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TOTCB Chapter 18 ‘Nobody’s Baby Now’

Bonjourno,

Well here we are with the final chapter of The One That Came Back raw and unedited cos I’m mean like that, if you want the lovely polished edited version you’ll have to sign up to my mailing list to get it winged to your inbox in a lovely digital with a cover and everything that I spent ages on ms paint making haha. I wish I was kidding.

Shit, I spent god knows how much money getting it edited only to give it away now I’m supposed to spend a small fortune on getting someone to do me a cover. I got lucky with the Ladies Close Your Eyes cover, I got someone from my comic book connections (when it was supposed to be a comic) to do it for free with a bit of cajoling and ass kissing.

So ms paint is all you’re getting, hey it’s the content that matters, all that thirty day nanowrimo content that kind of sucks but what do you expect it’s free? Nah it’s good, it’s not my best work to date, it’s rushed, it’s kind of raw, a little cheesy but overall I like it because it’s as close to the real life events as I could get it.

My main aim when writing it was to add an element of the supernatural and an element of mystery while keeping it as grounded and realistic as possible. A little like true detective, keep it gritty and real even a little boring to hit harder when it gets a little crazy.

I don’t really think I got the emotional weight I could have gotten or spent enough time making people like the characters but I wanted almost to treat it like a documentary and just present the characters as they are and you end up liking them or disliking them.

I dunno, I kind of like that, I’ve been watching Battlestar gallactica recently and it’s hard to describe because the characters are really grounded and I find myself not really liking any of them but not hating them either. It’s weird, they just are. I’m not rooting for anyone but I still find it oddly compelling and interesting and I love spaceship cabin asmr noises in the background and the sort of claustrophobic feel. Because it’s basically about the majority of the human race being destroyed by evil robots they created and now they have to live in a nomadic convoy of space ships looking for a new home. I think it’s a great show, not usually a big fan of sci-fi, but it’s sort of so realistic it’s almost like watching a tv show aboard a naval ship a thousand years in the future.

It gives me that hit of starship troopers feels I didn’t get from the animated series. Because I recently read the starship troopers book and it’s written by a guy who spent time in the navy and he just wrote a book imagining a navy in the future with space travel and killer bugs and that’s how it reads. And it’s why I found the book super fucking boring haha.

It’s not a bad book, just nothing really happens in it, it’s just slice of life kind of crap but its only interesting because its a slice of a guy who kills bugs in a mech suit haha. But it just goes to show how perfect Paul Verhoeven was to direct the movie, he added the perfect tone to the movie, just enough campy silliness to make it fun and make the gorey fucked up moments hit harder. Because really there’s no other way it could have been done, it stretches credulity too much to be taken seriously so Verhoeven just took it to it’s natural ridiculous conclusion and it worked really well.
Obviously he was trying to parody a fascist space dictatorship but he just made it look really cool haha.

Updates updates, ok well 3 ring is coming along pretty well actually. I’m finding it really easy to write, just flows really naturally, I’m not sticking strictly to a word limit for the chapters like I usually do, so just letting them fall where they fall because I have a lot of content for this, no shitty word salad filler (I don’t do that).

I originally planned it to be like a sixty issue long comic series so I watched a buttload of kung fu and samurai movies as ‘research’ and I have ideas out of the ass. So I’m just gonna write this first maybe as a novelette and just see where it goes, end it where it feels natural. Maybe I could get it published in a magazine in an episodic format if it’s short and wraps up nicely.

Yeah I was surprised by how well it’s going to the point where I did something pretty clever that was kind of unintentional, but mostly I think it’ll be a fun read, I think I’ll do the next Diana book after this seeing where the wind blows. Maybe I’ll do Cur for nano if I do nano this year. I fucked up and was late last year and just failed by like a day haha.

Getting some good stuff for Cur, still not fully formed, reading more Witcher which I’m enjoying for the most part. It’s fun because it’s basically written almost as a fantasy noir, it’s very stark and gritty and not at all fanciful or verbose, it’s literally like if Richard Stark or Dashell Hammet said “Fuck it, I’m doing wizard shit now” haha.

So it’s right up my alley but there’s no real story to the first book, it’s basically a collection of not really connected vignettes pastiching classic fairy tales like snow white and things like that. So I like it but there’s nothing in it that makes me want to get back into it. I kind of have to force myself to set time aside whereas when you read something like a Richard Stark Parker novel I can’t wait to find a minute just to see what Parker does next because I know it’s going to be fucked up, usually rape and child murder. Actually has he raped anyone? I don’t think so but he definitely killed a kid in one book haha. He is not a nice person.

But that’s one of the reason I love those books, because I spent so long reading noir detective novels to read one from the opposite side of the law was just so refreshing and every book in the series is just consistently good. It’s a lot like Dexter in that respect but a lot more stark and realistic. No dumb jokes about fruit or whatever haha. No I love Dexter but reading the books back, he is kind of a goof haha.

Anyway Jesus, I waffled a lot today.

Shit I need to do some real work. I hope someone out there likes the ending and wants to read it in it’s final form until then you can read the raw copy with the link below and have yourself a peachy day.

See you…

Nobody’s baby now

A week later they had his funeral.

Porter came to watch people. He blended in, that’s what he did on most days. There was no guest list at a funeral and he knew Jack for a split second or two. Maybe he owed Jack a headache he’d pass on to the nearest relative, so he figured that made it sit right, for now atleast. Some of the heat had died down from the Bartlett case.

The imposter supposedly skipped town after he got bailed out by a family friend. Without him to interview the press had run out of blood to squeeze. He was the centre of it all and with him gone it all fell apart. Jack’s death made him the perfect scapegoat. For the fbi at least and any news source that didn’t make the imposter the focus of their stories. For anyone that could see past a desperate conman to the potential murk underneath. They’d seen enough and were willing to pin it on the junkie that killed himself.

So why was Porter still here?

The funeral didn’t go on too long.

It wasn’t overly dramatc, it wasn’t raining, no one cried. The priest said his part and they put him in the ground and threw dirt on him.

They buried him in Holy cross cemetary near Bracken because it was the closest to their house. It was just a field at the side of the road like so many others. But it had some privacy with the surrounding trees and the long chapel barring it from the road. It was a small and private.

When it was over he watched as what remained of his family walked to their cars. They were parked at the bottom of an embankment. A blonde haired kid that looked like Johnny should have looked at his age got in the drivers seat of the Lincoln. Peggy and her husband Brandon helped the mom, Angela into the passenger side. They were ready to set off when Porter worked his way up to them.

Peggy clocked him straight away and her irises shrunk to full stops or the dot at the end of an exclamation point.

“You remember me?”

“I remember you, you’re that detective right? The one who took Johnny for the interview.” She looked curious but cautious and hung on the edge of a car door, half in half out.

“What did your father do to you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did he touch you?”

She scoffed and started to get into the car, Brandon worked his way around the side and balled up a skinny fist. “I don’t have time for this”. She said as she began to sit down.

“I found him, it is him isn’t it? Buried in the backyard of your old house.” He said looking at Brandon shrink as he said it. All the strength drained out of skinny limbs.

Her face got long and her ears seemed to dip, her eyes looking around as if for somewhere to be sick.

“You get the hell out of here!” Brandon screeched coming up on Porter but stopped short to looking at him. Revealing the emptiness of his threat. Expecting Porter to look away or flinch but Porter looked straight back and said nothing. His eyes like steel ball bearings in his head.

“Stop” Peggy sighed.

Brandon stepped back and flopped around the side of the car and got in behind Peggy.

“Two minutes mom” She got out of the car and started to walk up the path flanked by gravetones. He was supposed to follow but he watched her go and then went to find her.

The cemetary wasn’t that big or old. It was just a patch of land in the middle of all that texas nothing. Dolled up to look like a tasteful oasis of trees and restful sleep. She was standing in the back under a large oak tree looking down.

He approached her slow, evidently she did have time for this.

“He was yours, Johnny?”

“I don’t know where you get an idea like that”, she said folding her arms indignant.

“I have my story, you have yours.” He lit a cigarette and waited.

“Let’s hear your story first.” She said cocking her head to the side and plucking the cigarrete from his mouth, taking a slow pull.

“I think he had his fun with you and you got pregnant and Jack found out and killed him for it.” He stood and waited for her anger, when it didn’t come he went on. “Then when Johnny was old enough he found out. Then he found what was buried in the garden, there was a fight and he had an accident.” Porter said checking off boxes in his head. Going back to the pack for another cigarette and lighting it like dejavu. Waiting for his pat on the back.

She got quiet and thought about it for a minute, like she was rearranging things in her head. He expected tears and bittereness and denials. She sat down at the base of the tree and stared up at him, squinting as the sun dipped in the sky.

“You heard that story before or did you come up with that on your own?” She breathed out and cocked her jaw like she was trying to cry or stop from crying. Just taking another long pull from the cigarette she felt entitled to. “He wasn’t a bad man, my daddy. He was just a drunk. He didn’t know better and I wanted a baby so bad.”

Porter walked to a gravestone and sat against it like a teenager cutting class. He started the tap running now, she’d go until she was spent.

“It was my fault. He was drunk. But I couldn’t tell Jack or my momma that” She took a puff from the cigarette and said “You know the rest, or close to it”. She said looking at him through lidded deep set eyes.

“Is that all?” He said flat.

She rubbed her chin with her hand the cigarette dangled from. Her eyes focusing on nothing in particular. They were shakey, getting heavy like clouds about to rain. She looked up and smiled and said “This really bugs you doesn’t it, not knowing?” She took another drag still smiling. Her eyes still shaking. “It kills you not knowing, not being there, not seeing it yourself, having to trust me and every other idiot you ask”. She was mad now but at whom she didn’t know.

He looked at her and smiled back. Focusing on little details, the stain on her collar, the yellowing of her teeth. The pitch of her voice, split ends. Anything to stop him from boiling over and breaking her nose with the flat of his shoe.

“Right now you’re thinking you can hurt me and make me tell you everything but you can’t. You know you can’t, not really and it wont make a difference anyway. I can’t tell you everything because I don’t know I can’t know.” She said it not looking at him. She looked off at the horizon like it was some grand epiphany. She knew she was getting under his skin, she wouldn’t be the first.

She smoked a little more and said “You know the funniest thing about all this.” She stopped to bite her fingernail and take another drago on the cigarrete. “Is that people think we took in a complete stranger to cover up Johnny’s death.” She stopped again to pull the cigarrette in her shaking hand. “-but in all that time, we were the only ones who gave a damn about him.” The water works started slow and built from there. Her voice shaking with cool anger and bitter tears. “When he disappeared it didn’t even make local news, because they knew how he was, we did too. He was like that Bart Simpson kid, always getting in trouble. Terrorizing the neighbhorhood.” She wiped her tears with the edge of her hand, the skin taught and pale. “They thought he’d turn up in a couple of days and the whole thing would have been nothing, but he didn’t”.

“What happened to your father?”

“I don’t need to tell you anything, you know why? Because if you had anything I’d be talk to the cops right now.” She was indignant now, her face wet. “And even that wouldn’t do any good since the only people that really know the truth won’t say a damn thing to anyone about it.” She swallowed, her throat burning, raw. “because one is my momma and the other is buried under our feet.” She stopped and shook her legs, to check they were still there. Her movements were light and fast like a moth under a lamp. “So you’re wasting your time, he took it to his grave and so will Momma.” She smiled but at what he couldn’t say.

“I can tell you one thing, I’m glad of whatever happened to that French piece of shit, you ever find him? That’s what I want to know.” She shook her head and put her hand on her hip and looked like a cartoon character for a second.

“I looked” Porter breathed in, sealing his lips tight.

“What did you find?” She asked wistfull, suddenly not interested in the answer.

“Blood and feathers.” He said.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” She looked up at him scrunching up her brow, her temper fraying.

“Doesn’t it?”

“No it doesn’t, not a god damn bit”. She spat.

“He had a place, Jack. Way out in the boonies, a little trapper shack.” He finished his cigarette and flicked it.

“So? What does it mean to me?” She folded her arms again, getting catty.

“Blood and feathers.”

Peggy grimaced and turned away. She staggered to her feet and began to dust herself off.

“Well if that’s everything, I think I’ll be on my way.”

“Is that good enough for you?” There was a challenge in Porter’s voice but his eyes stayed fixed on the gravestone. As if the challenge was open to all takers.

“It’s enough for me. I can live with not knowing, it’s the only way. But this isn’t about me, and you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think I see that itch you got.” She smiled cockily at the back of his head and hiked her purse up.

She started to walk away and turned her head to watch him as she walked. Shouting back to him “Is it enough for you?”

Porter didn’t turn around to look at her and she just carried on down the path and got in the car and drove away.

April 17, 2018 0

GS2 Chapter 14 ‘What Isn’t Nature’

Not much today, I mean hey all, high energy, yeah!

Err mainly just trying to make sense of Gab and Minds and also trying to get a decent vpn so I can sneak back onto facebook because they must have me ip blocked or something because whenever I make a new account it gets shut down within a day. It’s really fucking annoying, doubly so since minds and gab seem to be giant piles of steaming wank and twitter is just a mess honestly.
Why can’t something be really good and user friendly but also not greedy and crazy and authoritarian? Why does it being really good and useful necessitate it becoming it’s own enemy, this is to the side of it selling our fucking data and all that bullshit. That’s not even surprising it’s to a point now where people don’t even care. I mean people put all their public stuff out their for the world to see anyway.

Anyway that aside, been kind of a crazy week for me, nothing so spectactular as getting going out and getting drunk or binging on game of thrones and chill on netflix. I’ve been doing a polyphasic sleep experiment mainly for my own amusement on the road to becoming the ubermensch I think I am.
It’s basically where you train your body to require less sleep, because apparently if you get like eight hours of sleep only about sixty percent is necessary rem sleep and the rest is just light sleep. It’s like if you leave your phone on charge and it’s fully charged just as it is instead of actively charging.

So I thought it would be cool to have more hours in the day but like a moron I went for a really hard one first, not the hardest one just the one where you have like three hours of solid sleep and then three naps throughout the day. I thought it would be ok but it’s really messing me up but not too bad. I can function but I feel muggy and when I get up after three hours of sleep I’m too tired to do anything but game until I actually eat and do some work.

Not to mention I just can’t fucking do it, I think it’s because I’m still lifting so I tend to sleep straight through my alarms because my body is so fatigued from excercise so I feel like my body is cheating me a little haha. I’m doing my best but that motherfucker won’t hear the alarm haha.

I think I’ll give the every man schedule one more night and then go on the less crazy biphasic model, so from three hours and three twenty minute naps to a solid five hour sleep with one nap. That sounds a lot like what I usually do anyway except without the nap. So that shouldn’t be too hard.

I kind of just wanted to do it for fun as an experiment but now as a viable thing I think five hours is a reasonable way to regiment my sleep and I really don’t need to have that much free time where I’m zonked out gaming.

This is a big thing for me because I’ve been meaning to have a set bed time for myself for a while because I think that’s essential to sleeping well and keeping to a schedule. So this is really helping me with that and it feels like a cool experiment, I dunno why I’m so psyched about not sleeping, fuck my life is boring haha.

The Frenchman smiled, his chubby stubbly face lined with blood and light powder burns, his beanie at a weird angle. He bent down sighing to pick up the head as if to dust it off and put it on a shelf.

“Beautiful girl” He smiled again and took up a pose citing Shakespeare “I hardly knew you Horatio”. He grinned at TJ who seethed silently.

“Who are you?” TJ asked

The Frenchman smiled tossing the head over his shoulder “No one.”

Jimmy lunged out of the corner of the room with his big knife gleaming under a halogen bulb. The Frenchman was too fast. Before he could close the gap, the Frenchman drew the nine from his belt and shot without looking. Blowing out the back of Jimmy’s head.

Jean looked back as Jimmy fell against the concrete garage wall. Sliding down as his motor functions slowly ground away to nothing and he became a soggy husk. “I hate being interrupted”.

BJ’s fight or flight instinct kicked in and for some strange reason the coinflip turned up ‘fight’ this time. Must have been the cramped environment. Could have been the fact the only way out was through the tubby Frenchman shooting people like he was checking ticket stubs.

He leapt from his chosen corner he’d ducked into when he heard the door open. He came out swinging the batlike giant black dildo at the side of the Frenchman’s head. It made a most disconcerting slippery wrinkling creasing noise. The tip of the phallus was wrenched through the air towards it’s chosen target.

The Frenchman caught the meaty black dick in midair. The large black member making a sound like a catcher’s mitt getting fucked by a rhino.

The Frenchman’s face got lined with annoyance as that one obviously hurt more than he was letting on. He snaked his arm around his rounded fupa firing centre mass into the fat blonde neckbeard’s gut.

BJ doubled over in pain and fell flat like a sack of potatoes.

The Frenchman sighed again, holstering the nine and then glancing over to his hand. His eyes narrowed and he dropped the giant floppy black dick like it was covered in aids ridden fire ants. The big floppy cock almost bounced with the sheer weight of the thing. The Frenchman quickly looked at his hand and wiped it disdainfully on his jacket.

“Now where were we?” He turned back to TJ but he was gone.

–

“I didn’t even know she had an on switch.” Jaclyn chirped.

“Oh yeah, of course, just reconnect your laptop and reboot ‘her’, just connect a usb and I’ll run another diagnostic.”

Jaclyn did as she was told and shouted “Ready”.

Mac typed away on his keyboard and said “Ergh, yah, power levels are good, she’s not a hundred percent.” He paused making that sucking popping sound with his mouth. “but she should be good, she took a massive hit to her cpu and it needed a hard reset, most of her systems should be online. I’m gonna reboot now, don’t stand too close to her, she might twist your head off like a toothpaste cap.” He giggled. He started tapping away again and said “And here we go.”

It’s body shook and started to animate like it was a horribly misshapen bouncy castle inflating for some terrified tots birthday party.

“It worked.” Jaclyn said.

The thing lumbered into existence once again sitting up like an erected car seat. Breathing heavily and somewhat laboured it’s breath hot and smelling of battery acid.

It got off the counter with giant gollomphing uneasy steps. It straightened and then slumped into some monstrous relaxed clockwork toy wound down position.

The thing looked around, it’s targeting systems scanning every person in the room. The reboot had caused it re-evaluate it’s situation in the femrierarchy. It’s head swivelled from girl to girl. Jaclyn stood in front of her looking through the curtain of the matted blonde wig they’d glued to her head. The targeting system marked her as ‘minimal threat – disregard’.

It’s one good eye swivelled like a camera’s lens pinpointing and scanning Roch who was leering at it in some weary slight disgust. It began scanning, reading her brain waves and blood pressure, dilation of her eyes and marked her as a ‘Possible threat’. It’s eye moved on to Kat at the window, nervously poking through the venetian blinds between pacing up and down. It scanned the way she was pacing, noted ‘paranoid behavior’, ‘quick to anger’ marking her as a ‘likely threat’.

Then moving on, the red of the scanner probed the walls, picking up on the presence of Juanita in the kitchen. The heat signature and the directional mic built into the unit picked her up in the back pacing back and forth. Muttering to herself in between stuffing her mouth with frozen half cooked baked goods.

It picked up and added captions to her ramblings.

She was looking at herself in front of a mirror in the kitchen stuffing her face. Saying over and over “I’m the real Sunday, she’s an imposter, I’ll get that bitch, I’ll get that skinny cunt.”

The scanner marked her as a ‘mentally unstable’ and a ‘high threat level’.

“Systems look good, she should be ready to move out, any problems, don’t hesitate to call”.

–

The garage wasn’t that big, not too many places he could hide. Just the big atv and a few other piles of car parts and garbage that could serve as cover. “Oh time for hide and go seek nes pa?”

The Frenchman walked around the atv, giving it a wide birth, calling out. “I didn’t want to kill your friends, they left me no choice.” He had the nine ready, rounding the atv fast he popped out and fired at the garage door and thin air. “Ah so you weren’t hiding behind the big car.” Jean was about to go inspect the other corners of the garage, the piles of car parts. There was a large tool cupboard off on the far wall but out of the corner of his eye he saw a glint of something. Then a sharp sensation sent all the hairs on the back of his neck into the upright position.

An eye watching him, a murderous intent building, shapeless, formless. Emptiness ready to swallow anyone that stumbled into it. A liquid metal sword grew from under the atv and tried to touch the Frenchman’s foot. He glided upwards lifting his foot out of reach of the hungry blade.

His foot hopped and came down again and the blade turned like it had eyes and a will of it’s own. It flipped and swooped like a bird swiping back on itself. The Frenchman had no choice but to hop his foot up again to avoid the blade and keep his appendage. But the blade came back in the other direction, swooping like it did before with even more power and speed. A tensile strength only a chronic masturbator could summon from his wrists and forearms in such a tight space.

“Merde!” The Frenchman cursed as he dodged the blade again. This time he was ready and he timed the sweep of the blade and stomped a boot on the metal blade of living grass. It wriggled fruitlessly like a dying snake under his tight boot and then died. “ha”.

He ducked under the atv and fired at the dusty dark hitting nothing but concrete. Bullets plinking up and hitting under the car and against the back wall.

An urgent scrambling noise, the suspension on the atv tested to it’s limit. The Frenchman looked up to see three hundred pounds of neckbeard dropping down on him like a homicidal flying squirrel. He fired a few shots at thin air trying to align on the black mass falling on him but there was no time. TJ pounced on him dropping his entire bulk on the Frenchman, knocking him down on the concrete floor.

The Frenchman was dazed for all of a half second before he put the gun to TJ’s head and pulled the trigger.

And then again and again and again. Each time resulting in a hollowing clicking sound with no bang. The Frenchman groaned and reeled back his hand to swat at TJ’s head with the butt of the nine. Hitting him in the side of the head and kicking his weight to the side.

The frenchman got to his feet groaning, prodding his ribs. Thinking to himself which hurt more, the shotgun blast or a fat neckbeard landing on him. He slipped another clip into the nine and pointed it at TJ as he rose to a knee. His eyes a hollow mess of rage and sorrow not looking at anything, just breathing steadily like a caged animal.

“Hmm” The frenchman said as he looked down at the sword. “I’m feeling sporting.” He said as kicked the sword over to TJ. “Pick it up.”

TJ looked up at him, his eyes burning with something far away and altogether garbled. He picked up the sword and stabbed the blade into the concrete ground using it as a crutch to rise to his feet. There was blood trickling down from the side of his head matting with his dark hair.

“I see you’ve accepted my challenged” Jean smiled as he holstered the nine. “I’ll have some fun with you, I think.” He said as he unsheathed a large tactical tanto, ten inches of cold steel drawn from a kydex sheathe under his jacket. “En Garde”.

–

It was raining now, the sound a bitter metronome drowning out the sound of fires. A distant noise approaching, a feeling of loss and forboding, the sun was rising.

A rain drop landed on Carpenter’s face, his head moved a little.

“Wake up Mr Badman” Laura said, hovering over him. “Wake up or they’ll get you.”

He sighed, inhaled and exhaled like a corpse coming back from the dead. “But… I’m comfortable.”

“Get up!” The little girl said.

He opened his eyes to a grey misty early morning. Bitterly cold and damp, he turned his head and felt fur on him. He got up and putting his hand on something soft and wet, his head felt like it was a plastic bag full of broken drillbits and crushed stained glass. He scanned the area and it seemed like a regular empty town. People would be waking up soon to discover this nightmare unfolding right before their eyes. He looked down at the fluffy soft bed he was lying on. It was the furry rabbit that cushioned his fall, it didn’t turn out so good. It’s head bashed open on a pointy but decorative rock in the police stations stylish rock garden. It’s brains splayed out like some modern art pink dogfood painting. They still looked warm, that was good, he hadn’t been lying like this too long, if the cold got in his joints he was done.

There was that noise again coming in hard over the building flames and the rain, the heavy droning whupping sound.

“They’re early.” He said to himself.

–

TJ glared through the Frenchman through his dark emo hair, clutching the sword in his hands. He breathed in, his eyes closed. He tried to find that cool calm place inside himself but could feel his hands tightening on the wrapping of the sword. His grip just got tighter and tighter until he could almost hear it. It hurt, like his hands would bleed from the rough sharkskin underneath the wrapping. The noise of the squeezing was deafening now and he couldn’t take it, couldn’t find it. He just kept seeing her head flying off and the blood and his mother and everything crashing down around him, did it even matter?

His feet weren’t so ponderous. He lurched forward the tacky running shoes he was wearing gave him a great amount of traction on the concrete floor. He barrled his weight forward bringing the blade down with a terrible speed and power.

The Frenchman smiled and dodged the blade effortlessly. TJ truck at him at again, a side ways upward slash and the Frenchman dodged again. Laughing as he cut TJ with his tanto, a manic sick wet laughter like he was enjoying it. The cut was intentionally shallow, like a scratch from a cat. TJ slashed sideways aiming for his neck but Jean dodged it again. Laughing as if he was in a different room or watching the fight on tv between a clown and a fatboy. The clown throwing custard pies as the fatboy tried to catch his nose.

The way he moved was unnatural, he moved like a blimp, slow enough to see but light, like he had no weight. It wasn’t so much like he dodged the blade, as much as he rode the current of air the blade created like a feather. The blade was had no purchase, he couldn’t be cut.

TJ thrust the blade forwards and it rolled off the strange Frenchman as he turned like a bullfighter. He tripped TJ who crumpled in a piled slamming into the door of the atv his sword bounding off under the car and to the other end of the room.

“Well that was fun while it lasted” Jean said as he kicked TJ in the stomach to turn him over. He squatted down next to him. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to torture you”.

TJ coughed in response.

“I’m not one for psychological torture and I’ve no time for games. You must have seen the man I’m looking for, a homeless man, calling himself ‘Carpenter’ I believe. You’ll tell me where he is or satisfy to me that you do not know, agreed?”

TJ said nothing.

Jean crushed down on TJ’s hand against the concrete floor, slowly applying pressure. But TJ grimaced without sound.

“Oh did you think the torture had started, oh no.” He said as he bent down with his knife and cut TJ’s pinky finger right off and picked it up.

TJ screamed but Jean kept his boot on his hand and his face stayed stolid. His double chins amassing to smile at TJ who squirmed under the boot of this madman.

“What do you say now?” he said waving TJ’s little finger. “If you say ‘I don’t know’, I will believe you, but I will have to take another finger. So, what do you say?” He pointed TJ’s own finger at him and smiled.

TJ’s eyes were ragged with fear, a rabbit in a trap. Tired, old and aging more by the minute. His breathe burning in his chest, heart punching at his ribs, banging on the bars of his rib cage. His hand felt numb, the pain burned at first but now he felt nothing. A weird ringing noise in his ears, the room started spinning. A sudden shot of euphoria came over him. He felt dizzy like he wanted to throw up, double vision and he looked past the Frenchman and said…

“Sunday?”

April 4, 2018 0

TOTCB Chapter 17 ‘Wayward Stranger’

Super quick today, wasted too much time already arguing with spergs about weed today haha. But seriously if you want to see some spergy shit tell a stoner that weed is degenerate and see that motherfucker flip out so hard haha.

Ok so still working through the proofread of this beauty and if projections are correct and I don’t get side tracked into some shitposting flame war it should be up and ready for circulation some time next week, shooting for the first tuesday of the month but I’m already walking that back in my head maybe opting for another proofread.

I dunno, anyway as you know free copies for emails, that’s how this works my dudes and as always you can check out the rest of it unedited and raw on inkitt where I keep all my raw and rough work.

TOTCB

The house on J street was only twenty minutes from the rehab clinic, it was handy. Every thing seemed to be twenty minutes away in this town. He had some time before nightfall, that was when things would get interesting. He lit a cigarette and sat low down in the dodge.

J street was a loose string of flop houses kept standing with popsicle sticks and spackle. A glorified trailer park without the charm. Lots of empty cars and grey sky to look at as the red light on the end of his cigarette got closer. There had to be more cars per square foot than people, it was a regular grave yard. The dodge didn’t look too out of place, a pick up rarely did in any part of texas. He could be a contractor on a job or an honest crook taking a break from lifting copper wire. Either way no one would likely turn a pickled eye in his direction, cop nor crook alike.

He sat watching the house in his side mirror as he was likely to do. He had to assume Jack had seen his face, the amount of time he spent watching them. Someone had followed him to the meet with Mickey and the list of interested parties was limited. He had to think there was a reason not to kill him or there was just no reason. Maybe Jack thought someone might care if Porter Carraway PI turned up dead. And maybe someone would. But he had to know no one would care about Mickey getting some attic space in his head. Just going round in circles, none of it mattered now.

The house he was watching was a single storey yellow wood building with no garage. A small yard that pincered a concrete driveway and a metal wire fence around the sides. There was an ash tree off to the right and a yellow mustang parked around the right side in the shade on the grassy lot. In front of the tree there was a lot of garbage and debris that spilled out into the street. Broken furniture and cinder blocks with a sign behind it that read ‘No dumping’.

There were four windows in the front. The blinds drawn tight but two had lights on that must have been on throughout the day. They were on and he didn’t remember them switching while he kept watch. Working his way through his pack of cigarettes. The two windows on the left that had lights on had to be for the living room right at the front. The side on the right was probably the kitchen and the bedrooms were in back. The front door was a no go, it was locked and had a metal screen on it, standard for this neighbourhood. He might be able to jimmy it but it would make too much noise. Only then to be greeted by whomever was waiting for him in that living room.

There was a large gap between the house and the building neighbouring on the right. It looked like an abandoned chapel. A long building stretching back from the road covered in sheet metal. Probably to keep out copper thieves away.

The house on the left looked empty too. There were cars parked out front but were likely parked there because no one would complain. He hadn’t seen much activity, no lights, no coming and going. It was a small blue house with wild agave plants growing in the front yard. A tiny plastic kids swingset and slide and a medium sized green plastic lawn table with two chairs.

It got dark quick there and when it got dark on J street it meant it. There wasn’t a street light for a good quarter mile and none of the houses had working flood lights. A dull glow from the shaded lights inside, shadows flicking back and forth. Curtains creeping back and forth, furtive glances felt but unseen.

It was about time. He fell out of the dodge, quick and quiet, shutting the door without a sound. He crept around the truck ducking from car to car in the street, hopping them closer to the house.

He circled around to the left and traced around to the left of the blue house. He walked quick tracing the fence, passing the kids swing set that now looked like a tetnis trap. Around the left side of the house, the windows were dark and it looked like they boarded from the inside. He slipped around the back, the yard was empty and it looked like someone had been digging, the dirt was fresh. There was only a three foot fence separating the back yard of the blue house and the yellow house. Porter hopped it giving out a slight tinkling sound that reverberated down the line. Could have been the wind if there was any wind but there wasn’t. The night was still as a picture in a frame, the air hung cold and dank. There was a lot of moisture in the air and he felt like he could feel all the molecules and none would shake. Time was frozen and he was the only one awake.

The backyard of the yellow house was bare but for a few tipped over lawn chairs and old beer cans. There was a small back porch which lead into the kitchen. Porter circled around the right side, sticking as close as he could to walls of the house. The car was where it had been sitting for a few hours. The old yellow mustang was definitely the same one he’d seen Jack driving. There was nothing that interesting he could make out inside without a torch. Looked like the regular fast food debris and stuff like that and a gun on the backseat. He tried the handle and it was unlocked, the door creaked open but the light didn’t come on. He palmed the gun, it was heavy but he couldn’t make it out in the dark dimtime. It felt like a 45. It was long and squared away with smooth edges, the handle was wood and smelled of oil and smoke. He tucked it in the back of his pants and closed the car back up quiet.

Satisfied he was in the right place he crossed over back into the yard and to the back door. Taking great care as he mounted the back porch. Listening for creaks and voices of the people inside. As he got closer he could hear talking. But it was the static rehearsed talking of a loud television left on in the background. He could hear the pauses and the clicking of teeth and tongues.

The back door was open but for the screen. The door frame was thin as fire wood and he popped it open with a shrug and stepped into the dark kitchen. It was cold and lit only by a warm light coming from the living room where the tv was on.

The kitchen was small and tucked away, boxed in by an adjacent bathroom or bedroom or both. It was rectangular with linoleum floors and unpainted wood cabinets high and low. A fridge next to the door and a washer dryer in the far corner. It was a mess even in the dark. He could smell the plates rotting in the sink. Hear the bugs crawling through the damp under the cabinets. Surged on by a constant drumbeat of a leaking tap.

There was an alcove that lead into the lounge through a little sitting dining area. He walked light footed through the alcove, past a small table and chair under a broken lamp and into the lounge. It was warm and smelled of smoke and other things. Burning plastic. The lounge came from the dining area and snaked around the front. The front door to the left of a big bevelled television sitting on top of four cinder blocks. There was some kind of movie on, one of those late night movies you watch when you can’t get to sleep. You sleep and wake up and it’s there waiting for you.

The lounge was a mess, clothes tossed all over the place, more fast food garbage and beer cans. The walls had dark brown stains on them he could only see when the movie got bright. There was writing too but he couldn’t make it out, cabinets off to the right with weird taxidermy animals in them. Looked like rodents, and a few birds in there. The whole cabinet stank of fermaldehyde and had little bones in it, rat skulls. Something a little bigger a cat skull maybe, it’s good to have a hobby.

Scanning from left to right there was no one there, he could see the back of a coach bathed in dry tv light and not much else. He rounded the coach in front of the tv and saw there was a door that must have lead to the bedrooms. He pulled the gun out of the back his pants and shook it a little to get used to the weight. In the light of the tv he could see it was an iver Johnson Trojan standard .45 auto, a nice gun if you could afford it. He held his hand out for a moment like he forgot why he drew it in the first place, he let it drop to his side.

A small thin hand wrapped it’s skinny fingers around his wrists soft. He was looking down at his right into the sunken eyes of brunette who looked half there. Lying almost flat prone across the dirty old coach covered in what looked like a white painters tarp. She lay on her front and could barely summon the strength to lift her head. She looked like she recognised him. Something that was definitely a bad habit because she was a stranger to him.

She was naked lying on her front. He could see her ribs and her ass looked like a flat piece of flank steak. Dirty dark hair sticking to the sweat on her back.

His eyes peeled up and there was something scratched into the walls above the coach. A crude cave painting etched into the chincy wallpaper. It looked like a woman with wild red hair but the face of a bull with a ring through it’s nose. A set of big tits at the bottom and the rest of the body faded behind the coach.

He stepped away from the coach and her hand fell limp on the floor as she drifted out of consciousness again. He checked the clip, seven bullets and one in the chamber made eight. He walked out of the living room into a dark hallway which connected the bathroom and the bedroom. The bathroom door on the right was shut, it had a little window over the top of the door, so he knew the light was off inside. On the left the bedroom door was ajar and had a weak thread of light bleeding out.

He lined up the Trojan and tiptoed towards the door. There was only the sound of the tv from the other room and a building crescendo of crickets outside. He got to the door and there was a familiar smell, acrid, strong and getting stronger. The hairs on the back of his neck rose and his guts did a little dance. He poked the door open with the barrel of the Trojan and nosed it through like a dog under the covers.

It was anti-climatic, he knew it already but he liked surprises, liked lying to himself too much. The butterflies in his stomach were there because he put them there. As soon as he got to the door he knew the truth already but it was too disappointing to put into words. Lying there sprawled on the double bed, a mess of dirty sheets was Jack lying on his back with a needle in his arm. Eyes wide open looking pleased with himself as he stared unblinking at the ceiling fan.

His skin was waxy and pale, eyes glazed over, vomit on his shirt and on the pillow, an overdose for sure. Porter sighed and holstered the gun in the back of his pants and started to push deeper into the room. He must have been dead the whole time he was waiting or the smell was on account of him emptying his bowel. Either way Porter wasn’t that interested in learning the specifics. Or sticking around too long. A cursery glance of the room didn’t turn up any suicide notes. No journals written in red pen with the title ‘I did it’ on the front. But the sawn off mossberg shotgun under the bed said something. It smelled like it’d been fired recently. The calibre ammo accompanying it seemed to fit the size of the hole in Mickey’s head, as they say, if the shoe fits.

Suicide, that was stupid, this was like the rest of this mess, that’s all it was. He wanted this to be big and complicated but it wasn’t, it was a big mistake, the whole thing.

There wasn’t much else to the room, a double bed benal paintings on the wall. Clothes strewn about, drug paraphernalia. A couple of side tables with full ash trays.

He stepped back and took a mental picture of dismay. A snapshot of purest self-destruction. Then ducked back into the hallway where the air was a little more fresh. The girl was still there but she’d shifted onto her side with her other arm still trailing along the floor. He skin was so white he stopped to check whether he had two corpses for the price of one. He put his hand in front of her mouth and he could feel her breath, it was weak and probably smelled bad but it was there.

He thought about asking her questions but small of her back was in no mood to talk. He got himself off and away from that coach and started walking.

“Are you looking for that kid that was here?”

Porter turned to the coach, she hadn’t moved, maybe she couldn’t but there was no one else.

“Are you his father?” She said into the coach cushions.

“Where is he?”

“They came here together and then they went out and then he came back alone” She hummed. Her voice had a dreamy faraway quality as if she were talking to herself.

Porter was convinced he was talking to a ghost now and he liked his ghosts to get right to the point. “Where did they go?”

“J has a shack, he goes there when he’s hiding from someone, it’s a dirt road off interstate 33 near his old house.” She said dryly, no hint of inflection in her voice, she spoke as if reading a script written on a coach cushion.

“Thanks”

Porter started to walk off again when she asked “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

“He did it to himself.”

That seemed to fit and she stopped talking like she ran out of quarters and Porter saw that as his time to exit.

He went out the way he came, cutting around back, out the kitchen and into the back yard. He took the Trojan out of the back of his pants, wiped it with the cuff of his jacket and tossed it over by the chapel. He snaked around Jack’s car working his way back to the dodge. Starting it up without putting his lights on and pulled out into the night.

March 28, 2018 0

GS2 Chapter 13 ‘Le Samourai’

Hola senors and senorita, what’s a lack of accent marks between pals huh?

Facebook ban lifted and I’m ready to spam like a motherfucker haha.

Back to that crazy trolling shit I do until I get banned for another fucking misplaced spongebob meme, oh holy jeebus save us from the offensive spongebob maymays.

Ok so down to business, so what have I been up to, not much, case close. Err been trying to write this lovecraft story but the plan I have was written by my past self and it’s not as structured as my present self would like so I’m spending more time just staring at it than I am actually writing which is good or bad depending on who you ask. I kinda feel like I’m in a rut again or I’m just so confident about Diana being a success I just can’t focus on anything else.

I so want that to be it I can’t help putting all my eggs in that basket even though I know I shouldn’t. I just feel like the time is right, I need this to be it, I need it to be now because of where I want my life to be heading. I need the success and I need the money to be with the people that mean the most to me, to be where I belong and not just have to keep visiting like a stranger.

But all I’m going to be doing today is doing a thorough read through and then cleaning up The One That Came Back to give away to you wonderful people that put up with my bullshit. I just want to get it in the best state possible, so I’m going through it with a fine tooth comb for the edits and then I’m going to probably go over it again just to be sure and then I’ll send it out I think at the beginning of next month.

I have nothing more to say, peace out my dudes.

As always you can check out the other chapters of this story and all my others on inkitt.

GS2

“Omfg, I’m so sick of waiting around here!” Kat said to no one in particular pacing up and down the storefront.

“We’ve been here like an hour”. Roch said, perched on the end of a booth seat in her own little corner of the store.

“Well it feels like forever”

“Why don’t you do like Nita and eat some fucking donuts and sit down.”

“I-don’t-do-carbs” Kat said getting in Roch’s face again. Roch just seethed quietly and turned her head.

“Do we really have to wait here three days?”

“Well we wouldn’t have to if Nita didn’t kick up that stink with that asshole in the army navy store.” Roch said.

“It’s not my fault I’m gorgeous, I didn’t asked to be harassed, I didn’t ask to be born a woman.” She called from the kitchen.

Juanita was in back again eating frozen donuts rather loudly in earshot.

“We’ve got no choice, if we go out there with nothing but our pussies in our hands we’ll be torn apart by flesh hungry monsters”. Roch said.

Kat went to the window and peered out through the closed venetian blinds and said “I don’t see anything”.

“That’s because it’s not set to start until tomorrow morning around sunrise.”

“This is so fucking stupid.” She said as she snapped her fingers away from the venetian blinds and started to pace again. “Only a fucking old white guy could come up with some fucked up shit like this!”

“Yeah that’s why we’re here, trying to stop it, right?” Roch said.

She frowned, “Y’all white people wanna kill eachother with the fucking living dead why do I care?”

“Then why are you here?” Roch said.

“I’m starting to wonder that myself” She said as she started to pace up and down again.

“Can you like stop fucking pacing, you’re driving me crazy!” Roch shouted.

“Don’t you micro-agress against me” Juanita said from the kitchen.

“What?”

“You can’t say ‘crazy’, you know I’ve got ptsd, it’s ableist to stigmatise the mentally ill.”

“She has ptsd?” Kat whispered.

Roch rolled her eyes and said “From people calling her fat on twitter”.

“Have you been to a doctor?” Kat called out.

“I’m self diagnosed, I don’t need a doctor to tell me I have ptsd, I know my own body better than any doctor.”

“O-k then.”

Jaclyn was half asleep leaning on restaurant table in front of her laptop. Sliding off from time to time and waking herself up and then going back to sleep again.

Her laptop was open and another call came through marked as ‘Urgent’. She wiped drool off her face and almost fell off her seat trying to answer the call.

She clicked it on and said “Hell-“ But was knocked right off by Juanita barrelling back into her seat.

“Hey Maccy sweety, what it do?”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

The manlet with the hipster haircut, cleared his throat and said “I’ve got some urgent news non-gender conforming people like entities.” He cleared his throat and went on. “I’ve got some disturbing chatter from my guy on the inside.”

“What is it?” Jaclyn said trying to get in shot, quickly bounced out again by Juanita’s girth.

He made that sucking tutting noise for effect and said “I think they’re onto us.”

“What do you mean, are they coming for us?”

“Eergh, in a way.” Ergh in a way.

“What are you talking about” Roch interrupted, leaning over Janita to be in shot of the webcam. Juanita put her chubby hand on her face and pushed her back after an uncomfortable struggle with lots of fishhooking.

“Yeah what dya mean, are we in danger?” She said as she flicked a quaff of green hair out of her fat face.

“No, well, maybe.” He made that sucking noise again as a full stop.

“Spit it out already” Kat said over Juanita’s shoulder.

“Well, they’ve upped their time frame.”

“What?”

“Well I didn’t think this was even a possibility.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“They’re making the drop in a couple of hours, the three day time frame is bust.” He made a noise in his throat and said “They’re rushing the end game.”

“How could they know we’re here, we were so careful to cover our signal. We bounced it around all over, the money we paid to get in was crowdfunded, there was no way it could be tied back to you.” Jaclyn shouted from off screen.

“I don’t know, my guy couldn’t tell me anymore.” He paused again and swallowed. “Ergh but it doesn’t change the plan, it just excelerates it by two days. They couldn’t have changed the drop locations on such short notice. You have all the intel you need, just be in the right place at the right time and you should be golden.”

“Hey you see, you don’t need to wait around anymore” Roch said in the background to Kat.

“Great and twisted abortions of science are gonna rain down from the sky.” She replied sarcastically.

“Since when were you anti-abortion” Roch responded.

“Fuck you.”

He coughed and Juanita was about to say something and he cut back “What about the prototype?”

“We shocked it and reattached the head but it didn’t seem to work, it probably needs more time.” Jaclyn elbow said meekly in the corner of the screen. Juanita scoffed and vacated her seat and Jaclyn sat back down in full view of the webcam.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Mac said.

“Actually no” She said ditzilly.

–

“I can’t.” TJ’s voice rattled in his throat, a wet sucking feeling down deep in his esophagus.

She looked up at him, her eyes hollow, her skin looked cold and damp like a corpse and her face was tired. The look of an old nag with a broken hoof preying for a quick death from a merciful shot from a kindly gun.

She couldn’t talk anymore, her lips were frozen, her tongue growing fat in her mouth, her head spinning. She hung it forward like she couldn’t bear the weight of it anymore. Revealing to TJ; her kaishaku, a perfect strip of white flesh at the back of her neck. A smell hit TJ, that beautiful fresh earthy smell, now it smelled like a little damp got in, a little rot.

No, this had to be a dream, a dream within a dream. A sick fantasy from a tight fisted lonely jacker, Japanese love pillow fucker. This couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be her neck calling out for the flash of a naked blade. ‘Lift my burden TJ’, the neck said.

Seemingly an eternity had passed and Jimmy hated eternities so he wound up to bat shrieking “Fuck it! I’ll do it if your bitch ass aint man enou-“.

A lighting bolt hit the room, a white hot flash of cold steel making every ear ring. Jimmy stood frozen, a victim of a paparazzi bulb, the harsh gaze of a cameras eye, a deer in headlights. His eyes sewn together by the point of an elegant blade poking it’s nose between them.

The point of the blade close enough to pick the hairs off Jimmy’s eyebrows. TJ stood, tall, not looking in Jimmy’s direction, the long arm of the blade in his one hand, straight and tight and lean pointing right between Jimmy’s eyes.

“Ok, ok” Jimmy said as he backed off.

He took the sword in both hands and closed his eyes and when he did he could hear them. The things on the outside and the slow building flames like rushing waves of a hungry ocean.

He took a deep breath in and he tried to find her there, try to find her alive and well. A smile maybe, a laugh, something he could hold onto but there was nothing, just pure cool emptiness.

–

A little girl’s laugh floated on cooling corpses in a long hallway on the second floor of the cop shop.

A thin hand with dirty nails snatched a back up boot knife out of a kydex sheathe on one of the dead cops. Disappearing it up the sleeve of an old green army jacket like a magic trick. He padded the corpse down and found a spyderco edc folder, an old endura two possibly, full serrated edge. He pocketed it.

There was glass on the floor. But he already found a set of boots that fit since there was an ample selection of boots just lying around. Some filled with blood, others not.

Carpenter picked out a nice long shard of glass and wrapped shreds of a curtain around it to make a handle. Wrapping it around the shard and his own hand to make a tight reverse grip, feeling like he grew a ragged claw, a dirty serrated iceaxe.

“He went this way” The little girl whispered.

It was quieter now, a graveyard waiting quiet, like the eye of a tornado, chaos waiting for it’s turn in some cosmic jrpg. He rounded a corner and saw a heavy metal door open ajar. The word ‘Morgue’ written on the sign outside. It creaked open a little, being coy but he’d seen that shit before and the darkness coiled behind it could tell.

“I see you” He said.

A burst of white, the thing crashed through the heavy door launching at Carpenter like a quarterback with a firework covered in hot sauce up his ass. It was on him, numb jaws snapping behind a fabric mask. A giant white rabbit took Carpenter clear of his feet and was humping him feverishly with no bite, no claws, no teeth. All encased in soft cuddly fur, turning this mauling into little more than the exuberant greeting from a cuddly toy.

He smiled pushing its soft flailing limbs away from his face and burying the shard of glass deep in it’s big padded eye. Snapping it off a few inches in he felt scraping bone but no joy. He flipped it’s limp frame off of him.

He got to his feet and delivered a satisfying kick to its plush underbelly. The white rabbit moaned, almost human and started to crawl to the window at the end of the hall. Carpenter looked out the window, and back at the white rabbit as it limped down the hall.

“What, you lose your nerve?”

Fast fumbled padded steps, the rushing and scraping of hungry fur, before he knew it he was neck deep in the shit. They were all over him, a tucan’s soft beak pecking at him. Soft claws and paws padding him all over, plush jaws biting with no purchase. It was kind of funny, kind of disorientating, hard to believe even in some stoners wet dream. It took him a few seconds to even capture what was happening but by then it was too late, they were on him. A fat elephant, a muscular tiger, cartoon plush humanoid animals crushing him. Piling on top of him cutting off his air, his vision covered in fur, felt like he was drowning in it, buried in it. Six feet under and some god with a sick sense of humour was tossing shovels full of furbies on top of him.

It was hot, there was no air, just paws and huge cartoony eyes and fake multi-coloured hipster haircuts. A nazi werewolf trying to skull fuck him. His muscles slackening in sure disbelief, surrendering to the grave in pure irony. To die like this was too hilarious to turn down. His eyes rolling back in his head, lids getting heavier. The muscles in his ribs getting weak, lungs wanted to collapse, why not let them, give them a rest, they deserve it.

“Follow the white rabbit” Laura’s voice said.

A bolt of lighting shot through his muscles. The waking pistons of a train engine pounding hot and heavy. An opening in the fur calling him out, he saw that fucking white furry bastard at the end of the hall in front of the window.

Before he knew it, carried by angels wings and devils’s farts he was slipping the furry rainbow noose. Their grips had no nails, their jaws of death had no teeth, death’s scythe was a toy that couldn’t cut a microwaved banana. He was swimming through fur, slick with sweat and grease and blood, sucking it in. Slipping through a crack in space and time, lunging like a dog chasing a car at the white rabbit shape in front of him. A white hot headlight of a subway train car rushing at him, hearing only the blood in his ears rushing. Telling him to strike and to fly and to kill and to cut.

He lunged through that fucking rabbit both flying through that second story window. Glass popping out floating like little snowflakes, some song playing. A little Christmassy in the distance and he was gone like saint nick.

–

A snipping of a stem, a green rose falling softly on a concrete floor. TJ, the gardener frozen in a state of morbid elation, synapses firing all over his body. His blood rushing to all points charged, electrified, his heart pumping he was sure was audible to the whole room.

It wasn’t like he imagined it, her head flew off and rolled across the floor. Her body fell limp a little blood and a strange liquid leaking out of the hole in her neck.

The head kept rolling until it was stopped by a boot gently pressing down on her porcelain cheek.

The Frenchman closed the garage door behind him and said “Am I interrupting something?”

March 21, 2018 0

TOTCB Chapter 16 ‘Well of Misery’

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

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

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

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

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

That be all.

Bye now.

TOTCB inkitt link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Err… ahem, excuse me”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little too much information but that was fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is this?” Nulidad said.

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

“What do you want?”

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

“Why would you do this for me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 15, 2018 0

Diana After Dark – Chapter 10 ‘I call him D’

Gonna keep this real short and sweet today, I woke up feeling like amy schumer fell on me. It must just be a mix of pushing myself really hard with the weight lifting and maybe too much staring at screens or not drinking enough. But I don’t see how it could not be not drinking enough because I literally drank three whole litres of green tea yesterday, don’t ask me how I know that but I did.

So yeah I feel like the inside of amy schumer’s toilet bowl today. Maybe not that bad, maybe the rim of of her biddy. Which is worse, I don’t know. Too shitty feeling for jokes, I just want to retire to the dark with my protein shake and silence.

But I bring updates, I was supposed to be writing but I had no idea what, got talking to another south african lovecraft fan recently and I really should get back to writing that but I felt a real urgency to keep the Diana train rolling because I think she has a real shot.

So instead of writing lovecraftian stuff I decided to do the pitch doc and query letter drafts for Diana After Dark. A lot more effort went into this and I’m pretty pleased with it and the blurb I think is probably the best I’ve ever done. You be the judge, I’ll leave it below for your viewing pleasure.

That’s pretty much it, I went over the editing Chrissy did up to now and I’ll wait for her to get enough done so I can make a complete pitch and then start sending it out to agents, see if I can’t get this thing off the ground. Although I think even if this book doesn’t get me attention from an agent I might just do another one and try to get that picked up as a series because I have some really good ideas for a second and third and even a fourth instalment.

That’s about it,

See you…

Diana Harrison is the girl next door but be thankful she doesn’t live next door to you.

Under her shy pretty girl exterior lives something a lot darker.

On the surface Diana is a happy go lucky senior at university high California. smart, funny and will laugh at all your bad jokes. She has a strapping boyfriend and a terrific grade point average. she seemed to have everything going for her. But her bold future is tested by a dark fascination with serial killers that borders on obsession.

Although some might find that strange and may not want to invite to their house party or to the prom she manages to keep her desires a secret.

However, when a real killer moves to town her inner and outer worlds begin to collide. A series of strange dreams and some haphazard internet snooping has landed Ditzy Diana in between the sights of the real thing and now she has no choice but to ‘come and see’…

Cutting out a lot of walking through bland bleached white halls. Not too dissimilar from the inside of a hospital complete with the smell of death and cleaning products. Here I was waiting in an ‘interview room’. It was sort of a bland egg shelled colour and it smelled vaguely of crayons.

It was just a square room that could have been an empty storage closet but for the table and chairs. There was no long two way mirror, just a camera, I was sure was on. But they would see nothing of interest, no tell or wink or talking to myself. I was without guilt of any kind, incapable of feeling it in fact and as far as I knew actually innocent of any crime larger than an overdue library book. My fantasies aside I was a pretty solid citizen, on paper. That was as far as I knew. Two or probably thirty minutes from now a detective could walk in here with a video of me robbing a jewellery store wearing the barmaids head as a hat.

I’m sure I’d look quite surprised, then again maybe not. I had dwelled on the possibility that the dark back seat driver might have been taking me around for a spin in the wee hours of the night. Slipping his driving gloves on and sidling over into the front seat while I was away with the faeries. But it seemed fanciful even for me. Although it would explain why I feel so rundown recently, I could just be getting my period.

I was about to delve deeper into another dark daydream when the seal on the door behind me was broken. I turned awkwardly to watch detective Cartwell saunter in looking down at a bland manila folder as if I hadn’t been waiting at least an hour at this point. Sipping a hot cup of coffee probably one of many. Our tax dollars at work.

There was something I liked about this place though. There was something beautifully impersonal about everything I saw. Men and women in and out of uniform shuffling about in a trance pretending they belonged, all separated out in little cubicles and cubies. The smell of justice a dank bitter smell like burnt coffee and cigarette butts. People brought together working towards something that could never truly be but was worth their time anyway. Like a maid constantly making a bed for others to sleep in only to have to make it again the next day. Making order from so much chaos, what a daunting task, I liked it.

He looked up at me like he didn’t expect me to be in here causing deep creases to form on his smooth chocolatey forehead. He then proceeded to slap the folder on the table as if it had pictures of the Kennedy assassination from an until now unseen new angle. My money was on Jackie this time around. Maybe it was the butler with the candle stick.

He took a sip of his coffee, waiting to say something, this whole thing I guess was to soften me up, let me stew, all protocol I was sure.

I could have said something, that was sort of the point of me being here. But I felt it impertinent to be the first one to talk in this situation, surely that would break some sort of criminal code. At least let the cop ask a question before you spill the beans entirely.

So I sat, adjusted myself in my seat a little bit and looked at him as he continued to look down and sip his coffee. I cleared my throat quietly, readying myself.

“Do you know why you’re here” He asked some, I was assuming, very guilty looking coffee granules at the bottom of his cup.

“Err” Eloquent as always. “Something to do with the heads in the lockers?” I asked myself, the words tiptoeing out playfully. The heads seemed like a distant memory now, a memento from a special day I never got to keep, I didn’t even keep the ball. Maybe I could still get it out of the trash.

He made a face at his coffee like he got all the way to the bottom only to discover the body of a fly in a set of tiny Bermuda shorts.

He looked up at me with half lidded eyes and made a sucking noise with his teeth before setting the empty cup down. The sound of the empty cup touching down on the table echoing went right through me. We had so much in common.

He then readjusted himself in his seat and made a sighing noise like he was about to open some grand grimoire of Diana’s mistakes past and present. A catalogue of all my thought crimes recorded for all to see. Probably even had my tween fascination with Justin Bieber and Edward from twilight in there too. That would have been truly incriminating. Especially if he found my adolescent fan fic shipping the two. My mind was wondering trying to distract from the dark hissing noise. A black punctured tire whispering to me in that mock reflection of my own inner voice.

A quiet siren ripping through the dark foggy depths of the ghost town called Diana.

He opened the file and split his lips as he looked at me, flipping a Photostat copy of a picture over in my direction.

In it; a blurry night still from a security camera, the vague outline of a hummer pulling out into the night.

“That picture was taken from a gas station security camera of a car fleeing the scene of the latest Headsman murder.” I don’t know what was more shocking, the picture or the fact not even the police could decide on a definitive name for him, Head-hunter, headsman, pick one.

I looked up at him and gave him my best teenage ‘so what’ face. Trying both not to look completely blindsided and also trying not to open my eyes wide enough for him to see that there was nothing behind them. Too much emotion, and too little would both be mistakes, what a tight rope I walk, how I envied Manson. He’d just make a funny face and say something vaguely intelligible.

“I- err” Great work Diana, you’ve got him eating out of the palm of your hand.

“Now what would be the chances that you would be the one to find those heads.” He sat back in his chair laying out some figurative diorama of events with his hands on the table separating us. “And only a day later photographed leaving the scene of another murder in your boyfriends car- and that is your boyfriends car isn’t it?” The question was mute, devoid of any inclination of doubt. He slid a few more pictures across the desk, these ones were less blurry. Different angles of the car even a nice shot from the front, my ghostly white face projecting through the tinted glass windshield. So alien looking, that whole night slid past me, I didn’t remember any of the drive back, just got filed away, burnt in a fire. He could show me cell phone footage of me drinking someone’s blood and flying away on a broomstick next and I would have shrugged. My heart was pounding now, jumping up and down. I could feel something rising, but it was slow and pleasant like the steady beat of Wagner through paper thin apartment walls.

Termites crawling through drywall, making a steady humming sound of tiny feet.

“You want me to believe this is a coincidence?”

That would be helpful. But neither of us were that dumb. I started to feel small and put upon like I was sitting in the principal’s office and I was about to be ambushed by my parents. Who would inevitably take the side of law and order and all things good and abandon poor Desecrated Diana.

I didn’t say anything, they can’t give you the electric chair if all you do is nod and drool. Was there a precedent for that?

“That’s you on those tapes.” He said it defiantly almost as a question. But there was something in his voice and the way he pointed and moved his head. Pointing at an imaginary VCR that made me think he didn’t really want to believe it. He didn’t want evil to be this cute. Something about that really troubled him.

I shrunk a little more away from him into my own little world.

He readjusted and sighed making some exaggerated face wiping gesture with both hands. As if he’d been the one waiting in here all this time to be accused of multiple murder that you probably didn’t actually do. “Look-

I don’t think a teenage girl is capable of all- that.” He said now with an air of divine leniency, a saint ready to let the sinner have a quick and merciful death instead of a long awkward one sitting atop a dull pike lathered in goose fat. “But I think you know something, I think it could even be someone at your school- your boyfriend maybe?” He nodded at me he was fishing now, the fight he had a moment ago, the hot spark of discovery was gone. He must have thought I would throw up or burst into tears when I saw the photos, not stare blankly at them hiding the rising tide of- something.

An air of almost perfectly crafted indifference. “I was just-“ Yes? “My boyfriend was taking me for a driving lesson” Weak Diana, that is terrible.

“At two O’clock in the morning, through central city?” He scoffed.

Oh Jesus, I was better off as the strong silent type, I should have asked for a lawyer, no that would have made me look ten times guiltier, don’t you watch TV?

Just as the silence between us had elongated to an incredibly unpleasant cacophony. The door opened again with the sound of Tupperware popping and the head of a tiny red-haired woman poked around it.

“Cartwell, captain Hughes wants to see you in his office”.

“I’m in the middle of an interrogation”

I thought this was the ‘interview room’ that’s false advertising!

“He says it can’t wait” The woman said.

He got up without saying another word, just a gasp or another sigh and a quick searching glance in my eyes, he’d find nothing and that’s what scared me the most. An odd expression crossed his face like he’d suddenly realised he’d been talking to a Burmese python this entire time. And I was just waiting for him to lie down and stop wriggling so I could unhinge my jaw and fit him footways into my mouth.

“Excuse me for a minute” He said before awkwardly angling himself around the desk, almost like he was trying to jump over it.

“Err” I said.

I waited for another ten or twenty minutes, trying not to look up at the camera or blurt out anything incriminating. Now that I thought about it I couldn’t even muster a confession. All the events leading up to this point were so disjointed. Despite actually being there, I doubted I could relay it in any particular order that made any sense. Not without needing to talk to a priest first.

I sighed, saddened by the fact even if he did rake me over the coals for hours and break me I wouldn’t even make enough sense to muster an insanity defence. Despite the fact I technically didn’t do anything but I had nothing really to bargain with either, no names to give no hard evidence. It crossed my mind to throw them Wendy like some sad tired over made up life preserver. Then remembering I still didn’t have any of that evidence they loved so much. It would just be a pathetic witch hunt spurred by a false confession based on ‘women’s intuition’.

Just as I was starting to feel sorry for myself and think of ways I could maybe accessorize or dye my hair in a toilet to go with an orange jump suit. Cartwell came bounding in looking a little flustered. He looked stolid, hiding a streak of glacial anger, like he’d received a swirly for good behaviour and was now looking to take it out on someone small and cute.

He stood aside from the door and made a flat dull donkey-like face. “You’re free to go”

“Err, whu-?” Kill me now.

“Word from on high is you’re a state case, I can’t touch you” He said it like I was covered in bugs or something to that effect.

A shard of glass came off my back and I felt a distinct shiver, what did that mean? Was I supposed to know? Was it the FBI? I just did a little harmless amateur hacking I swear, it’s not like I back doored the pentagon.

He cocked his head to the side motioning to the door and I got up awkwardly picking my heart up off the floor. Bundling out of the opening brushing past him as he held it open.

Something like a restrained growl coming from inside. A hushed pained yelping from a wounded dog was there something sharing space inside the good detective? Probably not, not everyone is a nutty serial killer Diana, get over yourself already.

I breezed down the hall finding some air in my lungs and some blood in my legs, it felt like I hadn’t used them in hours. I walked up and down feeling a little lost. I remember there being a bunch of surfer dudes busted for partying too hard. Trying to start the party all over again in the hallway cuffed to a bench. They were gone and the hallway was empty and samey looking, a graveyard quietus holding me in place.

An alien noise erupted from my purse and I jumped like an idiot in a slasher movie, it’s just your phone Diana.

I closed my eyes smoothing out my shirt and taking a deep calming yoga breath putting the phone to my ear.

“Diana?” The rugged voice said.

“You called me” I answered.

“You see you do need me after al.l” Brodsky croaked, a hoarse hissing laughter eking out like the sound of two planks rubbing together.

“You got me out of there?”

“What, don’t want to know how some OC detective who couldn’t find his ass with two hands and a Sherpa got his mitts on that footage. And only a few days after the incident in question?” He cleared his throat, it needed a lot of clearing “Warrants have to be issued subpoenas given out, it can take weeks. How would he even know to look at that stretch of road or that gas station in particular? He’d have to look at the security footage of a five block radius of the house. And why would he even bother for some low life gangbanger?”

“So it was you, you’ve been shadowing me?”

“Not me personally, I don’t get around so good anymore. I can help you or I can bury you under so much red tape you’ll wish you were dead. Do we understand each other?”

“You brought me here”

“I brought you here and with one phone call I can keep you here for as long as I want.”

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want and I think I know what you want.”

“I’m working on it” I said.

“Good”.

A few days of inaction passed, school, home, sleep. That process continued on for a short time until the weekend got the better of me. I realised procrastination was getting me nowhere and prom was getting ever closer. So now, as fortunes would have it Dumb Dawdling Diana found herself snugly entombed in the cool dank dark of the fairly roomy trunk of a Lincoln town car. Black as far as I can remember, terrible for this heat.

Maybe I should have been more alarmed but I was too busy listening for the turn and feeling the speed bumps to think about my immediate future. Muffled voices of inane pleasantries exchanged, you’re regular ‘How do you do’s’ and all that, ‘isn’t the weather lovely, what a nice day for a vivisection’. And then a mechanical noise of a gate rising, engine biting and rising and nosing through the gate.

I waited for a moment for them to clear the checkpoint. It was a five mile zone in this neighbourhood so I opened the trunk and stepped out quick and low and braced into a walk as casual as Larry, whomever Larry was. ‘Yeah I live here, just an average girl walking her- nothing.’ Shit should have brought a leash or something, maybe a clip board and stick on tie to look official, life a teenage garden inspector.

Oh you thought? Dashing dark lit Diana trapped in a trunk by some dastardly dude? Nay, I mean no, not yet anyway. Not if I had anything to say about it.

It was just the slickest way I could think of breaking into a gated community unannounced.

I’m getting ahead of myself, what am I doing? I asked myself as I started to feel like I was walking aimlessly as my eyes adjusted to blaring mid-morning L.A sun. Forgot my sunglasses, who does that? Oh how I pity you, ditzy deadly Diana.

I felt pressed, moulded, pushed along by hands seen and unseen and possibly one cold claw. A little field trip was of vital import.

Wendy Vargas, my dear old pal and for all intents and purposes; blood sister, lived in a nice little three bed three bath Condo in the Anaheim hills. About a thirty minute drive from school in a gated community known as ‘Viewpointe north’. Very glitzy, I must say.

It was a Saturday, of course it was, you wouldn’t expect a solid citizen, model pupil like me to skip class to do what exactly? A drop of home invasion, some measured manslaughter perhaps? I could be so lucky.

I picked this day for two reasons, school being the latter. The former was that today I knew exactly where Wendy was going to be because I was meant to be there with her. Today was supposed to be early prep work for the senior prom which was only a couple of days away, now I thought about it. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

Just benign things like hanging up streamers and sticking up posters, she had the whole committee helping I’m sure she wouldn’t miss me. I already called in sick ahead of time and subsequently turned off my phone. Promising her I would be buried under a mound of sheets and clothes sweating out some summer cold. Hoping to be rid of it before the ‘really like seriously important dance’. If I had had a conscience this is the moment it would popping up like that little Microsoft paper clip; “It looks like you’re trying to break into your best friend’s house to look for evidence implicating her in a murder”.

Of course lacking any of those oh so human draw backs I walked the streets without a care. Almost considering whistling a happy tune as I strolled the carefully pruned lawns and shrubberies of the block looking for her house in particular.

It was a very nice neighbourhood, reserved only for state senators, criminal attorneys and, I guess one ex-sandwich shop magnate.

I had been to her house before of course, being best buds and all. I could probably make some excuse with the gate keeper guard guy, say I forgot my iPod or whatever at her house. ‘Oh please mister guard could I go get it?’ Batting an eyelid or even two. But then there’s the problem of signing in and out. There’d be a record of my coming and going and although I didn’t plan on leaving any evidence there was a good chance she’d be told that I was here. And that was something I was willing to climb into the trunk of strangers car to avoid. In case you were wondering how I knew where the car was heading, they all have these stickers on them. Sort of a sign of status but helps easily identify peoples cars at a distance. So then the guards can decide when walking up whether to put on the fake shit eating grin. ‘Good morning Mr rich asshole’ or the stern Pitbull scowl ‘fuck off Mr nobody guy, no one’s buying bibles today!’.

Even their mail must have been sorted through that booth. I wandered if they filtered their internet too, maybe they warmed their toilets seats before they sat down. Who was I kidding? Of course they had heated toilet seats, goes without saying.

Actually now that I thinking about it, it had been a while since I’d visited her, maybe as far back as middle school play dates. But even then I think that was just an excuse for my ‘Aunt’ to see how rich people lived. Larp as one for an afternoon while Wendy showed me her collection of ethnic Barbie’s from around the world. Even then I found that tiresome and I could only dream of sticking all the heads of her Barbie’s on the gate surrounding Casa de Barbie’s dream villa. Complete with a real working hot tub and sauna.

In all honesty she didn’t really interest me back then, we’d stayed in contact, this was all before the ‘unpleasantness’ that befell her father. After that quite coincidentally we reconnected in high school. No one really interested me if I was being ‘really’ honest, not any further than I wondered what their insides looked like. Even then I felt like a shaved fox walking the cramped halls of a battery farm chicken coop licking my lips and asking only ‘when?’

The answer to that question always a shrill and chilling ‘Soon’.

Always soon, never now.

I had of course tried to get the area up on google so I could ‘walk the streets’ so to speak but even my digital footprint was denied access. I guess google wasn’t even good enough to set foot on these hallowed grounds, how privileged I felt even breathing their air. It was sort of heady and crisp, maybe they had it pumped in from aspen. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The houses of course were all perfectly breath taking. Smooth and gorgeous like they’d all been cut from one piece of stone, just giant liveable sculptures, little Mount Rushmore’s. Each distinctly wonderful and in keeping with the high end aesthetic. Without falling into the trap of being carbon copies of the other, wouldn’t dream of it.

Sprawling but perfectly modest two story buildings with beautiful well-kept lawns on all sides. Without any fences or gates surrounding them. Why bother when all the riff raff are kept out by armed guards and probably dogs, lots of angry dogs.

Finally after a couple of minutes of half purposeful walking. That’s half ‘I belong here’ confident, a little arm swing, fleet of foot, ‘I have somewhere to be, don’t stand in my way’ and half ‘shit, I’m lost’, have you seen fluffy? Is this my house or? Have you been drinking in the morning again?’ I came across a house I was sure I recognised.

It was a large two story condo, a sandy almost salmon pink colour, something like lime sandstone maybe I dunno, I’m not an architect. High school kid remember.

A huge almost church window on the front of the second floor and a giant white garage door below it. Tastefully dusted with trees and shrubs with some spikey looking desert plants put in for good measure. Gave it an overall atmosphere of look but don’t touch, sadly I could not comply.

The front door was for some odd design choice not actually at the front but sort of tucked at an odd angle almost in the house’s elbow. With raised partition of walls on one side and the full structure of the house on the other. Which was decidedly to my advantage as it would hide my advance around the house. To anyone given to an idle glance it would just look like a little rich white girl walking to her front door and then disappearing into the splendour she so rightfully deserved.

I know what you’re thinking; ’really you’re going to break into a probably nearing five hundred thousand dollar house in the middle of the day. Guarded by a team of armed ex-army and moonlighting cops? Yes, yes I was. I was that stupid, that desperate.

Really, honestly, you think I wouldn’t think of a way round this? Ok yeah you’d be right. I was just hoping something would come to me in the time it took for me to walk up the drive and open the unlocked door. Holy crap, you have to be kidding me?

March 13, 2018 0

GS2 Chapter 12 ‘Liquid Swords’

Feeling kinda bleh today so gonna keep this short and bitter, just like me. Or how I like my coffee, I dunno, fuck it, you want wit go find some edgy mommy blogger.

I don’t really have any updates since my last blog, the problems of having them like a day apart, oh I did finish the first proofread of Gage so that is available to read in full raw on inkitt of which there is a link to below.

Gage

That’s pretty much it, just waiting on my now two editors to finish the work, but it looks like my new editor is about to lap my old editor, I really hate emailing people, or talking to people or texting people or looking at people *sigh*. Which is why I never leave the house although I now have the excuse that all the roads are snowed dead.

Now Gage is proofread, I think I’ll go back and finish that Lovecraft story I was writing and finish the plan for the sequel to the newly minted Deedee after Dark.

See you…

An aggravated swizel chair noise, the sound of expensive leather creasing under toned tightened butt cheeks. The sound of a zen garden water fountain and those clicky clacky things that go on your desk to help relieve stress, somehow.

A large flat screen tv on the wall showed aerial footage of a police station swarming with thousands of furries, distant fires burning.

“Woah woah, pause this, what the fuck am I look at here?”

“Sir that’s a live feed”.

Dan furrowed his brow looking up like a confused dog at his secretary Ms Palmer. A long straight women with angular features and uncommonly large breasts and dark hair. Hired for her angular intellect and the fact she resembled a living anime character. Complete with a set of frameless glasses and her dark hair tied up in a bun with those Asian pin things in them. A beauty mark like a full stop underneath a plump bottom limp lightly glazed with peach lipgloss.

“Huh?” He said narrowing his eyes.

“Erm, it can’t be paused.” She leaned forward, squeezing her breasts against a tablet she was hugging extenuating her words like she was talking to an idiot. “It’s happening right now sir.”

“… I know that!” He threw himself back into his high backed office chair sulking a little, wrinkling his expensive suit. “Get that bastard Evergreen on the phone now”. He said seething, his eyes half open.

His secretary unsheathed her tablet from her bosom almost popping her own bra off or breaking her back and started tapping away at it.

“On line one sir” She said calmly.

He leant forward and took a blue tooth headset off his desk and put it on his ear, just breathing into it.

On the other end Evergreen was in his darkened command centre in one of the hollowed out oil trucks lit only by the light of the monitors inside.

“What’s he saying?” Murray whispered.

“He isn’t saying anything” Evergreen said holding the phone away and covering it with his hand. He put the phone back to his ear and said “Sir-“.

“What the cowfucking Christ is going on?”

“Sir I-“

-“I turn away for two minutes to get a shiatzu and a happy ending from a thai sheboy. And when I come back the town I planned to dump a bucket of zombies on like a kid with one of those bucket water door pranks. You know the ones” He paused trying to decipher where that joke was supposed to land or if he even intended it as a joke. “This town not only already coincidentally has a zombie outbreak. But they’re all specifically furfags lead by a spoonbending liberachi lookalike. And on top of that there’s some fucking yahoo running around like John Wayne before the game’s even started. “ He paused to take in a breath

“Sir”

“And yes I saw the dykes with the giant tranny, they were pretty funny actually.” He had a think, lost his train of thought and came back. “Someone is fucking with us.”

“I think so” Evergreen said flatly.

“Hmm”

“KGB wolf, CIA jackal, take your pick, on the other hand it could be ‘personal’.”

“Personal? But everyone loves me” Dan said with no hint of credulity, not even a trace. Zero credulity found. He laughed “Ok then, I know what has to be done” He said grinning so Evergreen could feel it through the phoneline.

A drawn out silence.

“Your orders sir?”

“Everything”

“Come again sir?”

“EVVVVERRRREEEERRRYTHINGGGGG!!!” He screamed down the headset, veins popping out of his neck, spit flying over his tasteful desk. “I WANT THAT TOWN WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH! SEND EVERY FUCKING THING WE’VE GOT! EVERYTHING THAT CRAWLS AND FLIES AND KILLS AND MAKE THAT TOWN A MEMORY!”

“Sir” His secretary chimed in soothingly. “Is it wise to cut the game short like this, what about the investors and the custome-“

“Fuck them.” He said turning to her bottling his rage into hands that looked like scare quotes emphasising his words. “I could give two shits about the fucking losers who pay to watch this shit. Who knows they might even like it, give them something new to fap to. Fuck some are probably furfags themselves.”

“Right sir, but the thumbs up on the stream are actually favourable. This much engagement at this early stage is unprecedented.”

His tone got loud but curt but he wasn’t shouting now, just talking out loud. “I learned from my dear old dad; ‘When someone tries to fuck you. You fuck them back twice as hard with their tears as fucking lube’, do you understand?”

“Yes sir”

“Send them, everything in the back catalogue. That little shitberg won’t know what hit him. This’ll be rapped up by tomorrow night. We sweep and clear, sterilize the town and we’re out without a trace with all the tactical data we need on the new prototypes.”

“You hear all that” Ms Palmer said touching her own ear piece.

“I heard him.” Evergreen said standing as rigid as an elm tree in the van looking straight. Murray was looking up at him not sure if he should talk. He ended the call and put his cellphone back in his top breast pocket and said to Murray “Do it.”

–

“Is he gone?”

“I think so, It’s gone quiet.”

“Too quiet.

“What the hell was that shit about, you think he was a terrorist or something”.

“Or a really pissed off postal worker.”

Two cops hiding in the dark of the police stations morgue crouched under an examination table. The cold feeling of all that chrome stainless steel surrounding them. Whispering like kids in boarding school in the cool darkness.

“Shhh what’s that noise?”

There was a muffled scratching noise.

“Shhhit he’s coming back, what d’we do?”

“I’m ready for the asshole this time.” He said as he sparked a lighter in the darkness making little pockets of light revealing them. Little coughs of light in the thick dark. A hissing release of gas then the woofing noise of steady flame.

“Where the hell dya get that Mal?”

“I swiped it from the evidence locker in all the confusion”

“Did you lock the door after?”

“Who the fuck cares Steve? My main priority right now is keeping my brain on the inside of my skull”. Mal said in a harsh biting spitting whisper. The flame of the flamethrower revealed him as a barrel chested Mexican with a mustache. His friend a slim balding man in uniform.

“Where we’d even get that from?”

“Weed farmers had it in case they needed to destroy evidence, fields of it.”

“Shhhh” Steve said as he readied his glock, lifting a torch to the side of it. “It’s coming from the win-“

A gutwrenching crash of glass and steel as some misshapen fuzzy form fell into the room. Carcrashing the silence of the dead in the morgue.

“What the fuck is that?” Mal said. Suddenly hesitant to use the flamethrower in such a small space having never fired it before. He hesitated looking at his partner. “Fucking shoot it already!”.

Steve swallowed and readied the glock in both hands letting the torch drop and roll to the feet of whatever it was. The careening beam of light revealing a giant cuddly bear with a ominous smile.

“What the fuck” Steve mouthed.

Mal looked at Steve and shouted “Fucking shoot it!”

He gathered himself aiming the gun carefully shaking. He popped off two shots into it’s fuzzy chest, a puff of smoke, a flash of light and some flying fur but the bear didn’t go down. It lurched forward and glomed onto Mal. The sounds of muffled jaws snapping under the costume, a dull whistling moan.

“Get offa me!” Mal said as he pushed back at it with one hand, the other on the flame thrower.

“What is that thing?”

“Fucking toast” Mal said as he readied the thrower. He hesitated a little like he wanted to cover his eyes as if he was about fire up a nuclear reactor. He fired it one solid burst engulfing the bear in the cloud of concentrated flames. The cool stainless steel lit up like rome, hot and cold, a warm light filling the tight sterile room.

The bear went up like a coach in a meth lab fire. The flames changing colour as they reacted to all the dyes and the artificial fibres. It started melting into a pile of indistinguishable rainbow mush.

“You got it” Steve said.

“Yeah I did” He smiled triumphant turning to his friend, his nose wrinkling up at the smell the thing was giving off. “Smells like burnt dolls hair and baby shit”.

Suddenly a white hot pain gripped his leg, quickly turning cool and numbing. “Ah, fucking tore a muscle or something, ah it burns!” He looked down and saw a multi-coloured molten paw gripping clawlike to his ankle.

He cried out like a rabbit caught in a bear trap as he was yanked off his feet by fear and revulsion. The pain now working its way to his brain, the smell of his own flesh cooking.

“Jesus!” Steve cried out popping off the small cap gun glock. The gun hopping in his hand like a hot potato covered in dish soap. The bullets getting lost in a nightmarish rainbow molten flaming goo making sad little sploshing sounds.

It climbed up Mal spreading it’s multi-coloured self all over him like rainbow napalm, burning and melting. His skin peeling away and falling off his bones as the toxic mess engulfed him. The smell growing stronger and more toxic burning the hair from both their noses. It got to his head, it’s hot clawlike fingers cutting through his flesh and skull like a hot knife through warm soft clay. Giving just a little resistance before collapsing in on itself. His brains and eye juice leaking out like warm jelly. Searing and bubbling and burning as they made contact with the white hot claws. Eyes popping out and boiling in the multi-coloured goo. He gave out an animalistic shrill scream of a semi-conscious dying thing crying out for something more painless. Instead of this searing slow mind tearing pain.

Steve shivered, shrinking into the darkest corner pulling the trigger of the now empty Glock. Clicking in the dark as the thing that swallowed what was left of his comrade started to rise. Flaming and melting, pieces falling off of it. The flame seeming perpetual. It lumbered towards him. Taking two steps before anticlimactically falling into a lifeless burning pile on the morgue floor.

Steve panted as the flames still raged. A relieved sigh leaving his lips he started to trace with his hands the corner of the room and walls. He started to back out towards the door quickly and quietly. The monster had kicked his torch back and he felt it rolling by his foot, he picked it up and walked backwards stopping as he backed into a coatrack.

“Oh shit, what is this, the coroner has a furcoat?” He said as he clicked on the torch, revealing crowd of silent giant plushies standing in the dark. “Oh no”.

–

A slim hand with green painted nails snaked around a crack in a door. Some quiet fumbling and then the click of a light switch.

Halogen lights lit up like rectangular lightsabers crisscrossing a grey concrete ceiling. Sandwiched by a grey concrete floor.

“This is it” Sunday said as her feet tapped on the concrete floor, echoing in the large open room. The smell of motor oil and wet paint. The garage was pretty much empty, a couple of trashed shells of cruisers and something interesting under a tarp in the centre. Her breath was a little short and she had a slick sheen of sweat on her face from throwing up earlier.

“Just like I said, follow the signs” BJ said as he followed her into the room.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here” Jimmy sulked his way in, his big knife hanging by his side.

TJ strode in like a Japanese general with his new sword at his side. Feeling ten feet taller, riding a crashing tsunami of raw power. He held it by his side blade up because he had no belt.

“Oooh” Sunday cooed as she knew tarps meant good shit, or total shit. She semi-skipped over towards the tarp flinging it off like she was pulling a table clothe off. Not really giving a shit if the plates were still there when she was done. A thick cloud of dust kicked up and swallowed her.

She was coughing loud, the others kept their distance. The dust settled revealing a large all terrain vehicle. Looked like decommissioned military. Low to the ground and angular with thick pierce proof tyres and reinforced windows, black. She hopped up onto the cab to look into the window calling back “Keys in the ignition”. With a big cliche’ smile on her face.

“Cool” TJ said.

Sunday was still coughing uncontrollably, but happily. She peeled away to look at it, trying to talk but getting cut off by another cough and then another. The coughing rolling into something akin to corpsing. It wouldn’t stop, she just kept coughing, her throat looked red and all the veins rose up on it. She started to sweat more, her mouth and nose started to leak a strange coloured substance. Her eyes rolling back into her head as she slumped to her knees. Her head hung down like a broken puppet, her arms lying at her side with their strings cut. Micro seizures locking her body up and down and releasing her. And then again, twitching like she was losing control of her body. Her bat hit the flaw and took a bite out of the concrete.

TJ rushed to her side almost dropping his new toy. His heart doing backflips, his stomach fighting to get to his throat. His ass tight as a drum full of coal that wanted to be diamonds.

“Sunday” He cried out. Hearing her name out loud was strange, addressing her, calling her by her name, were they friends? Was this anything close to a relationship, a woman he’d known for a grand total of three and a half days collectively. Officially the longest relationship he’d had with a 3D woman that wasn’t his mother.

Her body seemed to jossle back and forth. Waves of pain radiating up and down, making her sway rthythmically. Shivering like she was possessed.

“Please be ok” He whispered. “I can’t do this without you”. Tears welling up in his eyes he smiled at her, the sound of his sword jangling at his side.

“What the fuck is wrong with her?” Jimmy said with a little credulity in his voice as if she was faking.

Her head turned to meet TJ’s with a mechanic shift of ball bearings. Her face seemed flat and frozen, all the veins raised like a plate of red spaghetti. She tried to move her jaw but it seemed disconnected and loose.

“She is infected, the creepy hobo was right after all” BJ said softly.

Her mouth opened and a hushed hissing sound like air escaping a tire came out. Her mouth started to move with a great effort as if it was on some elaborate timer. The signal from her brain taking time to reach where it needed to be.

She grabbed his arm pulling him close and whispered

“Kill….. me.”

March 1, 2018 0

TOTCB Chapter 15 ‘Half a Person’

Ok back again for that stuff, I do.

So on the plus side being banned on facebook for another thirty days does do away with a lot of the distractions I suffer which coupled with the intense tiredness associated with getting back into weightlifting is nothing too dissimilar from a literal handicap haha. Just half awake scrolling and scrolling forever haha.

It’s better that I do something vaguely productive despite feeling like I’ve been run over by a truck everyday. I went pretty heavy when I started up again, went straight to the eighty pound bar bell for the chest press which I don’t regret, if anyone hasn’t tried weight lifting or any good excercise, it really is like a drug. My drugs of choice are chocolate, coffee and excercise and I’m trying to cut back on the coffee.

Updates, updates, get down to business, get things right in my head. Still don’t have the finished edited copy of this which is infuriating and I’ve emailed and emailed and emailed and it’s getting me absolutely nowhere.

Also I realised I fucked up with the editing of Diana after Dark, because I did some story tweaks changing one of the characters so they’d be more integral to the story in later manifestations but I sent the old version so I had a minor freakout about that but hopefully it’s all fixed, Chrissy, my new editor seemed to take it in stride and it really put my mind at ease. But really what a fucking rookie mistake, changing it and forgetting to label it correctly, fuck me I feel dumb.

Anyway it’s going forward and recently it’s been a slog with all the weightlifting death feelings but I’ve working my way through the plans for the sequel to Diana after Dark and it’s going really well. I’m really liking the direction it’s taking. Also I decided to change Diana’s name to ‘Deedee’ for the title, so her name will still be Diana Harrison, Deedee will like be a nickname. I just think it’s cuter, its less heavy and librarianish and I think it makes for a snappier sound. Also the references to Dexter’s lab amuse me haha.

That’s about all. Just gonna spend the rest of the day editing.

See you…

TOTCB

On the drive home the ‘kid’ was relatively quiet, just staring out the window. Something in him seemed lighter, the weight was gone. Porter followed the highway back towards Selma and into Valhalla. As they reached the entrance he started to talk again.

“So you’re a detective?”

“Most of the time”.

“How do you get that work?”

“I got my license in a cereal box.”

He smiled and said “Cereal stopped giving away prizes long ago, I think”. Nulidad went back to staring out the window, or maybe just looking at his own reflection in the glass.

There was some activity in the sky, a black helicopter flew overhead. “I’ve got to let you out here, you know the way?”

“I know the way”

Porter stopped outside the childs play area in Valhalla park and the kid started walking. Porter did a u-turn and watched the kid disappear around the corner.

–

The next day he was all over the news, videos of his arrest outside of his home. The boy now a man was bundled out of a white car, held with his wrists cuffed behind his back by FBI in brown suits. He smiled at the camera, his hair turning an orange colour due to the bleaching and lights of the cameras.

The story was ‘master imposter fools his way into america, pretending to be a missing child. Fooling the fbi and even the boys parents’. They described him as a predator preying on the most vulnerable. Feeding off their hopes and fears to gain their confidence.

“It’s almost unheard of, a foreigner pretending to be a missing child fooling the boys own mother. It’s hard to even imagine it.” The news anchor said, ruffling his neat grey hair and deeply creased face. His voice ringing with faux concern and moral outrage.

Angela refused to be on camera. A tearful Peggy on her way to the sheriff’s office was stopped by reporters and cried “Where’s the real Johnny?”

Porter was sitting at the bar eating beer nuts and watching it all fall apart on the flatscreen above the bar. Patrick craned his neck with his hands on hips and every mouth was open watching. Patrick looked at Porter and Porter said nothing.

The phone rang in the back and Patrick slapped his bar clothe down and went to go get it. Only to come back a few seconds later. “Its for you, some FBI woman wants to talk to you about ears or some such nonsense.”

Porter went around the back feeling a little smug but keeping it off his face and out of his voice. “Hello”

“Porter Carraway, this is Special Agent-“

“-Nancy Jaeger, yeah I remember, can we get to the point?”

“Which is what?”

“Say it”

“What, you were right?”

“Not in so many words”

“We have him, but it’s not over and I think you know that better than anyone.”

“…” Porter started counting his teeth with his tongue.

“He’s been talking, a lot, about the real Johnny. What he thinks happened to him, he’s implicated the kids parents and someone named ‘Jack’. We’re having trouble tracking him down for an interview”

“Did you question his mother?”

“We did, she passed a polygraph twice?”

“And the third time?”

Nancy exhaled into the receiver and smiled “She failed, on every question. The needle almost jumped off the table.”

“Uh huh, what happened after that?”

“She didn’t take it well, the poligrapher confronted her and she stormed out the room screaming.”

“So you’ve got nothing.”

“Less than nothing. Poligraphs are a cheap parlor trick to convince juries but they’re not solid evidence.”

“Ok, now get to the part where I do you a favour”

“He’s saying a lot, too much. He’s claiming to have information on several missing person’s cases. And he’s already been caught using his phone calls to impersonate other missing children. He’s a compulsive liar and fraud, there’s not a jury on earth that would take anything he said seriously”.

“But you believe him? About the boy.”

“I have my suspicions, but I’m too caught up in all this to shift focus on finding the real Johnny to do anything about it. If I try to shift focus onto the parents now without any evidence they’ll give the case to someone else. I have to be nailing Nulidad to the wall or the case falls apart.”

Porter breathed in deep and thought about it.

“Do you understand?”

“Yeah” Porter said as he hung up the phone and then picked it up again and started dialing.

–

Porter parked outside their old house on Swallow street. It was a bright Texas morning. He set off after breakfast and sat for a moment thinking and getting hot in the cab with the air conditioner off. The house looked the same as last time, the only difference was there was a black Jeep pickup outside.

After a moment of hesitation he opened the door and stepped out shutting the door hard. He walked up the driveway to that small white garage door. Crossing the round the stone footpath onto the porch and he rang the doorbell like last time.

Like last time the drapes were pulled and he couldn’t see inside.

He waited, there was some rummaging happening behind the door. Before long a figure appeared through the white lattice window in the door.

“What d’ya want?”

“We spoke on the phone.”

“Oh yeah.” He said letting the sound of the door unbolting be a full stop. Then the clinking of the chain being taken off. A large man around six feet, well built with a gut of a long distance truck driver sood in the doorway. He had a rough short beard and a shaved head but otherwise a friendly face and an affable demeanor. “Hey hows it going?” He put his hand out to shake and Porter took it. “Sorry about that, we get a lot of salesmen around here, you know what I mean, please come in.” The large man let go of Porter’s hand stepped to the side to invite him in. He was wearing a generic white tee and sweat pants.

“Darrol was it?”

Porter entered a small living room from the front door. A black coach pushed up against the wall. Through an alcove in the same wall he saw the dining room with a ceiling fan spinning. A screen doors lead onto the back yard.

The large man then sped up past him and lead him into the dining room furnished in a sandy wood. There was a table and some cabinets with books and dvds and a small tv poking out of one of the gaps in the dresser.

“Darren” The man corrected. “how did you get my number again?”

“Your realtor was real chatty, I just had some questions to ask you”.

“About that case right? I saw it on the news about the missing boy. He used to live here? Had reporters buzzing around here wanting to look around but I really don’t know anything, how could I?”

“You said something about a black tarp on the phone”

Darren opened the screen door and walked out into his yard and Porter followed him. The yard was relatively small slightly overgrown but otherwise well kept. Bushes and trees lining the outer edges and a fence running all the way around.

“When we first got my dog Bernie, he would always dig in the back corner”. Darren pointed off to the right back corner of his yard. Where the back fence met an overgrown bush that leaned over into his yard was choking a small maple tree. “over by that tree there, and one day I was mowing, and I sort of went under the bush a little. And I started picking up some of this plastic like tarp, got all clogged in the blades of the mower.”

He looked over at Porter to make sure he was hanging on his every word and he was.

“And I stop the mower and I find where it’s coming from and it’s this black plastic coming out of the ground.” Darren gestured with his hands like the dead were reaching out of the ground. He turned to Porter and he was nodding. “So I tried to pull it out from under the bush” Darren mimed the action of pulling the plastic out of the ground. “But as I kept trying to pull it, it just kept coming off in my hands, I couldn’t get a grip on it.” He sucked his gums and put his hands on his hips. “So I got fed up of that and I just covered it up and never paid it any mind until last night when we were talking on the phone.”

Porter inhaled some fresh cool air and rocked his head back and forth looking at the overgrown bush. “That bush has been there a while, you didn’t plant that?”

“No sir, that was here when we moved in.”

“Your wife home?”

“No she’s at work, she works at the hospital, she’s a nurse practitioner, she wont be back til about six maybe later.”

“Darren?”

“Yep?”

“You got a shovel?”

–

They migrated to the bottom of the yard. Darren did in fact have a shovel but he didn’t want some stranger digging up his lawn so the compromise was a trowl. Instead of clipping back the hedges. Darren would hold it up while Porter probed the ground with the trowel.

“Yeah it was right about there, I think, it was a good couple years ago when I found it.”

Porter knelt down, he’d tossed his jacket over the side of the fence and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He started gently prodding the earth with the trowl kneading it like dry dough. Only after a minute of this did he feel any resistance and he could hear a crinkling sound. He started to pry and dust the dirt off just enough not to irritate Darren too much.

He managed to get a good chuck levered out with the trowl. From what he could see under the bush, there was something taking in some light. A dull plastic tarp nevertheless caught some of the light and was throwing it back.

Darren watched with a morbid curiosity. He struggled the keep the bush out of the way like wrestling an octopus. Porter looked up at him, on his knees in the dirt. He made a sucking sound and looked to Darren for some tacit permission.

Darren was getting tired and he nodded furiously out of his own sudden desire to know more. Porter started to dig a little more. Gently removing a few more layers of dirt until more of the tarp was exposed and he could see a seam and more.

It seemed cliché and dreamlike, predictable, so predictable it was almost laughably. It was stupid really, like an episode of murder she wrote, but there it was lying on the ground.

A bone.

“What is that? A bone? Is it like a dog bone?” Darren said nervously praying that he was right.

Porter pryed the tarp open revealing more of the bone, it was long and white and discoloured. “I’m no expert”.

“But can you make a guess? I mean come on man, did my dog put that there or what?”

“I can make a lot of guesses, none of them any good. But I can be sure your dog didn’t wrap it up in a tarp before he buried it.”

He moved it with the trowl to get a better look at it, catch more light.

“It’s human aint it?”

“Seems that way” Porter sighed “Ah I dunno” he said as he rolled back onto his heels and dusted himself off.

“So what does it mean? Is that the kid, was he here all along? Oh jesus help me!”

Porter sighed, something prickly crawling up his back and was breathing down his neck.

“No, I don’t think so”

“Wait what d’ya mean, who else could it be? You don’t think it’s the kid’s?”

“It looks like a femur, a leg bone.”

“Yeah so?”

“It’s too long to be a kid’s”.

“Oh jesus, then who?”

Porter sighed and gritted his teeth with his lips tightly pursed.

“I have no idea.”

“Well what the hell do I do with it? I should go to the police?” He said like he didn’t really want to.

“Sit on it for now, you don’t want the cops digging up your lawn with a back hoe over what could just be a dead dog”.

–

Porter stopped at a gas station the first chance he got to use the phone.

He lit a cigarette leaning out of the booth listening to it ring.

It clicked on, a tense woman’s voice answered.

“Yeah?”

“Jaeger, it’s Porter. I had a visit with the guy who moved into their old house.”

“And? Did you find anything?”

“There was nothing in the house but we found something in the garden, buried under a black tarp.”

“Oh jesus you found him?”

“Not so sure, can’t guarantee it’s even human, just bones but from what I can tell it looks too developed to be a kid”

“I told you, my hands are tied right now. I can’t touch whatever it is you’re doing and I can’t send forensics to some guys house on your say so.”

“So what can you do?” There was a challenge in his voice.

“He called me, I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day but your friend said you were out and you don’t carry a cellphone.”

“He-who?”

“Jack.”

“And what did Mr ‘Long-chain-on’ have to say for himself?”

“I asked if he’d come in for questioning and he refused. Apparently he didn’t believe from the start that Nulidad was his brother. But didn’t want to say anything to upset his mother.”

“And?”

“And then nothing”.

“Do you know where?” Porter sighed.

Nancy sighed and there was a sound like someone rubbing their temples. The clicking of plastic as the phone was moved between hands.

“I looked into his records and there’s an address of a rehab clinic he spent some time at. It’s possible they might know where he stays, it’s on Calebra, West San Antonio.”

Porter paused and took a breath.

“So I go there and I find out where this guy hangs out and then what?”

“If you find him. Call it in as an anonymous tip related to drug offenses and we’ll have him picked up and questioned, that’s all”.

“First, tell me”

“Tell you what?”

“What you think”

“You wanna know what I think? I think they know where their son is”. She paused and put her hand over the receiver for a second. She came back on with a rustling sound as she took her hand away. “I don’t believe a mother could not know her only son for a stranger, not in a million years.”

Porter let out a breath and then sucked on his gums before saying “I’ll let you know” and hanging up.

February 27, 2018 0

TOTCB Chapter 14 ‘The Carnival is Over’

Guten Aben, Just gonna phone this one in, not that many updates exept it’s a go with the new editor and she seems raring to go. I realise I forgot all about the mailing list over the holidays, and I actually still haven’t got the full manuscript for the TOTCB off my old editor who is studying to be a priest or something in israel, or something like that.

Anyway, so I can’t do the mailing list really until I get that back, which sucks. But I’ll still be posting free unedited content and reviews of whatever dumb shit I see. I don’t have a clean copy of the last jedi to rag on yet but I did get the misogynist copy which is like a version with all the women scenes cut out I think haha. But it’s a cam so fuck that, I want high quality theft, only the best quality piracy will do.

Also I remembered why I use inkitt, it’s a good respository for my work I guess, makes it easier to thumb through each chapter on any device so I guess it has it’s uses. I’ll start putting Gage up there when it’s finally done, been dragging my feet recently where that’s concerned. Elite Dangerous addiction really getting out of hand haha.

So I’ll be putting links up like before so people can read the chapters in order. Like right here; The Carnival is Over

See you…

Nancy was sitting in her makeshift office in the San Antonio field office. She was on edge already then the phonecall she was waiting for came and time slowed. She picked it up and didn’t say anything.

“Hello? Is this Jaeger?” A thick spanish accent said confused by the silence.

“Yes, sorry, this is Nancy Jaeger”

“I’m Legate Dargento. We have analysed the data you’ve sent to us and forwarded that data to Interpol and they have a match. We’re faxing you the information as we speak. I hope this helps you in your investigation.”

“Yes, I’m sure it will” Nancy was elated but felt a hint of sadness creeping in from an unknown place, a cold shiver. “Thank you”.

“You’re most welcome”.

She hung up the phone and just sat there for a minute with her elbows on the desk.

“What is it, did the tests come back, was that Interpol?”

“They’re faxing it over now.”

–

Porter thought the kid looked hungry and he might loosen up if he put some food in him. So he took him across the street to Raising Cane’s chicken fingers, ordered some texas toast and lemonade.

It was a standard diner set up in any roadside chain. Booths running down the windows with blue seat cushions. The walls were all red with pictures of dogs and old movie stars on them. There were square tables running along the centre of the room at right angles to eachother. It was busy enough to cover whatever they had to say to eachother without anyone hearing it. Kids having birthday parties, old people, teens, college kids, the works.

He picked it because it was close and on a busy road out in the open. He picked a booth facing out so he could see any cars coming. The kid was facing away with his cap and dark glasses on, plasters on his face. It was awkward the kid didn’t want to talk but by this time Porter knew he remembered him.

“Do you remember me?”

Johnny nodded.

“I heard you scared your mother pretty good, that stunt you pulled”

The kid, shrunk back into his seat, the hairs on the back of his neck brushed backwards. His lip quivered, but with what it wasn’t clear. After a moment in a harsh whisper he said “That woman is not my mother”.

Porter’s heart gallopped and hurdled his stomach. His blood started rushing in from all over and he could almost hear it. His breath getting hot in his lungs as he tried to calm himself, tried to keep his face poker.

The kid looked at him and he was scared, really scared this time. He took the glasses off and threw them across the table and rubbed his eyes. He slumped in his seat and suddenly looked older and he looked Porter in the eyes, with those deep brown eyes.

“Who are you?” The words shook in Porter’s throat. They seemed to make the ground shake, like he was talking to devil himself. The angel Gabriel from high revealing himself in human form. His bones quaking at the revelation of truths to come. Come flowing out in a torrent that wouldn’t stop until they washed everything away.

The waitress came with their food. They sat across from eachother waiting for her to put it down and go back to the counter. She put it down and Johnny smiled at her and she walked away. His eyes hung down and he turned back to Porter. He breathed in deep his hand on the counter scratching at his thumb with his forefinger.

“My name is Cisco Nulidad and I’m wanted by Interpol”.

–

Nancy fought the urge to bob on her heels, she speed walked down the hall to the fax machine. She could feel the eyes on her but this was her moment, she couldn’t let the excitement get to her. She could hear the fax machine going as she walked. She sped up, Con was behind her.

It spitting out page after page after page, some in English some in Spanish. There was so much of it she could hardly believe it, she felt like a kid on Christmas. She could barely look at the pile afraid one part of it would be revealed too quickly and spoil the whole surprise.

When the fax machine stopped she scooped up the hot pieces of paper and bundled them into a folder she had ready. Then speed walked them back to her office pushing past Con, she hardly even noticed him at this point. She needed to get back to her office. There was something about it that told her she needed the privacy of a closed door to see. She didn’t need anyone to share in this moment.

She slapped the folder down on the desk and started from the start.

Con opened the door, coffee cup in hand. It was hot so his jacket was draped over his chair. He was just wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a tie tossed over his shoulder.

“What is it? Who is he?” He asked not stopping for air between questions.

She speed read through first page. Her mind reeling to keep up, She passed it to Con and started on the next as he looked at it and tried to process the scope of it.

It was a black and white sheet, a fingerprint card with a picture of man with dark hair on it. “Cisco Nulidad, it says he’s French, wanted by Interpol, twenty three years old, Christ!”

She burned through the next page and passed it over to him.

“Wanted for impersonating minors to gain access to children’s shelters. known Alias; Frederic Beard, Benjamin dianason, Jimmy Peter Manfred, Hurny Wright.” He flipped the page over in disbelief. “The list just goes on and on, these are all missing kids he’s impersonated. This is all over Europe. Luxembourg, spain, france, Germany, Belgium, Milan, Glasgow, Bosnia, paris, bourdeaux, this is crazy”.

She finished another page and passed it to him.

“Known nationalities, Australian, Uruguayan, Canadian, Mexican. A history of lying about abduction and sexual abuse. Suicidal tendencies, designated an extreme flight risk”. He looked at Nancy and back at the page in sheer disbelief.

“He’s a fake”. He said.

–

Porter steadied himself, his food growing cold in front of him. “How?”

“From the start?” Nulidad said.

“From the start”

Ciscoe cleared his throat and started to look around. He took his cap off and Porter noticed he had somewhat of a receding hairline and his roots were even darker now.

“Well I make a phone call and I pretended to be a couple who found a missing boy. I said he was scared and lost and they picked me up and I pretend to be very scared. I put into their minds they have a child, I don’t even need to tell them I was abused, they say that.”

He took a sip of his lemonade and he almost looked pleased with himself. There was something fun about it for him, like a magician revealing his secrets to the world, the world of one.

“They take me to the shelter and they tried to find out who I was but they couldn’t. I didn’t let them print me take photos, but they threaten to. I just wanted to stay in the shelter. So I say to them leave me alone in the office at night. Because I tell them I’m an American and because of the time zone difference I need to call at night”.

He breathed in. “So I search, I know on the phone in that office, no one can hear me, I can convince anyone on the phone. I called police stations in the U.S. I tell them I am police and we have a missing American child. I try to find a child that matched my description. After a while I found a woman in San Antonio who told me about a missing child, Johnny Bartlett”.

He looked around at the children at the birthday party, the cake came out candles and sparklers lit. He swallowed and went on. “She sent me a fax with his picture and I looked at it and I saw the date. Been missing for a few year, it was old picture, I know there would be a change and I tell them they had a match. I call Peggy on the phone pretending to be err police and I tell her we found Johnny. ” He paused and a little something wormed into his smile, regret maybe. “I washed her brain.” He went on fresh. “The next day I proved to the people at the home who I was and they called the embassy and the fbi.”

“I didn’t stop because I didn’t know what I was doing, I couldn’t stop”. He started to eat, taking bites of the toast, chewing while he continued speaking. “But fuck, when the embassy they sent colour pictures of Johnny, I see he has blue eyes and blonde hair, fuck me, I burn them. I wish I could burn every word I say up to that point. So I had no choice, I dye my hair, I get the dark glasses and cover my face and I get a girl in the home to do the tattoos. I thought if I could get the hair and tattoos and she couldn’t see my face she wouldn’t know I wasn’t her brother, I’d have a chance.”

“I didn’t even know if he was left or right handed. I couldn’t be him because I didn’t know him, I couldn’t think anymore. I just think of what prison will be like when I go.” He said taking a slurp from his lemonade.

“I thought about running away, I thought about it but it was too late, Peggy was on a plane and coming to get me, I was trapped. She show up and I hide, I didn’t think she’d accept me. I thought as soon as she see me she say ‘Who the fuck is that? That’s not my brother!’. I knew I was about to lose everything I had no choice, I knew I couldn’t wait no more, it was too late to run, I couldn’t disappear. So I open the door and I went down to meet her and she didn’t wait two seconds. She jump on me. She starts kissing and cuddling me and telling me she recognise me. She accept me right away, to her I was her brother, no question.”

“She tell me everything would be fine, only god knows why she would do that. Then she started showing me pictures, dozens of pictures. ‘You remember this is when you were playing with scotty.’ ‘Jason looks older’, just over and over, drilling it into my head.

He swallowed “I wasn’t pretending to have another identity, I stole one.” He sighed and went on as if it was a play or a game.

Porter stayed still like he was listening to a radio play.

“All I had to do was get on a train and go anywhere, but something tell me to stay. I can’t describe, I wanted to feel loved, because I never have that before. My mother have me very young and didn’t want me so I thought I could steal one who did”.

He looked off out of the window at the busy intersection and all that nothing. “I think America, I think big city, skyscraper you know? But when I get here it’s all this nothing, all this country, so much space.”

He was talking louder and more confident than he had since he got here and he smiled and shook his head. “And then I met you, I already leak to the media about me. Because I thought if the media, the whole world see me and hear my story, it would make Johnny more real, even to me”. He looked down at the table “I wanted people to feel sympathy, to love me”.

“How many French adult live the American dream?” He laughed a little as he said it.

“How did you get away with it? The embassy doesn’t just throw out U.S passports to anyone.” Porter voice came out of nowhere. He’d just been sitting there listening dumbstruck for what seemed like hours he’d forgotten how to talk.

Nullidad didn’t seem to notice and he looked off past him. “I had help.” He clenched his jaw and said. “I thought I’d fooled them but I fool myself, I see now they were the fakes from the start”.

“What do you mean? Who?”

He looked into Porter’s eyes. “She help me, I see now she coach me. The embassy they give me a test they show me pictures from Johnny family and they test me to see if I remember. ” He licked his lips and leaned forward with his hands on the table. “Peggy she tell them that I haven’t seen them but she’s telling me over and over showing me pictures. ‘Do you remember this, do you remember this person, you remember this, you remember that? That’s your uncle this, your aunt this, your cousin, your mother, your grandmother’. She did it over and over and she make me remember, she coach me and I passed”.

“Who your sis- Peggy?”

“Yes” He paused. “It was just so much I couldn’t think at the time that she knew they would test me. She helped me to cheat, it was such a normal conversation. I couldn’t see what she was doing, I just thought she really wanted me to be him, she wanted it so bad for me to remember”.

Nullidad swallowed and said “I thought she just really wanted me to be her brother. She made me her brother, she didn’t believe it for a second. She knew I wasn’t her brother, she wanted me to be him, nomatter what.” He looked down and breathed in. “I was convince, it was luck, I realise now there was no way they couldn’t see through me, who wouldn’t know there own child? They pretended.”

He swallowed and kept rambling. “I thought I was the fake, the imposter. I’m just a stupid person who wanted to be someone else, they were the real fakes. They knew Johnny was never coming back and they used me to hide that. I was the fool all along.”

He poked at his food and said “My lie was small, I lied about being someone I was not. Their lie is everywhere, it touches everything, it’s all around, it encircles me and I can’t escape.”

Porter banged his fist on the table, a sudden surge of nervous rage shooting through him. “What about Johnny?” Cisco looked up his eyes narrow and frightened. “I’m sick of listening to you feel sorry for yourself, what happened to Johnny?”

“They killed him”.

Porter shrunk back in his seat, all the hairs on his arms felt electrified, standing on their ends. He got that cold feeling in his stomach like he knew it all along. He knew it.

Nullidad looked down at his feet. “Some of them knew about it, some of them kept quiet about it, some of them did it”.

Nullidad licked his lips and filled the silence that was growing. “For a long time I worried that the real Johnny would come back. But one night, Angela, she drink, she was drunk and she tell me. I heard her say, Johnny is dead, it was an accident, but Johnny is dead. I knew it was true and I never worry about him coming back after that.”

“Why did you do that to your face?”

“I knew no one believe me, I could’t be Johnny anymore.”

“What about Jack, why did you run?”

“I don’t know, I have bad feeling and I wait for him to go pay for the gas and I run”.

Porter’s eyes glassed over and his face was flat and expressionless. “Why should I believe any of this? How can I believe you?”

Nullidad paused and rolled his head back and forth looking for an answer and when it didn’t come he said “You can’t.”

January 25, 2018 0

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Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Where weird shit hits bizarre fans.

Tag

TOTCB Chapter 18 ‘Nobody’s Baby Now’

GS2 Chapter 14 ‘What Isn’t Nature’

TOTCB Chapter 17 ‘Wayward Stranger’

GS2 Chapter 13 ‘Le Samourai’

TOTCB Chapter 16 ‘Well of Misery’

Diana After Dark – Chapter 10 ‘I call him D’

GS2 Chapter 12 ‘Liquid Swords’

TOTCB Chapter 15 ‘Half a Person’

TOTCB Chapter 14 ‘The Carnival is Over’

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