partners were ’O’Shaunnesy, McDonald and Clarke the dead one’s name was Miller.

Gage instructed them to scoop up what was left of Miller and they dug another shallow grave. Not too far from the mass grave he just dug and laid his bones down there to be dug up by the coyotes and gnawed on.

It was getting later and there was some light protest. Worrying as they were about sanctions from the state. Gage assured them as he held the large bible that smelled vaguely of piss. That there was no greater sanctions than in this book if they allowed the thing to live.

There was some sense in that, although they swallowed with fear all the same. Knowing what he said was truth that spoke to their ancient past conflicting with the ‘truth’ of their modern age. It was a practice these country boys were slow to get used to and that’s why Gage knew he could use them. The age they lived in devoted itself to indoctrinating it’s young into thinking the thoughts in their heads weren’t their own property. And their natural reactions of disgust at the world around them was a result of their bigotry and small mindedness. And they had best to train themselves to be more tolerant of an alien race raping their planet. They were taught to suppress their instinctual reactions. Encouraged instead that they should instead try to befriend the monsters. If only they treated these creatures with love and kindness maybe then they’d decide not to rape and murder and see them as a source of food. To just keep putting your head in the mouth of the alligator hoping this was the time it would see sense and not bite. Failing in every sense that there was no sense to be had and in fact biting was its very nature, a sense of it’s own.

But instead of destroying the alligator or living in separation from it. Humans were forced to share a bed with it by people that would likely never even be in the same area code as the real throng. Sure the Cyclon had them as bodyguards but they made sure to pick the best most plyable subjects. Putting them through the most rigorous of screening and genetic manipulation. Further inhibiting them from turning against their masters with surgical implants in the brain.

They would never see the consequences of their actions and would never even care. For the life of one of their kind was considered worth a thousand of ours but they would never say that although we all knew it, deep down. No to the masses we were all brothers, all equals. Living together in perfect harmony towards a better future and this was the great lie that was repeated often.

The boys off their horses were all tall to average height. Strapping lads raised on beef and cows milk. Not like those scrawny city folk who were barely up to a cows eye and ate nothing but vegetables and bread from Europa.

They were strong lads raised for work, probably moving hay bales from an early age. Grown hardy and earnest from years of getting up early to milk cows and feed chickens.

Now seeking some kind of adventure or travel had taken to moving the cattle their parents had raised. The next generation of farmers and cattle folk that would keep the country crawling along on its belly. It had puzzled Gage to think how a snivelling brat like Miller had snuck into their group.

“His pa owns the bank, he’s the one got a lean on our farm, wanted us to bring him along to toughen him up, I don’t know what to tell him”. Jameson sighed as he looked at the poultry sum of dirt and rocks that made up Miller’s grave.

Gage breathed heavy with the bible clasped in both hands at his waist. He watched as O’Shaugnesy and Clarke put the noose around the young lug’s neck as he was seated on the back of Jameson’s horse. They tied the rope off on a branch and Gage opened the bible and started to read from it.

*Editors note, this part seems unlikely and inaccurate as all reports of the man known as Phineas Gage state that he was in fact illiterate. A common state of affairs for men of his time. The ability to read and write was not something commonly attained by workmen of his station and reserved mostly for the elites of the city. The aliens of which used a completely alien alphabet no human was allowed to learn.

He read a passage about justice and fairness and carrying a sword and they all listened with an earnest wonderment. As they’d most likely never heard anything like it in their whole lives nor would they be able to read and write. Their heads dipped as if they were at a funeral. The beast just howled like a kicked dog without any decorum or respect for the words at all. Just a baying disgusting cloying and begging and pleading for life when it so easily took it from others. Something in it knew it could try to appeal to us, to the mercy it had abused it’s entire life. The trusting good nature of man that had allowed these alien forces to usurp them.

Even the concept of the good neighbour in the book he held was twisted and used to promote their agenda of tolerating the intolerable. Taking in those that would eventually destroy us. As if the book Gage held sewed the seeds of extinction for it’s own people in it’s pages. As if man were not meant to live at all but to be used and thrown away.

It continued to howl over the words. It so desperately wanted to continue living but had no idea why further than the animal need to continue to exist and propagate its dna. What could this thing do if it were allowed to live but eat and consume? Could it write a sonnet or paint a painting or create a house. Gage could do none of those things either but the potential was there, this thing could not even dream of that like a wolf could not be a pig.

It’s existence was momentary, a link of moment to moment pleasures punctuated by the pain of others. It couldn’t see other things anymore that it could conceptualise of it’s own existence. It just was. No reason to wonder why. It didn’t have the pressure put on it to act a certain way as men did, or to aspire to anything greater than being a beast. Although in the media the few specimens that were of note to be more than most of the lot were lauded and held up as an example to the mean. As if this one well behaved dog was an apt representation of the mass of rabid wolves that made up their ranks. We were supposed to ignore the murders and the rapes that had become all too common in this border towns and even in the major cities. Although funnily enough they were always one sided as for most humans it was impossible tell the Kafta women from the men. No one had ever heard of a man raping one of their women or even trying. If it had happened though it would have been all over the news and you’d have probably heard of it all the way in Europa. They’d probably be making plays about it over there, operas and poems, expressing their deep sadness and empathy for the poor monster.

“No kill” It sputtered gutterily. “Please, no kill”.

The young men looked at eachother and felt some twinge of regret and revulsion.

The sun was setting and it cast amber streaks along the sky, it was a warm afternoon with a cool quiet breeze.

The boys froze and couldn’t say anything, “Amen” Gage said as he clapped the bible shut. He slapped the horse on it’s hind quarters and it started to kick and try to take off. With a yank it didn’t move and for a moment they were all puzzled as to why it didn’t drop it’s rider and let him dangle with a crack and quick pop as they’d hoped. Ending the poor creatures suffering as quickly and as humanely as possible. The same sadly couldn’t be said for the boy O’Hare. They mentioned he lay dying with his guts hanging open in the dust as they ate and bit at him while he still lived. The screams of which they would never forget.

They’d only managed to get away because the beasts were much more interested in the cattle than they were the men. Attacking O’Hare just because he yelled at them.

At once Gage knew the problem, the vile thing was holding with his feet to the stirrups. Got them loops around his clawed toes keeping the horse in place with the strength of his legs. The will to continue existing had conjured up some monstrous feet of strength.

But as Gage got closer he saw the truth of it under lamplight. The monster had buried it toe claws into side of the horse and it was bleeding horribly but unable to move. Pinned and being slowly disembowelled by the sharp claws of the lug on top.

Gage spat with rage and took out his shotgun again and painted the tree with the innards of the beast, the barrel smoking angrily.

The thing didn’t even have the decency to die like a man, instead choosing to be cut down like a beast taking the life of an innocent animal with it. Gage was disgusted in himself in even considering involving the bible and giving the thing an actual service. It was just a savage animal and needed to be put down as one and not thought of further.

The boys were in a state of shock, especially Jameson as he undoubtledly had a connection with that horse, he probably raised it himself from a fowl. Tears formed at the tender lads cheeks and his mouth quivered with rage and sadness but lacking any real direction. A deep anguished sigh came out of his mouth and nothing more, he didn’t know what to do about it.

The lug was cut in half at the waist and swung against the tree with the force of the blast, it’s top half and it’s arms swinging loosely.

“Cut that thing down” Gage spat.

The boys gathered themselves and did as they were told, Clark and O’Shaunnesy cut it down as Jameson patted the maine of his horse which he had named ‘Molly’.

As he mourned Molly the others dropped what was rest of the lug on the ground and then they went about constructing a fire as Gage instructed. They gathered up pieces of the broken furniture and they constructed a pire to burn the body of the lug and the horse.

The boys stood around it looking sullenly into the flames for a while. Gage sat in his rocking chair waiting for the flame to die.

Something had changed in the boys but they didn’t really know what. Only that the world they came from wouldn’t have them back after this and they wouldn’t want it to.

April 26, 2018 0

Gage Chapter 5 ‘One Piece at a Time’

Good day vaguely humanoid masses of goodly folk who read these words.

Just taking it easy today, pushed the boat out last night on chest day and I feel great but dead, I am the swole grateful dead. But I had a pretty decent week all things considered, mainly shitty, a shitty month so far, my love life is in the toilet still banned on facebook and my ‘extended family’ is in fucking shambles but I guess things can only get better from here, I hope.

I was at my day job just feeling sorry for myself doing a job that should be the exclusive purview of seventeen year olds and feeling like I chose the wrong path. I should have listened to my uncle and done an economics degree and been some kind of wallstreet asshole blowing all my money up my nose and shit haha. Not that I’d do that, I am the ultimate solid citizen haha.
I dunno, I found myself recently having more days like that and it really bummed me out but then you have a day like yesterday and it kind of reminds you why you do what you do and reassures you that one day, things will be better and just to have faith in the mean time I guess. I’m not really religious but I think about whether there is a god and whether there is a plan for me and I really hope there is in both cases.

Anyway so I’m kinda in one of these slumps again, pretty standard for me when I finish something I’m passionate about like Gage and Diana, I just try to occupy my mind until lightning strikes again and the longer it gets the more I get worried that it won’t ever strike again.

But I’ve been reading the first witcher book recently and although there isn’t much story, it’s more like an anthology, it’s well written and I love the style, the action is frenetic and not over descriptive and for a translation from polish it’s really stylized and immersive. I was reading it for research because I wanted to do my own dark gritty almost noir fantasy in my style, something like the Kurgan from highlander meets Solomon Kane or Conan. So I thought the Witcher would be a good read to get the juices flowing on that.

BUT instead of thinking about this fantasy novel idea (which I did a bit, it’s still going on in the background) I couldn’t help thinking about 3 ring samurai again. Yeah that’s the comic I did about the fucking clown samurai named Pookie haha (Which incidentally you can still read on right here on tapastic).

Admittedly I wish I could take credit for the weirdness of the concept but someone in my comic days just came up to me and said “Diesel punk clown samurais go!” and I just went away and created an elaborate world and mythos and we turned it into a script. Then a lot of bullshit happened and when Trump got elected I had a spat with the artist who was heavily liberal and I was evolving into a trumpkin trollololmon and it just went up in smoke but at the time it was also lingering in development hell because the artist was this boomer who needed medical weed to deal with chronic pain and he couldn’t get it anymore so he couldn’t find the impetus to draw anymore, so it kind of just fell apart and it was the push I needed to dump comics for good and go into prose.

And now I’m doing prose, I couldn’t help thinking about what this would look like if I just had the freedom that afforded me and also not having an overbearing boomer telling me what the character I wrote should do/be and fucking boomerposting all over it haha.

I was kind of hesitant at first because when I sit down to write something like Diana After Dark, I’m thinking this could have mass market appeal, this could actually go over well and make money and make a name for me, it could make me. It’s not a dumb zombie book about green haired chicks and weebs with katanas that I write for the sake of irony and inside jokes with myself. Its not only fun to write a book and a character like Diana, it could really have a big impact, it can be taken seriously. But then I can’t steer away from stuff like Green Sunday and Gage and this, stuff I know, only a niche audience if anyone is going to enjoy them but after a day like yesterday I can’t help but waste my time on projects like that because they’re so fun and they remind me why I do this.

I actually enjoy this, I’m not just doing this for cash, I’m doing this for the feeling you get when you’re writing something and even though you have it all planned out as you’re writing it, you’re still not sure how it’s going to go and it’s like this intense feeling where you feel like you’re reading a book no one else has ever read and it’s unfolding in real time right before your eyes.

It’s really an indescribable feeling.

Anyway, I’ve ranted long enough and my journey to getting swole has robbed me of doing anything really productive today so I was gonna try and proofread the first chapter of the 3 ring but I might do it tomorrow and keep you hanging to the edge of your seat for it on the thursday.

I think I’ll leave it there and remember anyone who hasn’t signed up to my mailing list you missed your free copy of The one that came back and Ladies close your eyes but do not be down in the dumps because I’ll be sending it out again the first tuesday of next month, so sign up to my mailing list today to get your mits on those professionally and very expensively edited free ebooks.

Also you know the drill as far as inkitt is concerned haha.

See you…

One piece at a time

The small gun barely moved in his great mit as he fired at the bottles sitting on rotting bales of hay in the barn.

He fired until he could hear the clicking of the pin against the spent cartridge. Gage looked down range to see that all five of the bottles were untouched and only the inside of the barn had been injured in a wide dispersal.

“Damn son, if you weren’t inside the barn I reckon you would’ve missed that too” He chuckled.

He took the gun away from Gage and emptied out the spent cartridges into his hand. He stowed them in his pocket reloading the gun and then taking a look down the sights and then at Gage’s eye.

“Don’t get much depth perception from that one eye do ya boy?” He sighed and looked at the revolver and said “Other eye probably doesn’t work so good neither”. He sighed again and sucked his gum before shooting one of the bottles looking out of the corner of his eye.

The old man sucked his gums again and said “I think we can work something out.” The old man turned went over to one of the empty horse stalls and drummed his fingers on the fence. “Why don’t you get yourself some more coffee and try and get some rest. I’ll see if I can change the odds a little” He said smiling.

Gage breathed out frustrated but nodded and found his way out of the barn and slumped into the farmhouse sitting in one of the chairs. He supped cold coffee staring at nothing for what seemed like an hour maybe two. The ragged mad thoughts came screaming back as each second that dragged more of the booze sweated out of his system.

Then there was a whistling sound which didn’t come through at first over the sound of the wind outside. Something of a dust storm had kicked up and it had mostly swallowed the horizon. But then over the whooping wind he heard a cracking sound like rolling thunder. He walked out into it, his huge hand over his one good eye as he made his way back to the barn.

He entered the barn slowly, the smell of gunpowder in the air. The old man stood looking at a giant hole in the barn the whistling wind was coming through. He turned as he heard Gage shut the barn door.

“I guess you weren’t born in a barn afterall.” He chuckled. He paused and thought a minute before putting his hands on his hips and pushing his bottom lip out. “I got something for ya” He said smiling.

He turned and nodded at a bale with a lambskin tarp over it, atop the tarp sat a sawn off shotgun. Gage went over to it and picked it up.

“Justice herself couldn’t miss with that thing, or god be my witness” The old man laughed.

Gage took it in his large hand, it was a good weight. The old man noticed him shaking it for the weight and said “Even if you miss you could just hit’em with it”.

Then he noticed the etchings along the barrel and how abrubtly they stopped at the choke with crude tools marks. The stock had been roughly sawn away and sanded down, it was the same gun that was hanging on the wall of the storm cellar.

Gage looked down at it and breathed heavily and said “Why?”

“Why what?”

“I aint done nothing for for you”

“Not yet, could be you’re the one we’ve been waiting for and we didn’t even know we’d been waiting.” The old man smiled and said “Come on try it out, it might just back up and blow your damn hand off, ruin that pretty face a’yours”. He laughed.

It was a couple of months before Gage was ready to move on. His head clear, his mind focused, his body taught and strong like a drum like it was those years ago when he swung iron on the rail road. Doubts cleared from his mind he rode west on a horse the Carpenter provided.

What he intended to do he wasn’t quite sure of yet. Like some kind of apostle or prophet he was sure it would occur to him as if it would ride out of the clouds to greet him.

It was getting dark, and when it gets dark in the desert it gets cold. He could stand the cold but something on the horizon caught his eye. He’d been riding all day and the only place for miles was this odd two story ramshackle what looked like a coach house. But it turned out to be some kind of brothel built out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it was put there by a mining company for the workers or could have been a ways out from an actual town put out of sight from the decent folk.

Either way Gage wasn’t gonna pass it by.

He was sure the place would be occupied with all sorts of riff raff being so far out here. He wasn’t ready to be picked up by some Cyclon agent who might find a handcannon on him. Things could turn really bad really quick.

So he took the gun the old man had given him, oiled it and wrapped it in a canvas sack and buried under a tree about a half a mile out from the whorehouse. So if it turned bad he could just ride out and get it. Marking the tree with a knife so it wouldn’t get lost in all this nothingness.

He rode in slow as the sun came down over the ridge, laying down behind the mountain range. The sound of crickets and birds whipping up into a frenzy as he hitched his horse.

His heavy footfalls on the rickety porch stopping the tinny piano music inside for a moment before he entered. He ducked under the door frame and pushed the saloon doors open and the smell of the place hit him first. It smelled like filth, like it covered the walls. Unwashed woman wafting around never seeing water between countless uncaring drunken customers. Rat faced sneering men that smelled like blood.

The whorehouse itself was a simple wooden construction with a wide fore area with a piano on the right surrounded by tables and chairs. Where various scraggly ner-do-wells sat drinking with their shoulders around their ears.

“Looking for some company de-ar god” A woman’s voice said as he turned his face to look at her. She was old by any standard must have been late forties but gussied up to look half that with a face painted white like an eggshell. Her rotund belly bursting the seems of an off white colour corset. Her speckled and spotty sunburnt breasts popped up like flabby rising dough propping up her chin.

“No” He answered.

He stepped over a slightly raised mantle that felt as if it were a stage and made his way towards the bar.

Above the smell the place seemed like a good start. The tubeloscope played in the background reporting on some kind of explosion that happened near the capital. Some terrorist group claiming responsibility for it. The news woman, some kind of alien half breed of her own was walking around asking people leading questions. Like ‘what kind of monsters could have done this?’ The dirty people sitting and drinking didn’t look shocked. In fact some were smiling, some even laughed or were in silent support of the action.

He had heard on the tubeloscope that there was a rebellion somewhere. Some band of revolutionairies carrying out bombings and raids on convoys of Cyclon good. They were branded terrorists and scorned as the worst of the worst to be as despised as those that had killed and subjugated alien kind in the past. Those evil men who had tried to wipe them out as they would say ‘just for being different’.

There seemed to be an air of disdain for the current system and a general attitude of undirected animosity to it.

This gave Gage some hope that he might in the right place and he sat down at the bar and tapped the bar tender on the shoulder.

The bar tender swung around aggrieved at being disturbed from whatever it was he was doing behind the bar. But he stopped before saying something he’d regret seeing Gage’s face. A dirty faced young girl stood up and wiped her mouth. Gage looked at the girl who couldn’t have been older than fourteen barefoot and almost naked and then glared at the bartender.

“Wha dya want?” The fat sweaty man asked.

Gage said nothing, he looked above the bar and saw a large copy of the bible sitting on a shelf.

The bartender turned to look at it and scoffed, “Oh yeah that’s for the whores to piss on”.

He couldn’t rightly understand it at that point but for some reason that angered him greatly. He grabbed the bartender by his sweaty dirty shirt and pulled him close to his face. Not sure if he could even think of the words that would surmise his feelings of pure hatred towards the repulsive character.

But even if he had thought of something he was stopped in his tracks by a clicking noise. The feeble prodding of the barrel of a six shooter behind his good ear.

“Now I’d drop him if you don’t want to get even uglier.”

Gage turned to see the old whore who spoke to him when he enterned. He dropped the bar tender hard against the bar, knocking about a half a dozen bottles of liquor on the floor.

The women held the gun on him with her two hands as she looked around the bar at the other patrons and smiled nervously. “Get him” She squealed.

Before he could do anything the entire bar descended down on him. A chair was smashed over his back and a bottle over his head and he was kicked and rolled and hit with anything they could get their hands on. The whores too beat him with rods from the fire and even the teen girl from the behind the bar was biting at his legs as she pulled his boots off.

The attack was so fast and savage and by surprise there was no way he could have stopped it. And if he had had his gun they would have no doubt taken it and used it on him. But as it stood he was dumped a quarter mile out and left to die of dehydration and his injuries.

He lay there face down in the dirt awoken by the sqwarking of a buzzard deciding whether to peck at his good eye.

It didn’t hurt, nothing hurt anymore, only his pride was injured. His boots took, his coat, his money and whatever else he had on him. He was stripped down to his undershirt and left to rot and get picked at by the coyotes and the vultures. He felt nothing but the soft tight feeling of the broken and the mending and a stiffening of his muscles.

It made more sense to him now, these weren’t the revolutionaries he was looking for, just general criminals. A putrid scum that only laughed at the misfortunes of the state powers as far as they enjoyed any such misfortunes of others. They only opposed the system as far as it got in the way of their of own, degeneracy that exceeded that of what the state itself was willing to promote.

They were common criminals and had no right to live on this earth he thought as he staggered to his feet. His one good eye almost closed up with swelling as he tried to find his way to that tree and the justice he would bring, buried at it’s feet.

He found it within an hour of searching and trudged his way back to bar in the wee hours of the morning. Following the vile scent of the inhuman garbage that had left him to the carrion to be picked apart like some bloated pig.

He pushed through the door and was greeted with a silence and dull humming and the sound of snoring. The bar looked frozen, like a den of sleeping hogs, the drunks who had taken joy in beating and robbing him the night before were passed out on the bar. The whores passed out drunk in the booths along the side.

Gage could have easily killed them all in their sleep with his bare hands. But he wanted them to know the face of the man that would send them to the devil one at a time.

Pulling up a chair near the entrance he waited for the first to stir. The bartender appeared behind the bar like some kind of vole or rat sensing danger. Poking his greasy bald head over the bar as if he were sleeping on the floor. He rubbed his eyes like a child and thought he saw Gage and grabbed a drunk at the bar and tried to rouse him.

“Hey, wake up, is that- It’s him!” He squealed like a stuck pig and the drunk reached for an iron feebly slow and was cut down by the blast of Gage’s gun. The shot; hot and hard, hitting the back of the bar, splintering it and bursting open the bottles of liquor and lighting it on fire. The liquid flame exploding and splashing on the bartender who shreaked like a washer woman. He waddled falling over the bar and jumping out of the window partially on fire.

A pistol coughed at him hitting the doorframe and then once in his arm but it wasn’t powerful enough to move him. He swung around to where the noise was and emptied a barrel of his shotgun into the stairs. Cutting the old whore from the night prior in half just under her corset. The top half of her popping out of it and rolling down the stairs while her legs remained, the gun tumbling down and breaking open.

The bar was awake now, skittering like cockroaches under the eye of the sun, stinking rats fleeing a sinking ship. They piled over eachother to get away into the desert. Which was fortunate since anyone with the balls to draw a weapon and fight had to clamber over the cowards who tried to flee to pop a shot off. A foot to the groin or a hand in their face not helping their aim any as people literally climbed over them to escape.

Gage fired his last shot into the crowd tearing a wide hole in it and leaving men and some women writhing around in their own putrid entrails.

He emptied the spent shells onto the wood floor putting the shells in his mouth as he slowly reloaded. Occasionally some dishevelled miscreant would pop out from behind a table to fire a poorly aimed shot at the furniture. Only to duck down behind it again if they didn’t just fire blindly over the top.

He slid the final shell into the gun as he felt a tapping on his back as if someone were insistently prodding him on the shoulder.

Swung around to see a dirty young lad with a whispy mustache standing with a 22 pistol smoking in his hands. Gage snapped his gun shut and picked him up by the jaw and slammed the hard wood handle of his gun into the kids face. The first blow loosening all the teeth in the front of his head, the next shattering his jaw entirely. The next knocking his nose in and the next shattering his orbital cavity. After that there wasn’t much left to break and he threw his lifeless body over the tops of the overturned tables the cowards were using for cover. He heard a womanly shriek.

He fired into the crowd of overturned tables and turned them into kindling almost instantly. As if they were made of leaves and a strong gust blew them away. Men that weren’t killed by the shot were caught by shrapnel. Men shrieked with thick table splinters gouged into their eyes and throats and hands. Any that weren’t dead and maimed ran to escape the sound of the dying men’s screams.

Gage trod over the desolation barefoot, glass and splinters sticking into his huge hard feet but he couldn’t feel any of it. He walked over their corpses stamping out those still gasping and gargling for life. He saw the young girl from before lying on her back a big piece of table sticking out of her throat and her eyes glassy staring up at the ceiling. He spat on the floor in disgust and walked over to the stairs.

Stepping over the corpse of the old whore he made his way up to the second floor, kicking her legs off the side of the stairs.

The second floor was just a balcony overlooking the bar and a series of doors leading to bedrooms for the whores to ply their trade.

Coming to the first door his heavy footfalls gave him away and a burst of two succinct revolver shots bust through the door. Cutting Gage along one of his arms but not deep enough to knock it out. He fired back splintering the door and sending a bald man flying out of his boots with a hole the size of a donkey’s head in his chest.

A blonde whore was prone behind the bed with a long schofield revolver in her clasped hands. Her arms laying across the bed. She looked at Gage filling up the doorway covered in blood the righteous hogleg hanging heavy at his side. She hesitated and threw her gun down on the bed and it slid down and hit the floor.

Gage said nothing before firing the last barrel at her. Tearing up the bed with a burst of feathers and blood as her head split in two and plastered against the backwall.

He stood for a moment as the gun smoked before putting three more shells from his pocket in his mouth. Breaking the gun open again and letting the spent cartridges hit the floor,

Another whore with raven hair and green eyes sprang at him from the adjacent room with a pair of taylors scissors and stabbed Gage in his raised arm. He grabbed a fistful of her hair with his free hand and slammed her head into the side of the door with a cracking squelching noise. Her knees buckling instantly and he tossed her body off the balcony with a crash of glass and wood.

He finished loading the gun and snapped it shut again and fired into the room she came out of. Knocking her customer right out of the window with a thunderous clap and a tinkling of glass.

He kicked the door down of the last room and fired both barrels without even looking. Making it nearly impossible to distinguish what remained in the room. Just a paste of blood and feathers and bone.

When the whore house was still he went outside lead by a pathetic mewling noise. Following the sound it lead him to the bartender face down in the dirt smoke rising off of him as he whined quietly with as he breathed in dust.

Gage put his foot on the back of his greasy bald head and pressed it into the mud until the mewling stopped and he heard a cracking snapping sound.

When it was done he sat on the porch in a rocking chair looking out on the horizon with the gun on his lap. After about an hour of sitting there and thinking about what he was gonna do. Maybe just burn the whole thing down and moving on. But he thought better of it and decided to start moving bodies.

He assembled all the corpses and the largest pieces near the entrance. Then finding a shovel in the back he started digging a big hole behind the building.

He spent an hour or two digging a mass grave a few feet deep. Without the pain in his muscles he found he could work much harder and longer and it didn’t seem to bother him. The only thing he felt by the end of it was his thirst. When he’d finished burying the bodies and the parts he went into the bar and dumped out all the liquor and took a drink of water from a nearby well. Then he collected up all the guns and ammo that were left lying on the floor. All in all he got six or seven pistols, ranging in size from tiny derringer meant for hiding up ladies skirts and long army schofields. There was a rifle in the back hidden behind some barrels of beer and a short double barrelled shotguns as well as a set of brass knuckles and a bowie knife. The quality of the guns was fairly low as the legality issue had made choosers into beggers. They couldn’t even steal anything that mightn’t not explode black powder back into their faces.

After that he started to tidy the place up. Getting rid of the broken furniture and mopping up the blood and picking up the brains and bones and other parts he missed. Throwing out all the soiled burnt and ripped bedding.

At the time he couldn’t say why he did it, it was more ritualistic. Feeling as though cleaning the place up, the necessity for it would be made clear when he’d finished. Or somehow the act itself was like cleaning up an especially filthy corner of the earth and this would signal the start of a great cleansing. A small part of a greater design taking shape and growing one piece at a time.

He felt some slight clawing regret at killing his own people because that’s not what he’d set out to do. All that dirty work that seemed pointless had given him time to reflect on it and as he thought of those twisted ugly dirty faces he knew. That the horrible truth of it was that the decay was too far along. The moral and social and cultural decay of his own people had been had been ingrained in them long ago. By a people that sort their disorder to form their own from the chaos.

They had indulged these vices and even promoted them telling people of the one life they had to lead. Encouraging them to lead it only for the selfish asquistion of the basest pleasures of drink and women and violence.

And the majority had done so. As the spiritual and moral values they had founded this country on had given way to material wealth and physical pleasure. Turning men into nothing more than greedy eating machines whose only purpose was to buy bigger mouths.

He’d initially thought he might excise the cancer of his society surgically. But now he knew that even those not associated with the system were just as vile. And where he might have used a scalpel before when what he really needed was a hammer and shovel to knock it loose and dig it out. Pull it out by the root and he’d have to pile the corpses of his own kind higher than his eye before he could save his world.

A million faces like his would have to be smashed before they’d be free, before his kind would seek their own freedom. Talking never worked, the Cyclon were the masters of talking and nothing changed when it was left to a vote. the Cyclon loved voting everything. His people needed to be shaken forcibly from their dream, they’d fight and cling to their chains before being free.

Free.

The word seemed like a joke to Gage. Looking at this place he saw what people did with their freedom. He didn’t want to free his people, not from morality, not from god. Just from the Cyclon. It was their freedom that lead them to this. Man was not meant to be free, not from himself and not from God.

The beasts were free and man was not meant to be a beast.

It was his place to find good men and lead them against those that would die to protect corruption and decay. A system that would stifle their good and promote their worst degenerate tendencies would have to taken a part piece by piece. By the most righteous men unfaltering in their tasks. Driven by a firey passion and slaked with an icy determination they would drive their thumbs into the skull of the system and leave it blind.

When it was all done to the best of his ability, cleaner and brighter and lighter. That dank smell of human vice gone he felt he could breathe. It was a clean open room now waiting to be filled with what he couldn’t say but it was a step in the right direction. The sun was coming down so Gage took up a blanket with a scotch hatched pattern and sat on the rocking chair on the porch. He sat with the blanket over him the gun in his lap underneath it and with a lamp at his side and waited.

April 10, 2018 0

Gage Chapter 4 ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Cry’

Before anyone says anything, yes I’ve just been watching battlestar gallactica and I know Cyclon is dangerously close to Ceylon, but I don’t care haha.

I might change it but, I dunno. I do like that show though, been watching while I lift and it’s a lot better than I expected it to be. I like to watch sci-fi shows to add a little meat to my elite dangerous head back story you know and I love the claustrophobic feel of the ships and the humming spaceship asmr noise. Can’t get enough of that.

Ok so hi, how y’all doing. Been busy this week unfortunately with my actual day job and not so much writing but I have a big day of spamming and blogging and proofreading the editing on The One That Came Back today I’ll hopefully have that done for circulation in my mailing list the first tuesday of next month. So the wait is finally over haha.

Writing wise I went back into the rut after I finished Gage, erm, trying to write that Lovecraft story but ironically it’s turning out to be sort of formless and unameably horrible haha.
But I’ve been reading the witcher novels (well the first one) and I was hoping to get inspiration for some hard fantasy novels I’ve always wanted to do but it’s weird because the more I read the more I think about that stupid clown samurai comic I wrote and how much effort I put into the villains and anime backstories haha.

It’s kind of annoying because I’m trying to get inspiration for fantasy and my mind is drawn to diesel punk clowns. That comic sort of went nowhere not because I ran out of ideas but because artists are fickle potheads who need constant babying and reassurance to tie their own shoes. So I had scripts and ideas up the ass but that wasn’t enough to get the ball rolling on the other end so ultimately it went nowhere.

I had been thinking of turning it into a novel lamenting the lack of fun visuals but I think with the right tone akin to the witcher books it could work. I’m reading the first book which is sort of a loose connection of short stories and I really like the style. It’s just perfectly descriptive but also leaves a lot to the imagination so it builds up characters but not to a point that it’s too much.

I dunno I just try to piece this fantasy together in my head and it goes nowhere because I don’t have a decent villain or villains yet. It’s not gone it’s just benched, it needs to go in the oven longer and I can’t really choose when the anvil of inspiration sparks, I just have to go where it tells me to go.

So I’m gonna sleep on it a little more and read more witcher and write more lovecraft until my path becomes clearer.

That’s about all.

See you…

As always you can check out the rest of this story and more on my inkitt page.

Gage

–

It was sometime after that in the hours past midnight that Gage would stumble home to his lodgings. Which was little more than the floor of a store closet in a rundown church which had been long abandoned and burnt out.

*Note to the reader; at the time of writing the religion of men in the western world was Christianity. A religion celebrating a man who sacrificed his life to end all sacrifices. But at this late time in the Cyclon occupation it had fallen into a state of stagnant degradation. The alien media branding it as Speciesist or partial and depicting it in their tubescope programs as inherently morally corrupt. Lacking any sense whatsoever and thus it had become wholey unfashionable for those to practice it and instead were encouraged to ‘enjoy their lives to the fullest’. Which usually meant indulging in debauchery such as excessive drinking, sex and gambling of which the Cyclon made a profit off of all. This lead to a great and unyielding erosion of morality and virtue in man, creating a confict between the spiritual and bodily existence culminating in what we in present time call the ‘wild west’. Any remnant of Christianity in the more affluent suburbs was horribly bastardised. Usually changed to fit modern social norms and practices and used to disseminate any morality the system wanted for the people at the time.

He stumbled home barely able to walk as he carried all his ill gotten winnings now in his gut in the form of high proof liquor. Pickling his senses his limbs large and dull and rounded without points as he attempted to carry himself. He’d spent a little longer than he wanted as it had started to rain by the time the game had finished and he was running out of money for drink. But the rain hadn’t subsisted and when the landlord eventually tossed him out with the help of a lug that worked with him. Otherwise even in his current state Gage wouldn’t have been so agreeable.

So now he trudged home in the dead of night with only the moon as a source of light and rain pouring down turning the streets into a soupy cold mess of black tar mud and horseshit. He pulled his collar up and trudged through it. His feet sticking in the sucking wet muck as he weaved drunkenly in the middle of main street. Heading out of town to the church on the hill where a warm pile of vestments waited for him to curl up on and pass out upon.

He’d only traversed about ten twenty feet from the saloon in his drunken stupor before he heard a loud cowboy whistle. The whistle drew his attention to the otherside of the street and a darkened alley. He could hear the whineying of a horse but couldn’t see it for the shadow of the buildings.

Then there was a high pitched whispering he could hear as if it was all around his head but he couldn’t understand it. The noise penetrating his drunken stupor only for a moment before it went silent again. It filled him with a strange familiar feeling like someone was scratching at the inside of his skull but it was different this time.

Gage stopped cold, frozen like a rabbit starring into the night and the shadow cast by the livery building where he heard the first noise. Some time past as the rain pelted down and then something hit the moonlight. Something metallic glinting and then a squelching tromping sound came from behind. Something hard and big hit him and sent him reeling gasping for air into the thick mud. A viciously strong gargoyle claw pinned his head in the thick wet mud and he took it in as the thing pressed down on him. The mud in his mouth and the dirty water in his lungs.

He was held there, unable to move, the booze in his system making his limbs heavy and useless and his senses dull and pointless. All he could do was try and hold his head up and not swallow his tongue. There was no noise but the sound of the rain and the slight squelching noises drawing closer.

And then they stopped and a high pitched voice said.

“Hold his head up”

The clawed hand grabbed fistfuls of his hair and yanked his head up so it could be rained on, his body still pressed flat against the mud. His face was covered in mud and the metal frames of his prosthetic were bent and it hung off his face like the mask it was.

“What do we have here?” The voice said.

“Face” Gage sputtered feebly.

“Well let’s get a look at you” The cold voice said as he bent down letting out a curious little laugh. He lifted the prosthetic off and stood back up remarking on it. “Very interesting” He looked down at Gage and then dropped the mask in the mud. “My god, that face”. He bent down again squatting with his hands on his knees.

Gage’s head lolled forward.

“Keep his head up!”

“Sah” The thing on top of him said. As it reached it’s rough clawed hand under Gage’s head to keep it in place.

“Well you are ugly aren’t you and you’re terrible card player” He tutted “Quite a brazen little cheat”. The cowboy with the pristine hat bent forward trying to get in Gage’s field of vision and said “Do you remember me?” He waited and got no response and sighed.

Gage could barely keep his eyes open, he gurgled mud and babbled incoherently to himself. “I’m gonna have to teach you a lesson.” The man from the saloon took out a device from his coat he recognised, it was a Cyclon control rod. “Now we’re going to try this again, it didn’t seem to work the first time. Must be something to do with that booze turning your brain into horseshit, speaking of horse shit”. He chuckled as he turned it on and held it to his throat and said in a buzzing tone “I want you to eat mud until I tell you to stop”.

Nothing happened.

“Well let go of his head you idiot!” The man from the saloon said as he kicked angrily at the thing holding Gage in place.

The beast yelped almost like a dog and let Gage’s head slump forward into the mud.

“There you go” The man said as he squatted next to Gage’s head. “How does that taste?”

Gage with great difficulty lifted his grotesque head out of the mud with a sucking squelching noise “Well, how does it taste?” The man asked again.

Gage opened his one good eye and glared at the man before spitting mud in his face. Splattering his nice clean cowboy hat.

The man hissed angrily as he looked at his nice clean white shirt ruined by the mood and blood and spit of a human.

“Hold him!” He ordered.

The thing on top tensing and gripping him, his claws biting into Gage’s flesh through his clothes.

“Why isn’t this damn thing working all of a sudden” He sneered glaring down at Gage who looked at him with a righteous air of defiance. “Rip his arms and legs off, slowly.” The man said without any inflection whatsoever.

“Sah” The beast grunted.

Then thunder, a righteous hammer of god striking steel and cleaning away the filth of this world with a great wind, a mighty anger.

The beast was tossed aside by the blast of the thunder and lay twisting in the mud, it’s entrails splayed out and rained on.

The man in the cowboy hat spun around reaching for his gun, a cute little six shooter with an ivory handle and silver inlays. He aimed all around as he had no idea where the shot came from, there was just the sound of the thunder and the strike from the dark.

He fumbled for his control rod and tried to put it to his throat and command the night and god himself to heel but god couldn’t hear him from all the way up there. There was another shot, nicked his arm and the control rod fell into mud and was gone for good.

Then another shot and it put him on his knees and he let out an inhuman screeching noise. Then the waterworks and the begging, he pleaded with the wind and the rain and storm clouds themselves to save him. Have mercy on him and be like brothers once again but they couldn’t hear him and a final shot cut him in half like ripe fruit.

And then there was silence, nothing but the metronome of the rain beating down on their corpses. His brand new cowboy hat sinking into the muck.

Gage lay on his side gasping for air and coughing up dirt. The sound of spurs and clomping muddy feet drew closer and then the neighing of a horse as he started to lose consciousness.

He awoke again not knowing how much time had passed, only that he was drier and warmer and not covered in shit. He opened one eye and could see a fire roaring in a real fire place, the crackling embers setting his mind at ease as he stared into them.

“They like to do that sometimes”

Gage groaned as he moved quickly to find the voice. The pain in his ribs apparent now. The strain in his neck made moving his head feel like there was dirt and silt between all the joints in his neck grinding against the bone.

He crumbled on to the bed, which was made of furs and wood and smelled like wet dog. He groaned again after a pause letting the words trickle through his brain and he said in response “Do what?”

“Rough it with the locals-“ The man’s voice was rough and deep and he spoke slowly and powerfully like he was making some kind of speech. “Cyclon dignitaries, mostly their kids, it’s like a vacation for them. Wearing a disguise pretending to be one of us, walk on the wild side, live on the other side of the fence, know what I mean?” He chuckled. “This one was a real mean bastard”.

Gage just lay there looking at the light from the fire dancing on the wood beams of the ceiling. By the looks of it he was in some kind of big cabin on the outskirts of town. He couldn’t of travelled too far since it was still dark outside.

The man let out a breathy laugh and said “Dead now. Maybe he was writing a book or something. Some of them like to watch us, report back, just to gauge our response to things. Some try to influence us, organise human groups, make it seem like they just sprung out of nowhere.”

Gage tilted his head to find the source of the voice, it was a tall grey man, thin and gristled. He stood shirtless with his back to Gage, he couldn’t make out his features, just that he had shoulder length grey white hair. He spoke not looking at Gage, staring off at the mantle. By his side resting against the fire place there was what looked like a makeshift long rifle with some kind of scope attached. The fire glinting off it’s barrel.

“Sometimes they even make anti-alien groups to create fake crimes against aliens they can use to pass new laws. They’ve been running both sides of the game. When you control your own opposition no one can stand in your way.”

The tall grey man turned and said smiling. “But with a face like that, I reckon you already know all about it.” The man was older in his late fifties maybe but he was long and lean and weatherbeaten.

Gage snarled, too weak to say anything cutting in return.

“I don’t mean no offence by it partner, just making conversation.” He was gristled old coot with big thick white mustache and rough white stubble on his chin. “I don’t get a lot of visitors out here-

Especially not ones that got a face that looks like a cayotes leftovers.” He laughed.

Gage swung at him with one of his huge booze softened fists and tumbled off the bed like a giant dumb baby. Lashing out angrily coming out of the other end of his mean drunk.

“Woah there partner” The stranger laughed.

Gage rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling again and said “Whiskey”

The stranger laughed and picked Gage up with ease and dropped him back on the bed. “I think you’ve had enough son, sleep it off and we’ll talk some.”

Gage fell asleep again and awoke some time later when the sun was up. The light through the shutters burned his one good eye and filled his head with a painful crackling.

He pulled himself off the bed and tried to stand, he got up on his two feet using a rough bedpost and got his head to stop spinning long enough to look about him. He was in the same room as before, but alone and the fire was out, the gun was gone. The room was a single room cabin that was quite large. A bed covered in furs and a few chairs, all the furniture looked rough and unfinished. And there was a crude cooking pot over the dead fire where a few embers still cracked.

Gage stood there for a moment trying to stop the room and spinning just staring at a single point in the room and then at the mantelpiece. There was a single photo of a young girl in a crude wooden frame whittled by hand.

The door creaked open and the tall Grey man came taking off his hat and coat hanging it on a rack next to the door, resting his rifle next down next to the door. Gage eyed it and then back at the grey man.

The Grey man smiled and curtly said “What does a big fella like you need fer a gun?” He laughed and lifted up a pair of dead rabbits and said. “Thought you might feel a little better if I got some breakfast in you.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“The gun?-“ The old man smirked and said “I made it.” He took Gage by the arm and sat him down on one of the crude chairs covered in fur. “Now you just wait right here and I’ll whip us up something and we can get to waggin our chins like a couple’a school marms” He chuckled.

It didn’t take him very long to skin and gut the rabbits and although he wasn’t a great cook after eating Gage did feel a lot better. But even after they’d finished he kept his eye on the rifle near the door.

“I hid some after that thing happened up north, I knew they’d come take’em away sooner or later. Its funny, all those in town, said they’d die before they gave up their guns. They were some of the first to hand them in willingly, fucking cowards. Clinging to their flags, and their constitutions, following along mindlesslike. Not knowing this aint their country, not no more”

He got up and went back to the pot where he was brewing some coffee and poured two tin cups full and brought them over and handed one to Gage who drank it gladly.

“I used to make things, outta wood and sometimes metal, folks around here just call me the Carpenter.”

“Gage”

“Pleased to meet you.” He laughed.

“You made that alien brat pretty mad pretty damn quick, must have a knack for it, hell it’s written all over your face” He chuckled.

Gage sneered but continued to listen.

“I say I used to, not much call for it now, not now them got them new-fangled machines spit out a chair like it was a loose tooth from a drunks mouth. Looks like hell and about as comfortable as sitting on a boney mule but it’s cheap and fashionable- whatever that means.”

The old man took a sip of the coffee and made a face, it was good and bitter and never would touch sugar.

“Used to make toys too but much the same. Kids don’t want no old wooden toys if it don’t make noise or lights or steam don’t come out of it. Aint got no kids of my own after my woman run off to become some whore in new york city”

“Call’em ‘actresses’ just gussied up whores you ask me. Put any alien piece in their mouth if’n they set’em up right. Make a fella wanna burn it all down- I don’t go near those goddam talmoscopes, whatever they’re called, goddam garbage.”

“Been alone up here ever since and I wouldn’t have it any other way”.

He inhaled deep and said nothing for a moment, Gage just looked down. Their stories echoed eachothers but there was no certainty that this man knew what Gage knew. Nevertheless a silent bond was forged, an unspoken realisation that something was wrong with this world. Something that was broken that only men of a different age could fix. Men completely outside this new alien world watching with bitter disdain as everything their ancestors had built was torn down and replaced with something unholy and disgusting. Their women whores to alien entertainment, their children slaves to alien industry. Every ideal humans had forged, twisted and manipulated and bastardized beyond all recognition until it was a shadow. Turned inside out and made sick and hollow for the amusement of an uncaring race who saw humans as cattle.

And they didn’t do it with a show of force strong arm fascist take over but by using our own ideals against us. Attaching the chain to our throats one link at a time. They tricked us into voting ourselves into servitude through conditioning and constant subtle manipulation. All the while the humans were the frog in the pot complaining about the heat but never jumping out.

Gage had long listened to the bellyaching of men he worked with about the system of government they lived under. It had become a hobby to complain incessantly about it all with the idea of using the systems own mechanics to change it from the inside. And now as he recalled them he realised that not even they believed that was possible. That even these people he now considered to only be partially conscious knew their struggle to be pointless. For how could a system so inherently corrupt and given over to an alien consciousness ever serve humanity ever again. How could we hope to allow a people who’s mind had been jellied with alien media for this long to vote themselves out of their own slavery when they had been taught to love it? How would they even know the words to declare it? To Gage it was like a chicken in a pot asking for a lower flame or less garlic in the broth.

“Living up here grants a body lots of privacy though, not much to care about for them big wig aliens up north. They raided me one time, took a bunch’a irons but I made do making some of my own. Bullets too, gotta keep it hush though all them folks in town’ll rat me out, go shooting mainly at night or in the early hours. Good fer when it’s thundering out, if’n I don’t get struck by lightning” He laughed.

“I tell ya you need a good iron if’n them freed lugs come around, only reason they listen to is at the end of one of those. Rape and kill anything that get in their way. Without them that control them they’re as bad as wild beasts. Worse, some can even use an iron if you’d believe it, some of’em aint even smart enough to tie their own boots, if’n they wear boots.” He snickered.

*Note from the editor, there was a spreading trend of the kaftas breaking free of their control or having masters who passed away and did not dispatch their beasts or in some cases Kafta’s that killed their masters and roamed free creating savage bandit gangs preying on the human population. All criticism of the use of these beasts and the rampant and disproportionate crimes commited by them, were batted away as speciesist and then ignored.

“I don’t know about you, but I’d sooner shoot one down than look at’em, no beast like that should be here in the land of men, nomatter what no one says. We can carry our own damn steel.”

“But folks don’t wanna believe it, most folks just wanna go along to get along and they’ll take as many licks as they need to. As long as they can keep their bellies full and their hands clean they can live like dogs getting scraps off the table. Not me, I’d rather be out here alone than in all that muck.”

Gage nodded in agreement as he had nothing to add, the old man in the crudest sense had echoed Gage’s own reasoning in some small simulacrum. They were both outcasts to be sure and there was no world for them that existed except one they made themselves.

A silent minute of contemplation passed over the two men and they realised there was no disagreement to be had, a silent pact formed.

The old man chuckled and said “Lemme show you something.”

He took gage around back. Gage getting a look at the place could see it was a small farmhouse with a barn and one out building but nothing seemed to be grown there at all.

“Soils no good here” The old man said “Too dry”.

He lead Gage into the out building which was small ramshackle shed or shack. The old man opened the door and went in first Gage followed shakily as his eyes adjusted to the darkened room. It was cool and smelled of dust and was rammed full of useless looking junk and broken tools. Old bicycle parts, and even what looked like an coal engine from an airship.

“I dug that out of the sand after that crash in 41” It was hydrogen, no helium I think, burnt up like hell fire”. He said sounding somewhat satisfied. “But that aint it”.

He signed and his knees creaked as he moved a heavy calfskin rug off the dirt floor revealing a wood storm door in the ground.

The old man opened it up with a creak and made his way slowly down the wood stairs which bounced with his heavy footfalls. He lit a lamp and poked his head out of the hole beckoning for Gage to come down there with him.

Gage was hesitant at first but had followed through on his assumption that the old man was harmless to him. He descended the steep rotten steps and reached the earthen floor of the storm cellar.

“I used to use this place for keeping fruit cold” The old man said. “Now I use it to keep these hidden” He said gesticulating with the lamp. He waved it around him illuminating a stack of wood stocked long rifles and an assortment of junky looking revolvers. Gun parts on wooden racks built up off the floor and some shelves higher up with ammo of varying calibres.

He took the lamp further and set it down on a small workbench which looked like it had a bullet press on it. Newer looking well kept tools hanging in a specific order in regards to their size and use.

Something on the wall caught in the corner of Gage’s good eye as the light just brushed it for a moment. A colossal hunting shotgun resting on two bent nails dug into the wall. A breakaway action with two triggers, no there were more than two. It struck him He’d never seen a gun like this even in pictures. It was long with three etched barrels and a long ornate looking stock made of mostly wood with some engravings. Also horn and leather closer to the shouldering point.

It was for hunting that was for sure, but not for any dear or rabbit, this was for hunting something much larger.

“You like the elephantman gun huh?” The old man chortled “Pretty special aint it?”

Gage looked at him and then looked back at the gun.

“See I call it the Elephantman gun cos you could shoot right through an elepant to kill the man behind it if you needed to” He laughed. “You wanna try these first” He said as he held up a small break action schofield revolver.

Gage looked at it and said “Sure”

March 27, 2018 0

TOTCB Chapter 16 ‘Well of Misery’

Stellar news space cadets, no it’s not that I don’t feel like death warmed up in an easy bake oven, thanks to my new weightlifting and not eating regime I feel like oprah winfrey covered me in bathroom scales then smashed them with a hammer then sat on me then drove a free mobile home over me.

Doctor Ryk prescribed lots of protein coffee and elite dangerous playing.

But no the news, well after much poking and prodding and passive aggressive english awkwardness I got the edit back for The one that came back, huzzah, now I can finally get pub- oh wait all the two people who wanted to see copies of it have probably long forgotten about it, well shit.

It doesn’t matter, shit happens, got a new editor now, it’s all cool and the gang and a way better book to shill. So I figure just carry out the original plan and give it away for free on the mailing list which I should really keep updating but my memory and my fucks are not what they used to be.

Anyway that’s my plan for the day, work through the edits, get it smoothed away and then slap together a cool cover of sorts and make it a nice pdf or mobi or something like that in time for my ban on facebook to be lifted, freeing me to spam once more.

That be all.

Bye now.

TOTCB inkitt link

The clinic on Calebra was a small practice pinched on one side by a dollar store and some fleabag hotel on the other. It had a great green empty lot in the front. He expected something a little bigger like a hospital or a resort. Not a building that looked like a family dentist’s office. The weather was hot as usual, sun in the sky, starting to get a little darker, with a slight cool breeze blowing.

The clinic was a flat brick building painted a light brown all over. Even the roof tiles were the same wet sand brown colour. It looked almost like a residence with all the curtains shut tight. A small concrete parking lot out front with a single palm tree sticking up in the middle. The entrance was off to the right and looked like a little house or a big garage. The treatment rooms must have been in the back or slung over to the left in the bulk of the building. There were quite a few cars parked out front and a white van parked at the side. Porter looked at it and sqoffed at it imagining it was for catching runaway dope fiends.

From left to right there was a red prius, a black ford, a silver Chrysler, a black hundai. So he wasn’t here or if he was he was using someone else’s car. Or maybe he was staying at the fleabag and just walked.

He glanced over at the fleabag, there were no cars out front as far as he could see.

Porter parked the Dodge behind the prius and got out and went inside.

To his surprise the reception area was all the same colour as the outside of the building. The desk and furnishing were varnished wood of the same colour. Whether that was intentional or not was anyone’s guess. Unless their decorator was also a patient that mystery would have to remain unsolved.

Porter stood around the lobby for a second, the layout seemed odd. The desk was further back than he expected and he couldn’t see anyone behind it. The waiting area was bunched very close to the door and gave a strange perspective. Probably intentional to make the building seem larger inside.

He looked around, it was sparsely decorated, subtle tones. Not much on the walls except calming benign paintings of plants and kittens. There were a few magazines on the coffee table in the waiting area that looked dated and well thumbed. Other than that there wasn’t much in there that would tell you you were in a rehab clinic. No pamphlets or posters or pictures of people. For all intents and purposes it just looked like the inside of a very sterile and strangely laid out house.

“Err… ahem, excuse me”

Porter turned his head towards the squeaking noise from behind the desk. He moved closer and saw that there was someone behind it, she was just obscured by a rather large monitor. She was a petite and pale redhead with glasses on her face that looked like they were screwed too tight. Her hair tied back in a loose ponytail of dull orange. She was perhaps around her mid twenties. Fairly attractive with a sort of boxy squished nose lightly dusted with freckles.

“Yes can I help you with something?” She said leaning forward on her chair trying to make herself more visible to get his attention.

Porter put on his horker smile and went closer to the desk. Now he could see just her head which was disconcerting. The rest of her body obscured by the monitor and the needlessly high desk.

“Yeah I’m looking for my brother, I was wondering if you could help me, he’s got our mom really worried.” Porter said to the floating head.

“What’s your brother’s name?” She said returning a limp half smile.

“Jack Hide” Porter moved closer to the desk and leant on it with a single elbow watching her face closely.

She turned her nose up and then scrunched it up a little bit. Her eyes flitting up and down his face and body, his clothes, maybe she could even smell him now. The point is he was trying to make her uncomfortable by incriminent and it was working. The sooner he got what he wanted and was gone the better.

Satisfied, she started clacking away as loud as humanly possible on a large old grey keyboard. With every tap Porter could almost see bony fingers popping bubble wrap made of plate glass. It was like nails on a chalk board but the board was the inside of your skull and the nails were dirty toenails.

He smiled still looking at her face now from the side, leaning more of his weight on the desk and crossing his legs. She had a nice long smooth neck but not much of a chin to speak of. Not that a woman needed a big chin but it was necessary to stop your head falling off your neck. She caught him looking in the corner of her eye, which was fine, he wasn’t hiding it, quite the opposite. The more heat he put on her the faster she’d work.

“We have one Kyle Hyde, but no Jack” She looked at him and then looked back at the monitor.

“That’s him, do you have an address?” He flipped over on the desk and put both elbows on it angling almost to lean over and see the monitor.

She swivelled the monitor away so he couldn’t see and said “I’m sorry. We can’t give out the addresses of our patients, unless you can prove you’re next of kin.”

“How do we do that? You wanna take my blood, check my prostrate?” Porter smiled, it was so easy to tell with redheads, pale skin like that flushes, you can see it from space. He waited for it to die down and didn’t say anything, he just left it hanging there, letting the silence build.

There are two kinds of people when it comes to facing awkward silences. Those that will embrace it and get belligerent like a teacher dealing with a naughty kid. An authoritarian personality. The other type is more common. Most people will do almost anything to make it end shy of selling their mother at a discount. Most people just want to help and make other people happy. Even if it means throwing out everything they believe in a split second of awkwardness. It becomes hard when you have rules. That is to remember them all in a stressful situations. So all you need to do is apply pressure for them to forget one or two for a long enough window to slip past them. No ones perfect, people are like locks. And there are no locks that can’t be picked if you poke at them long enough and with a long enough stick.

The blushing came back and Porter smiled, he didn’t want to pull the waterworks or the fire alarm or have to lie. She was making her own story in her head by now. His sad ‘whore with the heart of gold’ smile was producing the screen rights to the movie.

“Look…” Porter said breaking the tension. “All you need to do is step away for a second and get a cup of coffee and you’ll never have to know anything happened.”

She was flustered good now, he was impatient and he’d worked her hard and maybe too fast. Laid it on a little too thick but he’d given her an out and she had to take it or call security. If this place had any, maybe she was it and there was a shotgun pointing in circumcision range as they spoke.

“Erm, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” She put up token resistance, just a stalling tactic.

“Look all I need is an address, I just want to make sure he’s alright, that’s all”. He talked emphatically, adding a little shakiness to his voice.

“Ok I’m going to go to the bathroom and I expect you to be gone by the time I get back”. She said as she stood up from her chair.

A little too much information but that was fine.

Porter smiled and mouthed thankyou. As if she’d done him and his imaginery family a big favour that he could never repay. She’d literally cured cancer by going to bathroom. If she washed her hands afer the dalai llama would give her a standing ovation.

He watched her go and as soon as she turned the corner he went around the desk. There was no fixed address listed for Jack at all. The alias Kyle and no address, he wasn’t making this easy. But Nancy had found him under his original name. Or maybe she just searched ‘Hide’ and this was the only one she found in rehab in a city of about four million people.

There was one forwarding address listed but going by the rest of it seemed like this was a coincidence. It seemed unbelieveable that this was our guy. The address listed must have been somewhere he’d been staying at some point. Most likely coach surfing or squatting. There was something about the address that seemed familiar. Standing in front of monitor wasn’t the best place to think about it. The address was 147 J street in the warehouse district.

He went out to sit in the dodge. He looked around and there was nobody in the parking lot. He cleared his mind for a minute and tried to think whether or not that address was worth his time. This was it, this was the only lead he was given if this was bust it was back to square one. If Jack left the state or the country this was finished. He knew he’d never get anything out of Angela, she’d probably forgotten more than she remembered by now. If the fbi couldn’t get her to talk. Some half decent confidence trickster wasn’t going any deeper without getting dirty.

Peggy probably knew something but wanted to forget. Getting close to her would be near impossible now. She’d be on the defensive nonstop until this died down and all the reporters forgot she existed. Plus she already knew him and he really didn’t want this to get any messier than it had to. Getting involved in their family drama wasn’t his plan. The kid was no good, he didn’t know anything, he probably had to struggle to remember his real name.

Plan? Now that he thought about it what was his plan? Was there a plan? Was there ever a plan? What was he doing, why was he doing it? It started over money. Then it stopped being about money and started being about getting a good nights sleep. Without seeing that kids face and then it became about money again and now was it back to sleep?

He sighed hard and drifted off into thought. Until he heard a little pipping noise and was made aware that some time had passed. The girl from the front desk wanted to move her prius and he was blocking it with his big unsightly truck.

He sort of fell out of his daydreams with a jump like falling. His heart hitting a cold floor and he felt flustered suddenly and was looking for his keys. Opening the glove box and then the sun visor, remembering that he put them in the ignition already.

He caught a glimpse of something in the glovebox. He put a photocopy of Johnny’s missing person’s flier in his car. Incase he needed to jog people’s memories or maybe it was some sentimental reason he didn’t want to delve too far into. Maybe looking at it would be enough to stir the angels to help him and rouse his spirits. Make his heart grow ten times bigger and his brain ten times smaller.

Then he remembered, it hit him like a tonne of bricks and he cared less about little red’s prius. The tattoos, the cross was a given. But the other letters didn’t make any sense and they didn’t have to at the time. Kid gets a little tattoo most adult tattoos don’t mean a damn thing. He thought the J might have just been for Johnny or Jack or something like that but the rest seemed meaningless. ST meant something but maybe it wasn’t two separate words. Just an abbreviation for street and maybe he was leading himself on a wild goose chase. Maybe anything he saw he’d make fit so that he could be on the tail of some great mystery. Not scratching in the dirt in someone else’s basement.

Thinking wasn’t doing any good, thinking lead home and nowhere, who was he kidding? He was going whether he liked it or not, like he was on rails. Spirred on by destiny and all that stuff that made us feel good and powerful but meant the opposite.

He turned the engine over and drove out of the lot.

–

Nulidad was sitting in a room in the san Antonio detention centre. They moved him from the childs centre to the jail proper across the street. After his record from Interpol came through.

He was wearing a white pair of pants and blue shirt. They almost looked like hospital scrubs as opposed to the orange jumpsuits you see on tv. Sterile looking.

His cell was small as you might expect. It came equipped with a blue phone imbedded into a white column in the middle of the back wall. A small old tv on top the plugs were in the middle of the wall right next to his bed, which consisted of a single cot. The walls were white and green on adjacent sides and there was a mirror over his bed embedded in the wall.

He’d spent most of his time sitting on his bed making collect calls to whomever would answer. He was looking for something, shopping for something. A new identity a new family. He got a taste of something, maybe he’d had it before and that’s why he did it. The love of a family, or something close to that. The tv was on but the reception in the centre wasn’t great and the volume was broken on the quietest setting.

There was something else, he was waiting for and then it came. The phone rang and he answered and an unfamiliar voice answered and he asked. “How did you get this number?”

“Mom gave it to me” The voice was sly and slow and contained a threat of some sort.

“Who is this?” Nulidad said.

“I could ask the same question, what was your name again, your real name?”

“What do you want?”

“The real question is what do you want? I can pay your bail, get you out of town and you can keep on keeping on ya feel me?”

“Why would you do this for me?”

“You know why, you’ve got a big mouth.”

“So you can kill me, like you kill Johnny?” Nulidad hissed.

“Now who said that? I didn’t kill Johnny and if I did, I wouldn’t talk about it on a phone in a jail”. He paused and sucked in some breathe.

“You don’t know me, you don’t owe me anything.”

“I want you out of my hair and you want out, it’s a winwin for you to skip and I can help but you have to make up your mind now.”

Nulidad breathed through his nose making a whistling sound and said “Ok.”

March 15, 2018 0

	Ryk Brink on Review of the Benchmade Harley…
	Upashna on Alabama
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	The Awesome Dad on Rain drops
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Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Where weird shit hits bizarre fans.

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Prey 2006 retrospective

Men in Black international review

Gage Epilogue ‘Effigy’

Gage Chapter 12 ‘Passover’

A quiet place – Review

Gage Chapter 6 ‘Leaders of Men’

Gage Chapter 5 ‘One Piece at a Time’

Gage Chapter 4 ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Cry’

TOTCB Chapter 16 ‘Well of Misery’

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