alternative history

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

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 3 ‘Colony’

Ok ok, in pretty good spirits today, although in the good spirits where I can’t tell my head from my arse and I really don’t know what to do with myself but it’s something.

I got the first nice little chunk of Diana After Dark, might be sticking with that name after all, I dunno, more sleep needs to be on it. And I’m kind of in a tizzy over what to do now, I’ve started reading the witcher books and I was hoping to be struck by some inspiration lightning and it isn’t even raining yet.

Nevertheless I finished the first go around of a plan for the second Diana book and I was triffling with ‘Delta Gamma Di’ or ‘Delta Gamma Diana’ because it’s all about her going through college and joining a sorority to track down a killer that’s using their front lawn as his own personal stage for displaying some cut on girls on. But now I might go with ‘Dearly beloved Diana’ or something like that.

As I said more sleep is needed on top of that, but how much sleep can a man have when there is work to be done.

Work time which I spent playing kingdom come deliverance as it teases me with a penultimate chapter only to throw a fetch quest at me, a series of boring fetch quests right before a big battle. I mean wtf.

I do love the game though, this just feels like padding, which tbf is understandable because it’s followed by two huge battles in a row and then a stealth sequence which had a mandatory failed state which pissed me off. I made a stealth character and then they give you a stealth sequence where your failure is unavoidable. Just fu game haha.

Nah but it’s all good, it’s still an awesome game, I love it and shall review it but I fear my passion won’t be matched by my hateful reviews, I tend not to want to analyse things I like and feel incapable of not analysing things I hate haha.

So I’ve got a lot to be getting on with, first and foremost I need to start putting a package to try and sell Diana to a literary agent and I need to stop dreaming about writing and get back to actually doing it. I think I might just go back to that lovecraft piece I dropped just to keep sharp until I get hit good and hard by a lightning bolt.

That’s about all.

See you…

*For the purposes of this record and continuity a transcript from Dram Johanessen (a close personal friend of Gage in his early life) original diary has been added to the text as a first hand account of events and Fords account has been removed as it was noted to be riddled with contradictions, over-exageration and outright fabrications.

September 13, 1848

Oh god’s it’s horrible, I saw it happen but I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe she’d actually do it. As soon as that tall man walked away and got into his carriage I went to his side sure he was dead, his face, oh god his face. I prayed he was dead, his suffering could no doubt be immense.

But by god he lived, his breath in his chest. His heart beating like a steam engine’s hitting the tracks, his will to live reaching up out of hades to grab at life jealously. With the use of Madame Souchang’s carriage we got him into town as quickly as we could. He reacted to no stimuli the entire hours journey and I was sure he couldn’t hold on much longer.

But there was that steady breathing through the hole in his face. There was very little blood, the hole it seemed was quarterized at the moment of penetration. But who was to tell the extent of the damage it had done to the vital organ inside. He’ll certainly never see again out of his left eye, as far as I can tell it’s completely destroyed, oh god. My stomached kicked everytime I looked under the sheet we put over him.

Madame Souchang was inconsolable, she acted almost like it was her brother that ordered it. She claimed no responsibility and was reticent to speak at all about what transpired. Fearing my own head I pressed no further and thanked her for the use of her for the gracious use of her personal motor carriage.

We got into the town of Porterville proper. Which was at the time was simply two rows of wooden victorian style building facing eachother with a well trod dirt road inbetween them.

The sawbones of the town had a practice next to a large furniture store and a grocery on the otherside. It had big protruding castle like struts with what I could only assume were weathervains attached to them. Which to me reminded of something of those books written by Shelley of the monstrous man that came back to life through arcane scientific practice.

Me and a few other of the men took him down from the motor carriage as easy as we could. The large man we had come to call friend who was once as strong and tall as an oak was layed low and meak and lifeless as we carried him through the thin wooden door of the doctors practice.

The inside of the doctors smelled stale, the wooden floor was stained with splotches of god knows what. The doctor was sat with his back to the door at a small writing desk, we set Gage down on a large wooden inspection table of which he barely fit on with his legs dangling off the edge.

The nurse was hanging off the edge of the desk smiling at us as we came in.

The doctor took one look at him as we took the sheet off and his eyes got very narrow and curious his nurse let out a silent scream holding her mouth open. Covering it with her hands screaming quietly with her eyes and then rushing out of the room bounding clumsily into a cabinet stocked with oddly shaped bottles of medicine. Almost knocking it over as she evacuated the room with a loud sound of stair foot falls and doors slamming.

The doctor was a short squat man with bared hairy fore arms under a grey shirt with rolled up sleeves, all of the hair of which was white and grey. A stern appearance with a pair of circular glasses placed at a peak of a receding hairline. He looked confused and angry at first and said something like; “What you bringing that here for? The morticians the street over! Get!”

After we’d assured him the man was still alive (which took some doing) he told us to lift him up on the table as if to humor us. He must have thought we were mad or stupid and if I were him I wouldn’t believe it either for at the time it looked like a train had run over his head or a horse had stomped it in.

He took out his instruments with a sigh and an aggrieved air of wasted time and started to poke and prod at him and then was seemingly struck by a curious itch. He reached back to get his stethoscope which he was about to warm but then thought better of it and placed it on the man’s chest after ripping his shirt. He took it away and his face turned as white as a sheet and he mumbled something the exact line from Shelley’s story, or so as my memory recreates it.

“He’s alive!”

After he’d got over the initial shock of it he started to lick his lips pointing and motioning hurriedly at a drawer one of the men was next to. A young man by the name of Gotfried.

“Get a bottle!” He instructed.

The young lad reached inside and pulled out a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and brought it over. The doctor wrenched it out of his hands like it was the last drop of water on earth and took a long drink and then slammed it down on the table. After he’d sighed and belched a few times he wiped his brow and went about collecting together knives various saws and articles I couldn’t quite identify as a layman. And he yelled for his nurse who was still in the back vomiting.

Eventually she came out and took one look at his face again and rushed back upstairs.

I looked at all the knives and saws that he collected in a metal dish. He coughed and then looked around for something before letting out an aggrieved sigh and bathing the instruments in a splash of his bourbon.

I asked him what they were for and he said almost with an air of incredulity “Surgery, he needs surgery.”

I was confused, not a man of great learning especially not of the medical variety so I asked again, “surgery for what?” thinking he didn’t need to lose more of himself and then it struck me as he said it.

“Goddamit can’t you see the thing sticking out of his damn head?”

Oh god his head was such a mess it didn’t even cross my mind that the rivet would still be lodged in his skull. It was shot right up under his chin and the spike of it was coming right out of the top of his head through his left side and out the top right out of the front like a horn.

“Oh god” I said.

The surgery took hours, but it felt like days, we sat in the doctors while Gage was worked on without anaesthetic in the surgery in the back room.

We didn’t see any of it but we could hear it, the sawing and the smell of hot bone. The shock of it sent some of the men outside and some who were lodged in town decided to head back and rest leaving just me and Gotfried.

20th September 1848

It was a week before he opened his eye again and I would swear in front of a jury it was not the same man. It was like someone had plucked our Phineas Gage and replaced him with another man entirely. He’d been sleeping, fed only liquid solutions administered to him by the nurse. His face mercifully bandaged. Unmercifully the doctor was unable to remove the rod itself. Fear further damage remove the thing might cause. And the black metal horn tip could be spied sticking out of the bandage.

Besides all that there was something about him that was just not right. The way he spoke, the way he looked at me. I’d never known of him to have a temper or a violent streak but he brought one back with him, from wherever he’d been. He snapped at anyone and everyone and I feared that if he were not unable to move he might do injury to himself and others.

I was almost hesitant to wire his wife in new Hampshire. Would it have been kinder to tell her her husband was dead than introduce her to this misshapen shadow of the man she loved. I wondered about their children, without the money he sent how would she care for them?

The doctor said the changes in mood were the result of his injuries, his brain was damaged. Specifically something about his nerves were severed he’s lost almost all sensation in his body. He can’t feel heat or cold or pain or even touch. The affects to his mood he did not further elaborate on. But it’s as if all his other non-tactile senses are heightened and his mental state is not comparable to the man we all knew.

2nd October 1848

His wife Catherine came up from new Hampshire today although I had told her to leave their children with their grandparents. The shock of seeing their father mangled like that would have been too much for them. But when she arrived Gage wouldn’t see her. He outright refused. I thought about what she would think about his face but not just that. The room he occupied had been fitted with a tubescope to keep him occupied during his long recovery but he’d smashed it almost as soon as it was installed. I’d noticed also all the newspapers I’d brought him he’d shredded. And it seemed like any knowledge of the outside world enraged him enough to put him in fits of unadulterated anger.

3rd October 1848

I put Catharine back on a train this morning, she’s a lovely woman, delicate in features and manner. It is truly saddening to see her go without meeting her goal of seeing her husband, but I honestly didn’t know what to tell her. All I could do was assure her that he would be well enough to work soon and we both hoped that once routine took hold he would return to the old Phineas Gage we once knew.

31st October 1848

After nearly two whole months of convalescence the doctor says Phineas should be well enough to continue his life and more imporantly his work. The doctor even made up for him a remarkable prosthesis to cover his scars so as not to alarm the general public. It was a piece of a light wood and some waxen substance painted and moulded to resemble a part of a mans face. He made it from a picture of Phineas we had supplied to as closely resemble his face as possible. Although minor changes had to be made, he was never a spectacle wearer but now a lensless pair was used as a frame to hook the prosthetic on so that the arms of the glasses would hook around his ears to hold it in place. To cover the horn he was instructed to wear a wide brimmed hat at all times.

The rest of the scars and missing hair could be easily covered in the same manner. It looked a lot better than I expected and from a distance you could be mistaken for thinking it was the man. But up close it gave the illusion up as the one unblinking staring glassy eye seemed to follow you around the room.

I felt for the man I truly did. It must have been even more of a crushing blow that his injuries and the time spent off work had resulted in a demotion and I had taken over his role and would do so for the foreseeable future.

Although this did not seem to anger him as much as effects of his surgery. His lack of tactile senses made it very difficult for him to complete the simple tasks I had set him. Many times he would injure himself and others and not even notice. It became very off putting for the men and resulted in vicious conflicts in which Gage was invariably the bloody victor. It was a horrifying sight, he seemed to have reverted to some earlier state of man, a vicious throw back to an earlier age.

His physical presence was also off putting yes but he also seemed to have strange new idea of life and the ruling government which was very unsettling for the men and struck up tensions between the men and the luggers.

He seemed to have gotten it into his head that there was some grand conspiracy of some sort. And that all the news was manufactured lies concocted to keep humans from rising up or some such nonsense.

15th December 1848

Unfortunately today at the behest of the company I had to let Phineas go.

The doctors had cautioned him about drink but he did not care. The great stress sent him deeper into the bottle and unfortunately I had no choice but to fire him.

It has burdened me with a heavy heart but he had become too much of a liability to keep on.

Nevertheless the company has awarded him a sizeable severance package and an early christmas bonus, although I fear he will only drink that.

I feel responsible for all of this I really do. When I told him he was to be let go he didn’t even seem angry, he almost seemed like he expected it.

A great melancholy grips me as I doubt we’ll ever meet again. I suspect he’ll return to his family in new hampshire and grow old and die a happier man now, I hope for his sake he does.

*Ford’s journal continues from here.

After that Gage fell off the face of the earth, he didn’t feel human, he wanted the earth to swallow him up.

He became a wanderer and a thief and a rogue, a bad gambler and a cheat only making enough money to keep his belly full of whiskey and his head dulled and stupid. Returning to his family would have been a lie for he did not feel like the same man. The old Gage was dead and in it’s place this man shambled on.

Sometime in the start of the new year He found himself in a small mining colony in Arkansas, in a town called Rush. They mined zinc up there, the stuff is used in certain alloys they use to make weapons for the capitol.

Needless to say it was a fairly rowdy town without a conventional form of law enforcement but people ususally kept to themselves. a It wasn’t in any great threat of bandits as zinc wasn’t high on their priorities to rob. And most of the miners money was pissed away on booze or women or just gambled.

Miners are off a disposition that any day there could be a cave in and kill them all, so they live each day as if they could be buried under rock the next.

Something Gage seemed to admire, moreover it made it easy to blend in with the revellers who on a good day couldn’t see further than their own feet. Not enough to notice a stranger with an oddly mask like face and a horn on his head.

Although on this night they were especially jovial as a recent election had taken place. A new president had been appointed, A man named Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Spanish American war. It was amusing to them as he had been somewhat of a colourful character before his presidency. Not only that but he’d riden a rising wave of anti-alien sentiment and people were sure that this would mean things would improve for their kind. To them he was the warrior messiah they had hoped to pull them out of their perdition. Although all alien media at the time had done their best to assure humans that things were better than ever for them and they were exceedingly priviledged. There had been a growing resentment formenting in the humans. As although they could fill their bellies for the most part and they were kept distracted with sportsball and a dull harmonic suggestion given off through their tubescopes. They had on an instinctual level felt control of their destinies slipping out of their hands. Sadly they were right but completely unable to understand how right they actually were. And not being smart enough or awake enough as a group to realise this it fell to petty concerns about their jobs. Replacing humans with luggers or with the coming of the industrial revolution high tech machines who would work for less. Bringing the prices down of all goods but destroying the class of people that could buy them. But it was to mask the feeling that they were no longer at home in their own world. So this election had given them hope for some kind of change and reversal of fortune for them and theirs.

The alien media had cemented this notion in them by elevating Taylor up to the level of a mustache twirling villain. A speciesist who would round up aliens and un-normals and send them to die in quarries. Bringing up the history of their supposed persecution Cyclon had underdone from the humans of the past who were to them barbaric and cruel. But this resentment the media had for him and their attempt silence him made the public clamber for him all the more to know what they were not meant to know.

But Gage could not share their optimism and joviality as to them this was a sign that the system was not corrupt. For how so could it not be a democracy if this man who the system hated could be elected to lead it? Sure that proved to them that the system was indeed impartial and this man could free them of corruption.

Gage who could see and was far more cynical and could understand. This was exactly the kind of move the system would make to assuage the fears of corruption in the populace. That this entire conflict was manufactured by the system itself. The previous eleven presidents They’d had were at least partially or ambiguously human. And each time promised the humans whatever they wanted and when their vote was assured carried on whatever policy the president before him had carried out in an unbroken chain of control.

How could there ever be a true democracy when the freedom of choice was between two alien puppets. The freedom to choose being an illusion created for this very feeling the miners were feeling now, of hope and change and a brighter future. And then within the next couple of years they’d be cursing this new president and blaming him for all the problems the system created. And then before anyone could notice they’d swap him out for someone else and the whole thing would start over again.

One thing that was key to the Cyclon agenda was that humans had a short memory and could be conditioned to forget the past. Dooming them to repeat it, allowing them to be kept in an ideological stasis. Never moving forward and always being just on the cusp of acquiring everything they wanted but never fully being able to realise or bring it into reality.

This election was different only in that it was a false triumph. A move calculated by the Cyclon to make the humans think they had beaten the system entirely by simply engaging in it. Thus deflating the rising tensions between human and aliens by making the radical human element think they’d won. At which point the majority of the useful idiots in that movement would think the fight was over and stop entirely. Leaving the more radical elements without a force behind them which meant they could be disposed of without causing too much of a fuss. The radical voices asking for changed would be exposed and defeated by their own victory. The normal people would happily put their heads back in the sand safe in the knowledge that the future for their children would be sunshine and roses from then on. Purely for their signing their name on a piece of paper.

Gage knew better than that, he knew as all men instinctually knew but had been bred to forget. That no change worth having comes without blood, torrents of blood, rivers of blood. Human and alien alike, mountains of corpses that a king would set his throne atop and then and only then would his people truly be free. Only when the system was entirely torn down and burnt to ashes and every alien and human traitor lay dead would there be hope for a brighter tomorrow. And it was this reluctance to accept this price that found Gage living like Jonah but instead of being in the belly of whale he was trapped at the bottom of a bottle.

He could not hope to see his wife and children again because he was not the same man they knew. And he would not burden them with this new terrible knowledge he had. He would forever cloister himself away in the cave of his consciousness with whatever booze he could get his hands on. For fear of what his realisations could bring about for the world and for himself and his family.

By that time booze had become his only comfort, without it he feared he might go mad. Although another man might blurt out what he had come to realise about the world he lived in, he did not. But was secure in the idea that even if he did, it would be considered the raving conspiracies of a mad drunk with a pickled brain.

Later that night he found himself in a card game with a number of these ruddy faced miners who were or at least reaching the same level of drunkiness as Gage himself. Gage was cheating, badly, but everyone at the table was too drunk and happy to notice or care.

All but one man who silently seethed under a firm cowboy hat that looked new and unused which covered most of his face. He was an odd little man with a slightly tanned aspect but with very deep blue eyes that seemed to behold everything with the most profound disdain and curiosity. Through clasped hands he rested his rounded unstubbled chin.

His manner of dress was strangely costume in it’s appearance. Resembling what a cowboy of the previous age might look like in one of the serial fictions they had in new york that cast cow chasers as these romantic figures. Killing villains and romancing farm girls in between eating lots of beans by the campfire. He wore a long black duster a white shirt with an indio looking pattern and a brown waistcoat below it with a necktie with a steerhead clasp. With his hat pulled down he smoked long black cigarillo’s that must have been imported. Nobody paid him any attention least of all Gage who was a long ways into a raging drunk almost falling over himself to spend his ill gotten winnings on more whiskey.

The man with the piercing blue eyes in the unusually tanned face that made him look like a spaniard eyed Gage vociferously. He stubbed his cigarillo out to chew a wooden toothpick in its place. Never once taking his cruel cold steely gaze off Gage who laughed and cracked up with the other drunkards happy for a fleeting moment in their meaningless existence.

After the man had lost a great deal which didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He got up from his chair and bid everyone at the table goodnight with a tip of his rigid cowboy hat before clasping his hands behind his back in an unnatural gesture and clomping his way out of the saloon.

The room went silent for a moment as they watched him go and then burst into uproarious laughter as they assumed he was out of ear shot on the otherside of the saloon door. Which to anyone but a drunken man made perfect sense.

March 7, 2018 0

Gage Chapter One: Tupelo

And here it is, the insanity that is a steampunk western sci-fi alternative history about a dude that gets a railway spike lodged in his brain. It’s still rough as all fuck, I’ve been struggling recently with writing and my day job, I’ve just been exhausted or too scattered to do anything more productive than pick my nose and eat potatoes. So I’ve sort of just been muddling along trying to get the right amount of sleep and the right amount of food to function and sustain this odd balance of my work and personal life where I’m perpetually tired from work but also broke because I spent all my money already on airfare and a rented apartment in barbados for a week.

But I mean how can I complain, things are looking up for me in a lot of ways, got stuff to look forward to and people that love me or at the very least don’t want me dead. That’s something.

So I’m really struggling to get back into the groove of things and I probably won’t get fully back on track until sometime in January when I get back from my third trip there, must be something in the water haha. Until then don’t expect to hear too much from me because I’ll be working or generally trying not to swallow my own tongue while I play elite dangerous.

I put up the full chapter which is not something I usually do but honestly, right now I’m just like fuck inkitt, inkitt is dogshit haha. It looked nicer and there was the chance it might publish one of my books but all it puts out is slocky romance or porn books for middle age women to get moist over or even worse those fucking horrible tween novels that won’t go away written by the middle aged women who fap to the porn books haha. So now they’ve changed their review policy I just don’t really see a need to go back, I dunno, I might go back later but for now why not just keep it in house and I can shill for reviews later.

See you…

The following are scraps of news articles and the personal diary of one Alexander Ford a known associate and collaborator with the man known previously before the great war as Phineas Gage.

June 4th 1849

I remember I was working as a mopboy at the time in McClusky’s bar. It was in the middle of a nowhere. A border town called Tupelo. This was when I first met the man who would later be recorded in the news apparatus as a terrorist and a madman.

It was a fairly average late afternoon in a relatively sleepy little town all things considered. We’d heard talk of revolts and crime and violence from the rebels and real action and adventure in these parts. Mostly stories spun from wonder of the unknown. But it was rarely reported anywhere but the radial transmissions and the tubescopes placed throughout the town. But most of the time they were just playing music or displaying some kind of sports activity, or some event in the capitals. Usually award ceremonies where Cyclon dignitaries gave other Cyclon dignitaries awards for peace or love or some such thing.

It was before I was born that they actually came, supposedly they’d been amongst us for a long time moving around not having a home to call their own. According to the tubescope we weren’t very nice to them, hating and fearing them just because they were different so they say. And then there was a time when we, being humans, decided we wanted to kill them all. The history books didn’t really say why, but it was reckoned that we were just ruled by evil men.

Well after that people felt so sorry for them, using our technology and theirs we built them a home in the stars. My people felt so guilty we took them in with open arms and if we didn’t we wouldn’t even have radials or tubescopes or the sportsballs we have and we’ve lived in peace ever since then. Or so I had come to believe in my young mind at the time.

I’d never once questioned the way the world was, my world was what the tubescope told me it was. With it’s bright coloured and smiling faces and awards and sportsballs and dreams of a better tomorrow, love and peace. I couldn’t even conjure the words in my head to even contemplate the lingering feeling of unease until that day.

It was unusually hot and I remember it vividly as I write it now, despite it being almost twenty years ago. As I sit on my bunk writing this now going on possibly the last mission I will ever fly about to drop the bombs that’ll end this damn war and free my people forever. I still remember that feeling in my chest when he told his story and the look in his eye as he spoke, the look he gave me.

Nothing much had happened that day, just the usual morning drinkers drowning their various sorrows. There were some miners who were working up on a quarry on the ridge mining gold for shielding shuttles and circuitry. McClusky the barman was scratching his bald head and craning his neck to watch the recaps from the latest sportsball game. I remember there was a lot of controversy recently as the sportsball league had lost it’s last human player. An act was passed to allow Kaftas to play after that it was all downhill, the aliens being physically superior in everyway the human players just couldn’t compete with that and they became tokens in their own game, there only for the fans.

But eventually they were gotten rid of entirely and after some slight protest from the fans it went on as usual. Any hold outs were ususally shut up by someone calling them speciesest or a bigot and reminded about the constitution and meritocracy. That the aliens should replace the humans if they do a better job. They had no real argument against that, only that it was their game despite most of the owners of the teams being aliens themselves we clung to it with some ancestral memory of it being ours.

I was never interested in sports being a skinny lad of around fourteen. As I said it was a boring day which made the appearance of a stranger all the more memorable.

He was a stout scholarly looking gentlemen with a bowler hat and an expensive looking suit, a city man no doubt accompanied by two anthropoid non-humans cloaked in human garb. These were not the same stock as the ruling Cyclon but a mutt-like hybrid of human and alien, not quite human but not quite alien, the stock of which made up the majority of the sportsball teams now. Although some had speculated that they weren’t from this world at all. They were much larger than humans with darker thicker skin like that of a rhino or elephant but had a vaguely simian appearance equating somewhat to a human face but far less expressive and desirest of empathy or any such human emotions. And although the face was ape like it had an elongated quality akin to a dog’s snout. The aliens commonly used them as security or bodyguards and they made up a great deal of the cities new police force. As they could take orders without question and follow them through with fearful brutality and they were moreover entirely expendable. Another could be plucked out of circulation within a day as they were so easily bred and they aged faster than humans so as these hulking monsters could in fact have the same number of years as I had then. In fact it was probably preferable for them to have the minds of children, not as to say the adults were much smarter. They were definitely stronger and faster with heightened senses of smell and sight. They could tear a human apart if ordered to do so but their intelligence and resolve was somewhat lacking in respect to a humans but I imagine now that was precisely the point, making them more pliable to the mind control the Cyclon used.

In their native tongues, they were known as Kaftas but we colloquially called them ‘Luggers’ or ‘Lugs’ as they were most commonly used in these parts for manual labour. But in recent times it had become impolite or not politically correct or speciesist to use these terms.

They wore human clothes but that just furthermore outlined the inhuman nature of their aspect. Seeming almost a parody of humanity as they stood so huge and hunched. Monsters wearing the clothes of men, their faces ridged and apelike as they gaped their mouths thoughtlessly.

The man leading them was a jovial looking sort, with a fat neck and small greasy looking mustache which was pruned and neat and leapt about his face as he spoke like a tick.

I couldn’t rightly hear what he was saying but he smiled and tipped his hat as McClusky looked at his huge bodyguards and got a squirrelly look about him like he wanted to crawl under a giant mouse trap.

McClusky didn’t say much but I could see his throat swallowing and his head nodding furiously as he was listening waiting to give up his own mother. As soon as he was prompted he pointed a fat sweaty finger at a darkened table in the corner hidden as it was behind a shaft of light from the window.

The stranger smiled and tipped his hat before tossing him a gold coin McClusky fumbled and stared at intently as the strange city folk passed under the shaft of light and sat down at the table in the corner.

The bar was small with few hiding spots, so how I’d failed to notice the other stranger was just due to my own uncurious nature at the time or quite simply because at that time the stranger did not want to be noticed.

The inside was dark as a rule, as most of the people in the bar were just trying to get out of the sun or sleeping off the drunk they had from the night before. Or just old timers with no better place to be.

But I remember even Mr Rickers the pianist hit a bum note as he saw the new faces, he sat on his stool at the piano tucked under the stairs. Madame Gertrude the old whore that worked upstairs stood in the middle of the stairs balancing on the banister watching them go with a wrinkled suspicious gaze and then shot me a school teacher sneer as she noticed me watching her. Mary Sue, I suppose she was a waitress although Madame Gertrude wanted to train her up as a whore but from what I heard she wasn’t much good at it stood open mouth gawping holding up a tray of nothing.

The human of the group sat down at the table in the corner with a smile in the back of his head, taking off his bowler hat and placing it on the table. Without saying a word he took out an ornate pipe and lit it taking big bellowing puffs from it as his non-human compatriots stood off to his side looking out the slats in the window standing as if they were children waiting for their mothers to be done browsing in a hat shop.

He cleared his throat and I edged a little closer to hear what he was saying.

“Is your name Phineas Gage?” The strange fat man said.

Noticing only the slightest movement, so slight it could have been imaginary, the figure he was talking to suddenly became visible. Siting still as he was in the shade, it was as if my eyes adjusted at that minute and I suddenly had that unusual face burned into my memory. To say he was grotesque would have been an exaggeration but under the hideous scar on his face was the face of a handsome man in his late twenties with a strong jaw and dark black hair cut neatly.

But his face, my god his face was a monstrous mess, as if he was half demon and how I did not notice him instantly upon his appearance has been blotted out from my memory. As how I could ever forget that face seems impossible. For if it were not the face of such as I know now, a monumental figure, I would think it the face of the devil himself.

And that’s how I felt at that moment, and a few after as I stood frozen thinking I was half in a dream as I looked upon his waxen features. Half his face looked like it had been chewed by Cerberus himself, his left eye closed, blinded and gone although he wore no patch. Which made his appearance all the more horrifying as half his face was handsome and strong and the other looked like that of a mangled corpse.

I might have pissed myself right then and there if I hadn’t just come back come back from writing my name in the dust outside.

The stranger with the horrific face looked up from his meal which consisted of a steak and some mashed potatoes and a glass of milk, with his one good eye. His jaw was locked and strong and he took up the glass of milk with one hand, his other out of sight and unmoving as if he had no use of it and he took a long gulping drink of it like it was a magic elixir and then hit the glass down hard and licked his lips of the white liquid gasping and sighing.

The fat man in the chair still smiling trying to look as casual and powerful as possible. Trying not to cross his legs and look anymore than a plucked peacock.

“I ask again sir” he said in a city accent. “Is your name Phineas Gage”

“What of it?” The stranger said. He looked at them stonily as he took the fork that rested on his plate and scooped up mouthful of mash potatoes and forced it into his misshapen mouth with his good hand. Then following it up by picking up the steak he evidently couldn’t cut with his good hand and taking animalistic bites from it. The fact it was larvae steak and not beef as cows had gone instinct from over farming a decade prior made it an especially grotesque sight as the thing was essentially a giant maggot. He ripped at it and it burst with a vile grey green liquid dripping down his chin. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his good hand while his other arm was rigid and seemingly useless.

I wondered if he hadn’t been in some kind train accident or mine collapse which had left his body mangled. I let my eyes adjust and get a better look at him and at first he had seemed of an average size as I compared him to the gargantuan monstrous nature of the Lugs accompanying the relatively dimunuitive stranger. But now maybe just from my memory, he seemed too a giant of a man, with broad mountainous shoulders and thick long arms like a gorilla with hands that were calloused and looked as if they’d worked everyday from birth. Hard back breaking soul crushing work, from tit to shovel to pickaxe to grave. He wore a thick brown woollen coat and a dirty dusty white shirt underneath.

“There a bounty on my head?” The man I now know as Gage said in an uncaring way as he continued to eat in this strange savage way not looking at these city folk.

“Quite a sizeable one” The man tutted. He crossed his legs finally as he was accustomed moving onto the next stage of his persona. “But I’m not a bounty hunter Mr Gage, I am a medical doctor of a new field entirely, a psychiatrist sent from the city, I’m not here to hurt you, I’d just like to study you.” He said it deflating, as if it was a magic tune everyone was supposed to dance to. “Doctor Herbert Westwood at your service” He said reaching out a pudgy hand only to hold it there for a few awkward moments. Getting heavier with every second to eventually drop it with a hurt twitching of his little neat mustache.

Gage snorted and spat out a piece of grubby sinew and continued to eat.

“I’ve heard about your case and I’ve been given permission to take you in under my care, in return all your past crimes will be forgiven.”

“Crimes, what would they be?”

“Murder”

Gage twisted his hideous face and looked up with his one good sharp eye and said “And what if I tell you to take your alien mutts outside and fuck eachother?” He spat, his voice slaked in a cool simmering rage as he chewed.

“Well then I’d have no choice but to…” His voice trailed off as he clicked his fingers and the misshapen creatures poorly cloaked in human clothes lumbered forward like animals. Such a stark viciousness emitting an ape like cry to battle bulging through their clothes with grotesque muscles and sharp canine teeth bared, their backs raised in a threatening gesture like a dog or a wolf.

The whole bar froze instinctually like rabbits hearing the roar of a lion. The women let out tiny squeaks of fear their bodies locked tight and their eyes unshakeably focused on these creaures suddenly shedding their human façade and revealing themselves as the monsters they undoubtedly were. I too froze unable to look away from some far flung cave man instinct passed down, staring and waiting.

I was just a boy and I knew if it was inclined, these beasts could devour me and everyone here if allowed to do so.

“Ah ah” The man tutted. The beasts heeled breathing deeply and heavily their huge grotesque frames rising and falling as they seethed with a vicious vulgarity. A vile steam coming out of their nostrils.

“We kill dreg nuh?” One of the beasts asked without turning his dog like head.

“No, they want him alive.” The man straightened his mustache, his eyes making two sharp points on his round face and he said. “They’ll want to make an example of him.”

Gage continued eating and didn’t even look at the man anymore. He hadn’t moved a muscle since it all started except to eat. He didn’t even look at the Luggers, like they weren’t there.

“I’ll give you one last chance to come peacefully, it won’t end well for you any other way.” The man was sincere now, but a condescending sincerity that got a piercing icey look from Gage with his one good eye.

The man knew exactly what that meant and he slowly stood putting his hat back on his head, his pipe still in his mouth.

He sighed and said “You’re a sick man Mr Gage, I can help you.” He looked at Gage but his face hadn’t changed, he sighed again and said “Very well Mr. Gage, have it your way. Luntz, Kurbt schnell! The fat man clicked his fingers again and stepped back as the fiends fell on all fours and circled left and right from Gage’s table in what little space they had. Seemingly weaving or attempting to strike from different angles

The entire bar was still frozen, unable to look away as the creatures surveyed their prey. Gage looked up with his one good eye and followed them as they sized him up. Their clawed feet on all fours making a sharp clacking scratching sound on the wooden floor. The first creature sniffed and made a growling sound in his throat and said “This one not so-“ The things head suddenly exploded with a cacophonous booming noise that sounded like god clearing his throat. The shards of it’s brain and bone matter pulping against the base of the stairs spattering slightly on the Madame’s slippers, although she managed to stifle a scream. The second reacting instantly throwing the table aside and pouncing on Gage snapping at the air. It’s powerful jaws trying to bite at his face but the thing was held there by Gage’s good arm as the thing slobbered all over him. Then a another booming cracking noise shook the entire place. I could hear the glass on the bar shake and could almost feel my bones shudder at the terrible noise and the sight of the things back erupt in bone and innard debris all over the tossed table with the remnants of Gage’s dinner on the floor.

I managed to keep my breakfast down, although the smell alone was hard to bear. I had thought when they came in it was strong, but now, in their current state they smelled even worse.

Gage finally stood and I could hardly believe my eyes, he must have been seven or eight feet tall as I remember it now. It could be just that I was so small but thinking back he was a freakishly large man with hands the size of a horses head. It could also have been that he picked a table that was in the corner beside the stairs where the roof was a little lower. But at the time I was lacking the education the rebellion had given me, otherwise the sight of him would have conjured images of Zeus and Atlas towering over man.

There was a muted hissing wimpering noise and I could see that the second creature was still alive spilling it’s innards on the dirty wooden floor I had yet to sweep.

Gage towered over it now, tucking something under his good arm he reached down grabbing with both hands the top and bottom of the lugs jaws and with a quick powerful jarring motion snapped them apart. I remember the women in the bar letting out another little squeaking noise as he put the other creature out of it’s misery, the sound of it’s whimpering hissing ending almost instantaneously.

That was the point that my breakfast made a return journey on the bar floor and down the side of the counter, ham and eggs.

Then the sound of small pieces of metal hitting the wooden floor and rolling, rolling through the blood and brain and bile.

The fat man nervously loaded small bullets into a travelling revolver his pipe nervously bobbing in his mouth as he bit down on it. His fat swollen fingers dropping the occasional bullet as he frantically tried to load the gun a bullet at a time. His face red and hot and wet.

Gage rose again to his full height and the man tried to smile cockily relying on the small gun in his hand, a streak of doubt crossing his nerve struck mind, would that gun even kill such a man or just make him angrier.

Gage took the thing he had tucked under his arm back into his left hand and let it hang by his side and I could see it clearly as a big custom hog leg made for his giant mits. It was shocking to me having only at that time seen guns in picture as they had been banned for civilian use.

*note to the reader – a Hog leg in the old era was what was used to refer to a fire arm that was sawed off at both ends and fired a sort of shot dispersal projectile which proved very effective as a close range weapon.

Westwood saw the gun hanging at his side and his mustache twitched into something resembling a nervous smile.

“A sawn off shotgun” He smirked. “I do believe you’re out of rounds my goodfriend.” A certain air of shakey confidence was returning now as his mustache bounced off his fat cheeks and his fat fingers danced and drummed happily on the pearl handle of the small revolver in his hand. “Now why don’t we just come along quietly-“

“Count again” Gage said as he raised the gun and pointed the lead chucker in Westwood’s general direction at which point he and I and McClusky all could see quite clearly it in fact had three barrels.

*Note to the reader weapons such as the shotgun commonly only had two barrels although some had three or even four but were for specialised use.

“Three?” Westwood’s smile fell off his face like dung from a donkey’s ass and he went white and waxy losing all tension, allowing his pipe to fall from his wet lips and onto the dirty floor.

Gage’s face stayed hard and evil and gestured with the huge gun and in an instant Westwood had dropped his gun as if it was hot coal or a venomous snake.

Gage walked slowly back to his seat which lay on its side keeping the gun partially raised although he didn’t have to. Westwood knew as well as anyone a man like him used a gun only to spare his bare hands.

He lifted the table and chair back on it’s legs and dusted the seat of his chair off and sat placing the gun in his lap and sat silently waiting.

Westwood stood silently, forgetting to breath in intervals, holding his breathing and swelling and swallowing and gasping like some snuffling pig looking at a man in a butchers apron.

Gage nodded at him and he took his seat back up and slowly Westwood did the same. Then there was a moment where an eternity of silence passed before someone spoke and of course it was Westwood.

“How did you know I was coming?”

“Didn’t.”

“But the gun, you always eat with it on your lap?”

Gage nodded slightly.

“And what if there’d been four of us, what then, what would you have done?”

“Reloaded.”

“I see” Westwood had put his white face in his hand and was shaking uncontrollably and searching for his pipe forgetting that he dropped it looking down the barrel of the gun. Coming up empty he found a the courage of the damned and sputtered “Dammit, what is it now?”

“You wanted to know.”

“Know what?”

“How I got this face”.

December 12, 2017 3

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Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Where weird shit hits bizarre fans.

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Gage Chapter 12 ‘Passover’

Gage Chapter 6 ‘Leaders of Men’

Gage Chapter 5 ‘One Piece at a Time’

Gage Chapter 3 ‘Colony’

Gage Chapter One: Tupelo

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