Carbonic Energy

By Crag Dakkins

Nickasun drove through the empty urban streets on a quiet night, every once in a while slapping his face to wake up and correct his erratic steering. He was very close to his destination. Through darkest woods, down winding country roads, into AIDS-infested crack-alleys, out of boggy marshes, and occasionally hooking up with an interstate highway, Nickasun had followed the path prescribed by his GPS system. After who knows how many hours of driving and at least 30 Diet Cokes, he was finally in Pittsburgh, with nothing on him but his car, his cubic zirconia box, and the hope of getting a fresh start.

So tired, Nickasun thought. Well, it wasn’t that he thought it so much as he felt it. He was too tired to think. Not that he would have wanted to. Thinking always troubled Nickasun: it led to thoughts, and thoughts depressed him, especially memories, and especiallyer the memories of when he was young and had thought things would turn out differently. Nothing had turned out right. He never became a successful musician like Daryl Hall, or even John Oates; the best he had done was to get a slave labor gig at Negrosun’s club playing an instrument he didn’t even know how to play. He never married his Green-Eyed Love; she left him to marry a wealthy gay, becoming his beard for the sweet life. He never rose to the rank of CEO at the best Geology corporation in the world; that job was already taken – by the aforementioned wealthy gay.

Nickasun’s car scraped against the side of a brownstone apartment building. Sparks flew and rocks were sheared off. He jerked back onto the road and slapped his face some more. He turned on the radio to keep himself awake, but immediately turned it off when he heard that familiar opening keyboard tune.

The gay CEO was actually a pretty nice guy. He had invited Nickasun to extravagant dinners with him and his Green-Eyed Love on a few occasions. He had given Nickasun a stable but repetitive desk job as a rock sorter and filing clerk. There was no potential for advancement but he told Nickasun if he got his Geology Masters Degree he could get a good rock job at a higher pay rate. He had even offered to pay for Nickasun’s classes. But Nickasun didn’t want to do that. No more school. It only led to more thinking, which led to thoughts, and thoughts were troubling. If there was any justice in the world, society would just place him near the top of the corporate ladder on the faith that he was a hardworking, capable, person, which he was. But there is no justice. Never has been, never will be. Nickasun slapped his face and steered away from an iron gate he was about to crash into. He realized he had been thinking for the last several minutes. Not good. He wished there was a way he could turn off his brain.

“In 200 feet. Turn right at Industrial Way,” the GPS system said.

Nickasun’s car was different from how it used to be. After exiting Wendy’s so many hours or days ago, he had returned to his car to find rocks glued all over it. Culprit rocks were schist, pyrolite, chert, slate, and taconite. His red Geo was now a multicolored “Geode”, the last two letters written out in tiny bits of quartzite. Metamorphic, Nickasun had noted with some satisfaction. Musta were Wendy’s guy did this, Nickasun thought, grammatically incorrectly. Inside the car, the gearshift was now covered with amethyst crystals. On the front seat was a letter. It said, “Never stop making your dreams come true! NEVER!” and there was a crude drawing of Nickasun standing on a rock with his hands over his head in a Rocky pose.

“In 200 feet. Stop at 12th Street and Industrial Way. Pittsburgh Diamond Mines is on the left,” the GPS woman said. The place looked familiar – the street, the buildings, everything. The more things change, the more they stay the same, Nickasun thought woefully.

“Congratulations on your new rock job. You are the CEO. You are winner.”

Nickasun shook his head to wake up. Did she say that or did he dream it?

“We make a your dreams come true,” said the GPS.

OK, Nickasun was sure he didn’t imagine that. He pulled over at the Pittsburgh Diamond Mines.

“What you want. We’ve got and it might be hard to handle,” GPS lady began.
“Shut up!” Nickasun shouted. He didn’t like shouting. It frightened him, even when he was the one doing the shouting. ESPECIALLY if he was the one doing the shouting.
“But like the flame that burns the candle. The candle feeds the flame,” the woman continued in her monotone voice.
Nickasun saw something out the window that was a little too familiar. This was most definitely not Pittsburgh.
“FUCK!” he shouted, frightening himself once more. There before him was the deputy’s Dodge Traffic. It had seen better days but still appeared to be in working condition. The hot dog stand was in considerably worse shape. Half of it was smashed, compressed like a tube of toothpaste. The flattened end was hooked up to the Dodge Traffic. Behind these things were a building that looked like 9/11 and a lot of excavation equipment similar to the kind used at geological digs.
“…But me. I make a your dreams come true. Ooo. Ooo. Ooo. Ooo. Ooo. Oh me. I make a your dreams come true. Ooo. Ooo–”
Nickasun smashed the GPS to pieces against the dashboard. His violent action troubled him. He had to settle down. He reclined in his chair and closed his eyes. Maybe some music would be calming. He turned on the radio.
“…Well, well, well, you-oo! Oh yeah! You make-a my dreams come–”
Nickasun turned off the radio. He tried to sleep, hoping that when he woke up he would be in Pittsburgh.

When Nickasun woke up, he was in Pittsburgh.

No he wasn’t.

Nickasun awoke to find a wild-eyed stranger, nude except for his underwear, tapping on his window and holding a video camera. When Nickasun sat up the man stopped tapping and commenced dancing like the gold prospector from the comedy movie, “Tu Madre!: Return to the Treasure of the Sierra Madre 3-D”, starring Adam Sandler and Mark Wahlberg as opposites who don’t get along while looking for gold but then become friends in the end. Morgan Freeman played the prospector. Real life was not the movies, though, and the semi-nude video camera man was definitely not Morgan Freeman. His bruise-covered flesh, unnaturally sloping shoulders, and the sides of his head where the hair and skin had been violently shorn off were giving Nickasun the creeps, to say the least. He thought he better get out of there quick. The moment he put the key in the ignition, the nude prospector’s fist smashed through the window. Nickasun almost had a heart attack.
“HOLY SHIT!”
“Don’t leave just yet. I need to get to the police station.” One of the man’s eyes was dark red and the other moved in a non-stop circular motion. Nickasun got a whiff of the man’s awful stench when he leaned in and took the keys.
“I had it all, my friend! Now it’s gone! Dust in the wind!” The man laughed and danced prospector-like again. Nickasun didn’t know how he could do that. It looked like one of his shinbones was about to poke through his skin.
“Would you please give me my keys? I need those to drive,” Nickasun said, trying not to let the man sense how frightened he was. He normally knew how to deal with hobos, but this one was white, totally changing the game.
“There I was, in a room full of evidence, likely of the blackmail variety. Sex tape after sex tape of the wives and daughters of area politicians, police officials, and other high-profile figures. I hear someone coming, so I draw my gun and point at the doorway. Not to shoot, right, since my gun was ruined in the sewage, but to throw, maybe incapacitate Eye Patch if it was him.”
Recognition flashed through Nickasun’s brain synapses. “You know Eye Patch?”
“Yeah sure! Who doesn’t!? Next thing I know, I’m waking up, and all the shoeboxes, cots, and medical supplies are gone! And I’m wearing nothing but my underpants! I tell you, I couldn’t have picked a more inopportune time to blackout! When I came to, all that remained was this video camera with a video in it. It’s of Eye Patch standing over my sleeping body. He says, ‘Betta luck nexx time, foo’. You know, like how the blackops say it. I’m surprised he didn’t kill me!” The man laughed and danced some more.
“So you need to get to the police station? I’m not headed in that direction, to be honest.”
The prospector leaned into the car and examined Nickasun. “Say, you’re that Samoan, aren’t you? The Nickasun person?”
“No, I’m a Filipino. You’re thinking of someone else.”
“No, you’re the guy! I saw a lot of photos of you recently. Step out of the car please.”
Nickasun didn’t move.
“I’m a cop by the way. You have to do as I say.”
Nickasun sighed. He got out of the car. The man hadn’t shown a badge, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

The wild-eyed prospector grabbed Nickasun firmly by the wrist and looked around in all directions. “Ah, this will do,” he said, zeroing in on whatever he was looking for.
“Police Procedural Video Episode 12, Chapter 1 says an arrestee must be restrained before he or she is conveyed to the station. It’s a safety precaution. Now, I don’t have handcuffs on me, so here’s my second-best option: confinement until restraints are available.” He opened the back door of the half-crunched hot dog stand. “You shouldn’t be in here long. Everyone’s been worried sick about you! Especially worried about all that knowledge you’ve been hiding from us about Negrosun!”

He pushed Nickasun inside and shut the door. The serving window offered Nickasun a view to the outside world. An iron mesh grate was pulled down over it and Nickasun didn’t have the key, so he couldn’t crawl out. The prospector picked up a metal rod and tried to bend it. “Gotta check the durability,” he said. “Can’t have this thing breaking apart into diamonds now, can we?” The rod passed the test and he jammed it into the latch of the hot dog stand door.
“Don’t worry. Your car will be waiting for you at the station.”
The prospector hopped in Nickasun’s Geode and took off, taking with it all of Nickasun’s hopes and dreams: the hopes of a new and better life in Pittsburgh and the dreams from that stupid song that was always on. The car traveled a steady clip for a quarter-mile or so before suddenly accelerating and veering hard to the left, smack-dab into a telephone pole. The car horn blared for close to an hour until an ambulance arrived to take the prospector’s unconscious body away. A tow truck took the Geode away a little bit later.
Nickasun thought he should try to get some sleep and maybe in the morning the excavation team could get him out of this hot dog. There weren’t any soft surfaces inside the hot dog stand. As he fretted about how he was going to sleep in these surroundings, he became aware that the exterior scenery was gradually morphing from a nighttime street scene into a daytime, green, dewy field scene. The hot dog stand was rolling along a narrow blacktop path in the midst of a parade of hundreds of marching police officers. Had he fallen asleep without realizing it? When he looked closer at the field he saw countless stone markers covering it. Must be a cop funeral.

The two cops closest to Nickasun’s viewing window were chatting during the procession. One was the fat, disgusting cop who had arrested Nickasun. The cop turned toward the hot dog stand and Nickasun ducked below the serving window.

“What can the British do exactly?”
“Nothing, Jankowski, that’s what. They hold no sway. Ever see a Britisher? Tea, crumpets, tight irregular clothing, uncoordinated, high prissy voices – the sight is almost too gay for words. Ugly as sin, too, by all cultural standards.”
“Yeah, I was gonna say – the ugliness is what really stands out to me. How can they do anything looking like that?”
“Aren’t you listening, Jankowski? I said they CAN’T do anything looking like that.”
“Shitface should be more concerned about the blacks and the greasers. Is that what you’re saying?”

Nickasun remembered someone talking about Shitface at some point, but he couldn’t remember the context.

“Punchy is the one to worry about, Jankowski. The Italians are discreet; we hardly get any charges to stick to them. Nigger X’s boys, on the other hand, we put behind bars almost every day. Poor management, poor judgment – you know how it is. It’s why you don’t see many black quarterbacks.”
“Could be their poor aptitude for quarterbacking leads to their downfall. You could question them about the British guy. See if they lay down any new leads.”
“Sometimes I wonder what you’re doing as a policeman, Jankowski. How do you draw a connection between a British guy killed in Frog Town with the blackrican underworld? Italians and Brits makes more sense. Similar colored blood.”
“It’s the Negrosun cards, sir. The name sounds black to me, similar to the word ‘Negro’. I’d put my money on Black Town.”
“Hmmm, hadn’t thought of that. There’s hope for you yet, Jankowski. I suppose we could raid The Banana Tree and Jigaboo Lounge.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it that around the black officers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’d call it Black Town. They seem OK with that.”
“Is this some kind of effeminate offense-taking? The Banana Tree and Jigaboo Lounge are the names of Nigger X’s nightclubs. The blacks, you should know, have been co-opting pejoratives all over the place, just like all the ethnico-religico-homogay groups do today. It gets to be you don’t know what is or isn’t an insult anymore. Back in the 1940s, you knew what words to use when you wanted to be hostile. Today it’s about as clear as a muddy, God damn lake.”

The procession came to a sudden halt. Officers murmured questions to one another regarding what was going on. The most common question Nickasun heard was “What’s going on?” He cautiously poked his head up and peered through the wire mesh at the officers. The blue-dressed people – more like “Blue Man Group”, Nickasun cleverly thought – at Nickasun’s left parted to make way for a small, fierce man whose uniform was more decorated than the others. At his side was a serious-looking man with sunglasses and a large mustache. They were front and center in Nickasun’s viewing window.

“What is the meaning of this?” the small man said. He was glaring at the fat cop. It seemed as though it was not an uncommon way for him to look at the fat cop.
“This? This is the terrorist vehicle from the Zinc collapse. Why?”
The small man reddened, sort of a regular amount of face-reddening you get from frustration and anger. Not a super amount of red or anything.
“Glasgow, I’m tempted to call you a stupid son of a bitch, but I have more respect for the fallen officers we’re here to honor today.”
“Chief?”
“I know WHAT this is, jackass! I want to know what it’s doing here!?”
“It’s a reminder of the day when the officers died.”
The chief rubbed his brow. “Yes, I’ll give you that. It sure IS a reminder. The wives and children of eight S.W.A.T. members remember it, I’m sure. What was your intent – to honor a terrorist?”
“Oh, no sir. Not at all. It’s like Jesus.”
The chief’s eyes popped open cartoonishly wide. He nodded his head; not in agreement, but to urge the fat cop to finish his thought.
“People wear crucifixes to remember Jesus, right? Sure, a crucifix killed him, but the symbol is a reminder to keep the faith in knowing what they do is right. This truck and hot dog stand is our crucifix. It’s a reminder that what we do is right and important. They say ‘Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.’ Well, for Christians and heroes, it’s whatever DOES kill us that makes us stronger. Never forget.”
“Oh, of course! I don’t know why I didn’t see that before!”
“Yeah, the truck driver saved people, too, just like Jesus did.”
Nickasun could see that the chief’s piss was brought to a boil by the comment, but he wasn’t sure the fat detective could see it.
“Then let the PEOPLE have this blasted ‘crucifix’! By my count, that lunatic didn’t save any of us! Four police were killed when he knocked that building down, and the four trapped in the rubble will likely be dead in the next couple days!”
“The citizens actually had more casualties at Zinc than we did. There is that silver lining, sir.”
“You there!” The chief was now talking to the driver of the vehicle. “Taggert, is it? You’re the partner in crime? Get out of there, and get over here! NOW!”
Taggert, an ugly man with a bulldog face, entered the movie Nickasun was watching.
“I was just following Asscock’s orders, sir.”
“Tell me, at any point did the stupidity, the astounding dunderheadedness of this project, or the insensitivity to the victims’ families ever strike you?”
“Yes, sir. I balked at first, but then Detective Asscock yelled at me and told me Detective Shitface would take his fists and demote my, quote-unquote, ‘pug-fugly face down to fug-pugly’. And if I continued to question his authority, he’d ‘further bump my face down to butt-fuckly’.”
The chief turned to the mustache man. “Is this true? Would you have debased his face, had he not complied with Glasgow’s orders?”
“No sir,” the man said through an unsmiling mustache. “I wouldn’t have known the criteria for the face levels mentioned.”
“I didn’t think so. Would you say, Taggert, that Glasgow’s decision to bring this terrorist truck to the funeral was fatter than most decision-making?”
“Sir?”
“You know – fat, tubby, corpulent? Would you say it was a fat swine of a decision for Asscock to cart this thing alongside the bodies of men you’ve worked with, men you were friends with?”
“Yes, I suppose it was somewhat fat. I guess.”
“Fatter than this man before you, you think? This heap of cholesterol who barely fits into his uniform?” The chief grabbed Glasgow’s belly from both sides and shook it.
“It’s hard to say, sir. They’re like apples and oranges.”
“Maybe answer how you think I want you to answer.”
“Yeah, the decision was fat. Gloppy even.”
“Now compare to the fatness and gloppiness of Detective Glasgow, if you please.”
“Um, I don’t know if you want me to say the decision is fatter or Asscock is. Can I just say that both of them are real fat, grossly fat and gross, so fat that neither Asscock nor the decision would ever attract a women without payment, and that each is actually MUCH fatter than the other, in sort of a paradox?”
“That will do perfectly, Taggert! Bravo!”
“You forget who you’re talking to, Taggert!” Asscock said, face sweaty, pink, fat, embarrassed and fat. “I’m your superior!”
“Not anymore!” said the chief, laughing. “I’m promoting Taggert to detective, effective immediately. You’re equals now!” The chief laughed some more. The mustache man continued to look serious.
“Oh yeah,” Asscock said. “Well, hear this, Taggert. Interesting face you have there. Looks like your neck farted and you accidentally shit a little bit. No one would shit out such an ugly face on purpose. You’re so stupid, though, that you would try to fart with your neck on purpose. The shit part wasn’t intentional but the fart part was. ‘Fart part’ rhymes, further humiliating you.”

The chief, seemingly happier than he was earlier, started spewing out more words. “Taggert, your assigment, your SOLE assignment until I say otherwise, is to track Glasgow. Where he goes, you go. Don’t talk to him. In fact, stay a few car lengths behind him and out of sight whenever possible. It’ll annoy him more that way.” He clapped Shitface on the shoulder. “Sorry about this, detective. I know you’re his partner. That’s the breaks.”
Asscock said, “Sir, I don’t need a babysitter. I’ve been at the job for over twenty years now. I know how to police.”
“I DON’T THINK YOU DO!” Everyone jumped back at the chief’s sudden rise in volume. Except for Shitface. He was as still and menacing as ever. Like a gargoyle, Nickasun thought, a purple-faced gargoyle. “Glasgow, whenever we find a slippery seal, a handcuffed innocent, or a shit-covered gun, you’re not too far behind. Putting someone on your ass is something I should have done a long time ago. As for the rest of you,” the chief addressed the officers, “feel free to tattle on Glasgow for even the most minor of violations. Could be a cigar or a promotion in it for you.”

The chief reached inside his uniform and pulled out a cigar. He lit up, took a knee, and silently smoked it. He seemed to be done with Asscock, funeral processions, and anything else besides that cigar for now. The twenty or so officers in the vicinity shot the shit while all the other officers continued to stand in formation. This went on for about ten minutes. Then the sea of officers on the right side of Nickasun’s viewing window began to ripple as someone made his way through it. It was a red-bearded man wearing a DeKalb hat and a green John Deere jacket.

“’Scuse me, sir. Don’t mean to be rude, but can y’all get a move on or get out the way? We need ta get ta our service.”
The chief eyed the man up and down, visibly bothered by this man’s interruption of his cigar break. “Where’s the fire? Do you have twelve confirmed dead officers and four pending dead to honor on this day, too?”
“No sir. I don’t mean to dishonor your sacrifices. Just we gotta get to our funeral is all.”
“Who died?”
“My pop.”
“What did he do for this country, soldier?”
“He were a butcher, sir.”
“I see. Well, if we move for the butcher, then we gotta move for the baker and candlestick maker, too, don’t we?”
The cops laughed.
“No sir. Probably not. Their funerals is this afternoon.”
“Come again?”
“Greg, Jerry, and my pop were the ones got killed at Haystack Days.”
“One of them’s a candlestick maker?”
“Yes sir. Jerry Burkhardt. Good friend of pop. It were actually one of his candlesticks what led to their demise. Acted as a lightning rod for the Jacuzzi they was trying out. Terrible tragedy.”
The chief rose to his feet, palpably annoyed by this conversation.

“Alright, Rub-a-dub-dub, get back with your group and wait your turn. We’ll inter our heroes when we’re good and ready. Then you folks can have free reign of the place. Tell the candlestick maker’s family he should have known better than to mix business with pleasure.”
The cops laughed again.
“All respect in the world, sir, but my pop was a hero ta me, and Jerry’s family sure think highly of him, too, just as your dead were heroes to you. I respect yours. Sure would be nice ta get some respect from you in turn.”
The chief was a lot shorter than the farmer, but he did his best to get up in his face. “Did your pop die fighting terrorists?”
“No sir. He were a butcher.”
“Yes, so you said. Well, you see all these hearses? They contain the bodies of men who died protecting your pop’s freedom not to protect people like him. In the last several days, we’ve had our own die from building collapses, rocket launchers, shit-asphyxiation, the kinds of deaths heroes die while protecting this great nation of ours. It would do you well to remember the names of those who aren’t here so that you could be – Simmons, Dent, X, Mylar, Hoffman, Keats, Rolfman–”
“I’m here, chief.” An officer raised his hand.
“Officer Rolfman? What are you doing here? Your name is on the program.”
“I noticed that. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything.”
“What’s in the casket supposedly containing your body?”
“I don’t know, sir.”

The chief looked annoyed again. Jeez, he sure got annoyed a lot. Nickasun hoped they’d wrap up this one-act play pretty soon and go to their funeral. He was getting bored. Then he remembered that he wouldn’t have anything to watch once they left, so he became sad. Both options were unappealing.

The chief got back in the farmer’s face. “Anyway, don’t talk to me as if you understand heroism. Heroism is putting your life on the line to save others and to make everyone’s life better. Your pop didn’t do that by cutting meat or fraternizing in hot tubs.”
“Respect again, sir, but I think it take all kind of heroes. Those on the front lines do their part and so do them working ta make daily life better by bringin’ some small parcel of happiness to this difficult world.”
“Don’t you see that some life choices are more honorable than others?”
“I ain’t so sure about choice. Man’s more like a machine ta me. A man does what he wired ta do. Some’re wired for the fight, some’re wired for the equations, and so forth. Each has his own set a skills.”
“What about a criminal, pal? A burglar – does he have any choice in his actions? HOW ABOUT A PEDOPHILE?!”
“Not at bottom, I don’t think. They make decisions, sure, but underneath it all is chemistry. Don’t seem ta me one could act against their design any more than could a ‘frigerator or TV.”
“So nobody’s at fault? We should open our prisons and release all the jack-rollers and thugbuggerers?”
“I ain’t sayin’ that. Just have some understanding is all. Respect, again, sir.”
“But just so we’re clear – you think the pedophile who diddled my sister’s kid is worthy of the same respect as the late Sergeant Briggs, the man who two months ago rescued seven people from a tenement fire all by himself because the firetruck was held up in traffic?”
“I just think everything’s gonna unfold the way it unfolds is all. People gonna do what they designed ta do. Ain’t nothing nobody can do about it. Same science move the policeman as what move the peder-phile.”

The chief looked around. “There aren’t any cameras here, are there?” When the general muttering indicated that there weren’t any, he said, “Everyone crowd in close just in case.”
The nearby officers closed in around the chief and the farmer like an anus tightening up after squeezing out a loaf. Nickasun felt like he better go the bathroom soon.
“Well, sir, I’ve had enough of your defeatism and disrespect for God’s bravest souls. You say all events are unavoidable and totally blameless. Then I am truly sorry there is no way I can help myself from saying this. Detective Shitface, please demote this man’s face.”
The gargoyle moved so swiftly Nickasun almost missed him. His fist cracked the man square in the face and he dropped out of Nickasun’s sight behind the huddled officers. The officers dispersed and reestablished their procession formation.

The chief moved back to the head of the line and everyone resumed marching. The truck and hot dog stand remained motionless. Hearses cut around it on the grass. Soon Nickasun was left with nothing to see but the farmer lying in the grass. He woke up five minutes later and stumbled off. The butcher’s funeral procession came through about a half hour later. Later in the day came the processions for the baker and candlestick maker. Then not much activity after that. Then it was dark. Nickasun wondered if he was ever going to get out of this hot dog stand. Might as well get some sleep, he thought.

By Dr. Gonzo Kablaa

Shitface stood in a damp basement. It smelled like a mixture of flour and blood. He prodded the body of the man on the floor and shined his flashlight on his face. Then he looked back at the ID and note card he had taken from the body, the latter of which had Shitface’s name and contact information on it – that is, it said “Shitface”, not his real name. A note was paperclipped to the to the body with instructions stating “Leave package in a conspicuous alley, attach Negrosun card.” He turned to Detective Dover.

“Who is Johnny Hall?”

*****

Shitface stared at the woman in front of him through his reflective sunglasses. “What did the British wonk want?”

The woman shook her head, and replied in a heavy French accent. “I ahm sohrry, but ahz I ‘ave told zee ohther office-airs, I ‘ave never seen zis mahn bee-foe.”

Shitface let his glasses slide down on the bridge of his nose so that the woman could see his eyes. Then he grabbed her cigarette and stubbed it out on the counter. “Ma’am, Detective Dover tells me the dead British guy outside walked out of your pastry shop directly before colliding with Detectives Dover and McCracken. That means either Detective Dover is lying, or you are lying, and my detective’s intuition says that the smart money is on you.”

The woman put her hand to her chest and worked up a taken-aback facial expression oozing with falsity. “Comment osez-vous! Zis eez intolairable! How dare you call me a lie-air, in my own shop! Get out!”

Shitface leaned his face closer. He seemed to be turning a pinkish color. “Obviously, ma’am, the whole police department is wise to what happens here. Normally, I wouldn’t step in, because it’s trash killing trash, but this man could be central to an investigation I’ve got a lot of stake in, and that seems to threaten my very family’s long-term stability. My patience is running thin. Tell me who that man was, and what he wanted.”

The woman’s eyes seemed to widen in incredulity with each word Shitface said. “Zis eez a pastry shop! We sell pastries! Noh-thing else! GET OUT!”

Shitface grabbed the woman by her stupid scarf and pulled her closer to him. She let out some weird half-way cross between a scream and a whimper. The two employees milling around the shop immediately started running towards Shitface. Before the first one got to him, Shitface managed to turn around and hit him in the chin with a right uppercut, which had enough force to send him several feet into the air and flying backwards into the wall behind him. The other he grabbed by the throat with his left hand, using partially his own momentum to swing him around and slam his head down on the counter. Shitface’s grip was like a vise, and the man’s eye’s starting bulging. Shitface then drew his gun and pressed it against the man’s skull. He turned to the woman, who now appeared very genuinely terrified. Shitface was a Coca Cola logo red.

“Ma’am, I’ll ask this one more time. What did the British wonk want?”

*****

“Who is this guy?” Detective Shitface asked as he motioned to the corpse on the sidewalk.
Detective Dover shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought he might be British mob. Spoke in a British accent. I can’t find any ID, though. No gun, just throwing knives. And a bunch of business cards that say ‘Negrosun.’”

Shitface looked intense. He had come directly from the Zinc Enterprises scene, where he’d been for over 4 hours. All things considered, it had been a generally bad day for the entire police department. After the mysterious truck had crashed through the building and the hail of gunfire started, the collected group of officers present stood around like a bunch of shy schoolboys too nervous to approach a girl at their first dance. Shitface hated dancing. Even more so, he hated feet-dragging, shilly-shallying, dawdling, and pussyfooting. All the verbal and physical prodding he could muster wouldn’t get their feet moving, though, even after the gunfire had ended.

About 10 minutes after the gunfire had ended , one of the hostages had burst through a wall section, collapsing the portion he came through into diamondized debris. More came after him. Later interviews revealed the mysterious truck driver had walked through the building wearing some sort of mechanized body armor and a Plexiglas-type face shield, blasting away with an enormous assault rifle, and exploding various limbs and appendages of the Avatar shooters. The mysterious driver, later determined from witness descriptions to be Deputy Grutch, had seemed less concerned with saving hostages than exploding Avatar shooters. A good number of the hostages had died.

After another round of intense ass-thumbing, Hockley finally gave the go-ahead to send in an 8-man SWAT team. Approximately 30 seconds after they had stormed the building, however, the entire building had collapsed upon them in a spectacular display. At least four of the officers were still alive, as indicated by their screaming and/or sobbing. There was no auditory evidence that anyone else trapped in the ruins was alive, and the construction crew they consulted said it might take days to clear all the rubble.

Since there wasn’t much left that could be done at the Zinc Enterprises building ruins, Shitface had not felt it was important to stick around. He had arrived at his current location by himself. He didn’t need Asscock’s fat-ass spilling powdered sugar all over a potentially important crime scene, and he figured the other assorted officers could handle the 8-sided building investigation better than fucking up this operation as well. Shitface spoke again.

“What were you doing down here?”
“McCracken and I were chasing some two-bit criminal that might’ve been a lead in a robbery case. This guy stepped out, right in front of both of us, knocked us all down. Got up, started yelling, reached for a knife, so I shot him.”
“A knife? Could’ve left him alive.”
“I thought it was a gun at first.”
“Where’s McCracken?”
“Hospital, sir. During the initial tangle-up, he smashed his face pretty hard.”
“What’s this place the Brit stepped out of?”
“Pastry shop.”
“What, was he buying smokes or something?”
“No, it’s a French pastry shop. Message-sending service.”
“Right. What do the people inside say?”
“Claim they never saw him.”
“Do they?”

Dover nodded. Shitface walked over to the entrance and gave the door a good shove. It flew open and he stepped inside. He then looked around and took in his surroundings. Officers Lee, Campbell, Denson, and Sanders were already in the building, standing about and putting on their best show of being busy and constructively engaged. Two beret-wearing employees were cleaning various tables that were already clean, eyeing the officers suspiciously. The apparent proprietor, a middle-aged woman wearing a stupid scarf and smoking a cigarette, stood behind the counter. Shitface walked up to her.

*****

Detective Dover ran through the streets. He was in Frog Town, on the French side of it. In front of him of a ways was a suspect. His exact identity was unknown to Dover. He did know that he was running and that he was a suspect, and that was good enough for Dover. His partner, Detective McCracken, was about 20 yards behind him. McCracken wasn’t as fast or nimble as Dover was.

Detective Dover was starting to gain on the suspect when a door flew open and some bowler-hat-wearing asshole stepped right in front of him. Dover slammed into him and they both went down in a heap. McCracken, who was far enough behind that he should’ve been easily able to circumvent the two-man heap, instead tried to leap over the two men. Unfortunately, Bowler Hat Asshole started to get up just as McCracken jumped, and McCracken’s legs got tangled up. He flew forwards, his face smashing into a solid metal table, and he landed on the ground. Dover looked up to see the suspect run down some alleyway. He’d lost him.

“God DAMNIT!” Dover yelled.

Bowler Hat Asshole stood up and started talking, in a British accent no less. “What the fuck is this, then? What the fuck are you two cunts doing blazing through the streets like a couple of fag slaggers? Could’ve bloody well killed me!”

“A Brit?” thought Dover, “What’s a fucking Brit doing in Frog Town?” Dover stood up. He walked over to British, grabbed him by the tweed jacket he was wearing, and threw him up against the window of the pastry shop.
“And just who the hell are you, you British wonk? WHY DON’T YOU LOOK WHERE YOU’RE GOING?!”

British shoved Dover backwards. “Look where I’m going? I walked out a fucking pastry shop, you pusty shank! I should smack round a time or two, the kind of sauce coming from your gob. You know who I am?”

Dover pulled his badge out and shoved it in the Brit’s face. “You know who I am, you fairy British fuck? Detective Dover. And you just fucked up a major bit of police work. I should haul you downtown right now.”

British waved his hand dismissively and snorted. “On what charge?”

McCracken continued to lie on the ground. He had cracked his head pretty hard, and he appeared to be unconscious. “Obstruction of justice,” said Dover, and then pointed to the unconscious McCracken, “and assaulting a police officer, asshole.”

“For leavin’ a fucking pastry shop? That’ll be the day. Now fuck off then, before I call a barrister’s knot down on you and your department.”

British then made a move to walk past Dover. Dover responded by punching British in his smug British face. Then he grabbed British by the shoulder and punched him in the stomach three times. When he was good and incapacitated, Dover grabbed a handful of his tweed suit in both his hands and threw him violently into the tables off to the side, causing various tables and chairs and dishes to fall to the ground, and creating a busy array of crashing, smashing, glass shattering, and various other sounds.

British stood up, blood streaming down his face. He looked angry. He reached inside his tweed jacket. Dover assumed it was a gun he was reaching for, so he drew his own and put three rounds into British’s chest. British fell backwards and collapsed on some more tables, causing another round of crashing and shattering. Dover put his gun away and walked over to McCracken. He nudged McCracken with his foot.

“McCracken. Wake up.” McCracken lied there motionless. “McCracken, goddamn it.”

Dover walked over to British’s corpse. He got on one knee and started searching him. The first thing he found was that British wasn’t reaching for a gun, if the cell phone in his hand was any indication. Whoops! Dover was a quick draw, but he was also jumpy. He had been that way ever since that crackhead had gotten the drop on him. No bother. He checked to see if British actually had a gun, but all he found was some throwing knives. Throwing knives? What the fuck was this – 16th century Italy? “Whatever,” Dover thought, “throwing knives work just as well.” Dover stood up and looked at the gathering crowd. He’d have to get rid of them before he got down to further police business.

“Nothing to see here, folks.”

The crowd continued to stand there staring. “Nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen. Please disperse immediately.” The crowd continued to stand there staring, like so many deer in headlights. “Goddamn it,” Dover thought as he drew his pistol. He fired a round that hit its mark about six inches from one of the crowd member’s feet. That got them moving.

When they were all gone, Dover kneeled down again and placed a throwing knife in the Brit’s hand. Then he kept searching the body, preferably for any form of identification. He couldn’t find anything, though. No driver’s license, no picture ID, no ID of any kind. Just throwing knives, a money clip with about $400 that Dover pocketed discreetly, and a credit card with “Money Card” as the name on it. In his right inside pocket of his jacket there were a whole slew of business cards. Dover took a look, hoping to find a name. All the cards said, all every card said, was “Negrosun.” “Jesus Christ,” he muttered under his breath as he threw the cards on the ground. He took out his cell phone and dialed a number. A voice on the other end started speaking.

“This is Shitface.”

“Yeah, this is Detective Dover. I’m in Frog Town and I’ve got a dead Brit here, jacket’s full of cards that say ‘Negrosun’ on them, figured you might want to be apprised of the situation.”
“Negrosun?”
“Negrosun.”

*****

“Excuse me, I think you might be in the wrong place.”

The man spoke in a heavy British accent. “British?” Johnny thought. What the hell were the British doing in Korean Frog Town? There weren’t many Brits in the city to begin with, and the ones that were here usually stuck to Flying Aces Pub. It took Johnny some time to compose himself enough to respond.

“What?”

The British man moved his face closer to Johnny’s, and he began to speak in a lower voice. “I think you’re in the wrong place. You’re looking to have someone put off, right?”
“Put off?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what the means.”
“You know, put off. Blacked out. Swatted down. Put into recycling.”
“What?”
“Christ, mate, not one for innuendo, eh?” He quieted his voice even more.
“Killed. Murdered. Assassinated. Made dead. Permanently–”
Johnny looked around to see if anyone had heard that, and put his hand on Tweed’s shoulder to move him off to the side of the counter.
“Ok, ok, I get it now. What makes you think I’m trying to have someone killed?”
“Not my business. But you’re in the wrong place for that kind of thing.”
“This is a pastry shop, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but this is a Korean French pastry shop. In Korean Frog Town. You need to go to a French French pastry shop, in French Frog Town. This place will only sell you pastries and otherwise legal but normally heavily taxed goods on the illegal black market. Like cigarettes. Or a tog of gin.”
“Shit.”
“Never done one of these before, eh? Dangerous business, friend. I’d watch your back.”
“What?” Johnny shook his head. “Look, if you’ll excuse me, I should probably be going.”

Johnny walked toward the entrance of shop and slammed his hand on the door to push it open. He apparently forgot that he had pushed the door to get inside, so all that happened is that he bent his wrist and walked into the door with his face, hitting his forehead and his nose. Then he grabbed the door and yanked it open, storming out with a mixture of humiliation and rage. Tweed followed close behind him.

“Hey mate, don’t worry ‘bout it. Tell you what, I’ll show you the way to the right shop.”
Johnny turned to face Tweed. “Why are you so willing to help me?” Tweed shrugged. “We’ve all been there, ‘aven’t we? All started somewhere. Come on.”

Tweed starting walking across the street. Johnny followed him. Tweed talked as he walked. “See, even if you’d gotten the right shop, they’d disregard you right quick the way you fumbled around in there. You’ve got to get in and get out. Got to at least look like you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, they’d dismiss you all and out as some rookie wanker who don’t know right from left, or some slagging undercover.”

They reached the other side of the street and started walking on the sidewalk. “How do you know about any of this? You work for the British mafia or something?”
“Strict ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy around here, mate. Not the gay kind, either. Get what I’m getting at?”
Johnny shrugged. “Sure.”

They arrived at the storefront of a pastry-looking shop with tables out in front. The windows were reflective to the point that they appeared to be mirrors. A man with a beret was standing outside smoking a cigarette. Tweed held the door open for Johnny, who walked in. Tweed followed close behind. The first room consisted only of a counter, where you apparently placed, received, and paid for your orders. There were two more doors, one marked “Employees Only” and one marked “Dining Room.” Johnny looked to Tweed.

“What am I supposed to say when I get up there?”
“It’s easy. I can demonstrate, anyway. Got a bit of it to take care of myself.”
Johnny shrugged. “Ok.”

Tweed walked up to the counter. “Can I get a cream-filled croissant?” Tweed snapped his fingers, “With a decaf café latte.” Johnny couldn’t see it, but Tweed winked once at the woman behind the counter. “Real killer weather out there today, that’s the say so.” He slipped a piece of paper across the counter. The woman behind the counter took the paper and looked at it. She pushed a button behind the counter, and the two doors not marked “Employees Only” made a locking sound. She then took out a silenced pistol out from under the counter and shot Johnny three times, twice in the chest and once in the head. Johnny fell to the floor dead. Tweed looked over his corpse.

“Sorry mate. Made it a little too easy, eh?”

Tweed threw a card on top of Johnny right before three French men materialized to remove the body. Two men quickly grabbed Johnny and dragged him through the door marked “Employees Only” while the third mopped up the blood his corpse left behind. The whole process took about 15 seconds, after which the woman behind the counter pushed a button unlocking all the doors. Tweed turned around and walked towards the exit.

*****

Johnny Hall waited in line. It was a long line. A long, boring line. It was all made worse by the fact that he didn’t want to be in line at a pastry shop. He didn’t want to be in a pastry shop at all. He sure as hell didn’t want a pastry, but more unfortunately than everything else, pastries were not the reason he was in line at the pastry shop. Johnny was there to order an assassination. Of a police cop. This was something he had no interest in doing. But, he had been ordered to do so by Mr. X.

So there Johnny was at a pastry shop. To get somebody killed. It all seemed ridiculous to him. But that’s how it was these days. Everything was done out in the open but underneath the figurative surface of things, instead of being done explicitly but behind closed doors and within the figurative shadow of things. Most shops in Frog Town were a front for some kind of criminal activity or another. Tobacco shops covered gambling, coffee shops covered gun running, hardware stores covered a large portion of the city’s cocaine trade. And assassinations were covered at pastry shops. For the most part, the city government allowed such activity to occur, because it was done in an orderly manner. And it kept the downtown sector thriving. Wal-Mart didn’t offer a convenient one-stop location for shopping and criminal undertakings.

What you were supposed to do is walk into one of these shops, and through a series of innuendo, complicated code words, winks, and body language, order whatever illegal activity package you were looking to get. There obviously weren’t any menus (for the illegal things). And there certainly weren’t any Yelp reviews. LOL! Actually, there were Yelp reviews, but reviews were written in the same kind of innuendo and code speak that everything was ordered in. Like “The chips were a bit ‘salty’ and the ‘cheeseburger’ lacked craftsmanship. Do you get what I mean? Wink, wink.” Johnny wasn’t familiar with any kind of this shit. He worked for criminals that committed crimes, he didn’t commit them himself. When he got up to the counter, he was clueless. The Korean woman behind the counter spoke to him, sounding impatient and annoyed.

“What you want?”
“Oh. Uhhh…” Johnny had spent most of his time on the way over trying to think of what the code would be. He was clueless.
“Order quick!”
“Could I get the…uhhh…‘killer’ blueberry scone?” Johnny gave the woman a couple winks.
“What you mean? We no have that.”
“Could I get…the…‘deadly’ special…?” Johnny ran his index finger across his throat as he said “deadly.” “This is fucking dumb,” he thought. But he didn’t know where else to go with this. The Korean woman started talking angrily. “What, you stupid? Look on menu. Order from menu. We have what on menu.”
He leaned over the counter and started talking in a whisper. “Listen, I’ve never done this before. I don’t know all the code words. I need someone killed.”

The Korean woman smacked him in the face with a rolled up newspaper. “What you talk about? We no kill anyone. Sell pastries. Look at sign.” She pointed angrily to a sign that said “PASTRY, ONLY PASTRY.” Just then, someone tapped Johnny on the shoulder. His nerves were already badly wrangled, and this wasn’t something he was expecting. He turned around quickly, stumbling back across the counter and knocking several items on the counter to the ground. For a brief period, he thought it was somebody Mr. X had sent to kill him. He had suspected for the past week Mr. X wasn’t happy, and thought this job might be some sort of set-up. The man facing him didn’t look like any employee of Mr. X, though. He was dressed in a tweed suit and a bowler hat, with a brief case in one hand and a newspaper tucked under the same arm.

*****

Johnny Hall had worked for Mr. X for 27 months. He was an enigmatic figure. Mr. X, not Johnny. About seven years ago, Mr. X had begun rapidly acquiring property, monopolized the black market for prescription pharmaceutical drugs, and took control of over half the city’s dope corners. His metaphorical hand exerted sizable control, and his only real rival was Don Puncinello. Nobody knew much about Mr. X other than his name. And Mr. X’s name wasn’t even really Mr. X. At least, not the “Mr.” part. His self-developed moniker was actually Nigger X. The newspapers and police cops originally referred to him as “Nigger X” when he was an up and coming black criminal, as that was the name he had himself chosen. However, Nigger X had sued the entire city for hate speech, and he had won. Big time. In fact, the proceeds from that lawsuit acted as a large portion of the seed money that had financed Nigger X’s criminal empire expansion. Nigger X now owned a good portion of Black Town.

Johnny worked for Nigger X mainly as a sort of gopher. He got coffee, pizza, dry-cleaning, whatever the mid-level black gangster criminals wanted. A lot of other gophers seemed to want to move up in the criminal empire. Johnny wanted to stay a gopher. The pay wasn’t all that great, but the work wasn’t all that hard, and gophers usually didn’t end up all shot and dead. He got some flak for being white, but he didn’t care.

Work was usually pretty boring. Get this, get that, nothing more. Just the way Johnny liked it. Yesterday, though, he had run across Stevie Jam at Club Diggity Bomb (no connection to the energy drink). Stevie Jam was a DJ by night, but one of Nigger X’s enforcers by day. Even though it was night, Stevie Jam had taken time out of his busy DJ schedule to talk to Johnny for Nigger X. He told Johnny he had a mission for him that would advance him within the criminal empire, even though Johnny was adamant about his burning desire to not have a mission and to not advance in the criminal empire. It had been an unpleasant conversation.

“Nigga X need you to ice someone.”
“Oh, come on! Even if I wanted to advance, straight up to killing? No way. I couldn’t kill anybody. I’ve never even fired a gun before.”
“Listen to yo white ass, thinking we trust you to ice someone yo damn self. Nah, man. You be hiring someone to do it. Hit up one a dem pastry shops in Frog Town, they take care of it all.”
“Who’s going to be killed?”
“Dis a popo job, straight up. Muthafuckin’ supa cop been sniffing around in some wrong-ass places, need to be put down. Detective Shitface or some shit. Mustache-wearing mutafucka. Think you ken handle that? Ain’t nothin’ much, and Nigga X ‘preciate it, know what I mean?”
“Why don’t you just do it?”
“Yea, muthafucka, and why ain’t I get my own dry cleanin’, too? You some kinda stupid.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Always have choice, cake daddy. Do what Nigga X say, or get dead.”

Johnny Hall looked glum.

By Crag Dakkins

“Looks like a trail of blood.”
“Seems to be.”
“Goes into the storm drain, it appears.”
“I would say that’s a good assessment.”
“Agreed. Sums up the situation pretty well.”
“Male or female blood, do you suppose?”
“Well, blood all looks the same, doesn’t it? But I’m veering toward male. You know, since the trail came from that firefight. Women don’t tend to get involved in firefights. They don’t crawl into sewers very often either.”
“Thoughtful analysis.”
“I was going to say the same thing.”
“Blackops probably.”
“Black Ops? You think the CIA is involved?”
“No, not Black Ops.  Black…cops…blackops. Officer Eye Patch, to be specific.”
“Oh, right. Do you think the blackops were Black Ops?”
“Hiding in plain sight behind a pun? I don’t know.”
“How did he fit down the storm drain?”
“It’s a tight fit. He’d really have to cram.”
“A lot of blood. Think he’s dead?”
“Can’t see a body. You need to see a body. Or an integral part of a body. Like say the top half of a head. If you see something like that you can safely say the rest of that person is not alive somewhere, regardless of how healthy the rest of their body is.”
“True. The blood by itself doesn’t say much about death or lack thereof.”
“Lack of death would be life, wouldn’t it?”
“Correct.”
“OK, good. I got confused because I don’t think of life as a lack.”
“Yeah, it’s not intuitive, is it? Words can be deceptive.”
“Yeah.”
“How about when someone says ‘I have nothing’? Doesn’t make any sense, right? ‘Nothing’, by definition, does not exist, so how can you have it?”
“True, true.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but you’re right. It really speaks to this situation here.”
“How so?”
“It seems like we have nothing to go on, but then you got all this blood here and the sewer down there. Those things are something.”
“Oh, good point.”
“So are we sure this is even blood? Could be oil.”
“Could get someone in the lab to verify.”
“Could be some joker made this trail. Steering us on the wrong path. Playing us for a bunch of chumps.”
“Seems like more effort than it’s worth. We should maybe assume it is blood.”
“I agree.”
“Yeah, good thinking.”

Jenkins, O’McTally, and Rico went round and round. Nobody wanted to go down into the sewer, but they all knew someone should. Jenkins was the commanding officer, but Episode 5, Chapter 3 of the Police Procedural Videos strictly prohibited officers from forcing subordinates into adverse climates such as sewers, burning buildings, and rooms with descending spike-covered ceilings. Each man in the trio hoped one of the others would man up and volunteer to take a stroll along the Underground Shit River to see where the blood goes, so the others could get to the rapidly crumbling building at 12th Street and Industrial Way. Instead they talked in circles and slowed traffic with all the cones they set up around the storm drain.

Rico saw a way out. A college preppie type rolled by in a white BMW. Daddy’s BMW, Rico thought.
“Would you look at that!?” Rico said. The kid was drinking from a bottle. “I’m on the motherfucker!” Rico hopped in his car, turned on his flashing lights and siren, and sped off.

Jenkins sighed. “Fine, I’ll do it. We have to finish sometime today.”

O’McTally understood what he meant, even though they hadn’t openly discussed what had to be done.

Jenkins dropped flat on his face and attempted to pull himself into the storm drain. He turned his head sideways and managed to squeeze it in a few inches before he couldn’t go any farther.

“A little help please?”
O’McTally put his foot on the back of Jenkins’ head and pushed. And pushed. And pushed. Jenkins groaned as his skull compressed. Then came the high-pitched girl-shrieks. O’McTally stopped pushing.
“Sir, we should get someone to open a manhole cover. Easier to get in that way.”
“Nonsense. This entryway is already open. Plus, I’m past the point of no return now. I couldn’t pull my head out if I tried.”
“Then I suggest we approach this problem like ripping off a band-aid – if you catch my meaning, sir?”
Jenkins thought about this. He had suffered a lot of head trauma lately.
“Go ahead, officer. The damage has already been done.”
O’McTally raised his foot, carefully aligned it with the back of Jenkins’ head, and then brought it down with as much force as his Irish soccer-hooligan legs could muster. Jenkins’ head disappeared into the dark and his face smashed into the wall directly under the storm drain slit. Old wounds were reopened and new wounds were incurred. The blow to the back of his brain damaged Jenkins’ occipital lobe, blurring his vision slightly. Dick hallucinations were now harder to see – which is not to suggest they were going away, but now they didn’t have the veiny clarity they once had.

Meanwhile, a couple blocks up the street…

Officer Rico pulled the kid over by a Starbucks. He approached the white BMW, ticket pad in hand. Rico was Puerto Rican, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him: He was 6’4” with blonde hair and blue eyes. You wouldn’t necessarily know it if you knew him either: His hobbies included drinking heroic amounts of ale, eating bratwursts until vomiting, and playing rugby. Rico’s parents were dark-skinned and short, more reminiscent of the Mexicans of the Caribbean than their son. He had asked them numerous times, but they insisted he was not adopted.

“License and registration please.”
“What was I doing wrong?”
“License and registration please.”
“Can’t even look at me when you talk to me? Typical. Just writing the ticket. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
“I’m not going to say it a third time.”
The kid handed Rico his license and registration.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“No, that’s why I fucking asked you. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“Best to keep a cool head in these situations.”
“What’d I do? I didn’t do anything!”
“Are you aware of the open bottle law in this state?”
“Open bottle? You mean this?” The kid held up his bottle of Naked Drink juice, Mighty Mango flavored.
“Yes, sir. It is against the law to drink a beverage while operating a motor vehicle.”
The kid looked at him incredulously. His face was entirely lacking in credulity. No credules present. CREDless.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?! There’s no alcohol in this!”
“Cool your jets. The law pertains to ANY beverage. Amount of alcohol present is immaterial.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! Naked Juice doesn’t hurt my driving ability!”
“Let me tell you about the Bobby Parsons Law, in effect since 2020. Young Bobby, age 16, and his friends cruised the neighborhood one night. They drove by a parked officer at 30 miles per hour. Nothing special about that speed, the officer thought, driver had his hands at the 10 and 2 positions, just some straight-shooter kids practicing some safe driving. The boys were all drinking Gatorade, which the officer noted was also not dangerous or out of the ordinary. These kids drove around for another hour or so, still rather modestly – none of this whooping it up, revving the engine, whipping shitties, yelling at pedestrians, or other things the kids like to do. Surveillance cameras would later show them wearing their seat belts, correctly using their turn signals, and making full stops at stop signs. All was going well, you know, until it wasn’t. They were crossing at a four-way stop in a residential area when a Chevy truck going 120 miles per hour blew through the stop sign and slammed into the passenger side door of their car. Seat belts be damned, Nature seemed to say, as all the boys were ejected from the vehicle. One boy flew through the living room window of someone’s house. Dead. Another was violently thrown into a sewer drain where his head became irrevocably wedged. Dead. Young Bobby Parsons was thrown into a pregnant woman who was pushing her daughter along in a baby carriage. Quadruple dead or triple dead, depending on your views of prenatal beings. The pregnant woman was cleanly decapitated by Parsons’ upper body. Parsons’ high-velocity foot hit the baby carriage handle, flipping it backwards a perfect 360 degrees in about a quarter-second. In this brief time, the carriage’s canopy, which had a wire skeleton, ripped full through the woman, scooping out her baby belly like so much ice cream. When all was said and dead, the mother stood there, upright, gutless, and headless, braced against the baby carriage. The carriage was back in its original position, but now in addition to the baby girl, it contained a three-month-old fetus and much of the mother’s GI tract. The fetus died from exposure; the baby suffocated from inhaling too much blood and viscera. Chevy driver was dead, too. Sad shame it all was. And now the investigations started. Who was to blame in this cruel world? The Blood Alcohol Content was checked for the Chevy driver and Parsons. Chevy driver was at twice the legal limit. But this had nothing on Parsons. Parsons was at FOUR TIMES the legal limit. Seems the Gatorade the boys were drinking was LOADED with vodka. When the mothers of all the dead found out about this, they were furious. If Parsons hadn’t been so incredibly drunk, they argued, he would have avoided the less-drunk driver. Hard to argue with that, seeing as how drunk he was. The mothers blamed the officer who had seen the boys drinking out of Gatorade bottles for not pulling them over to check them for booze, and they spent the next year working the politicians over to get the open bottle law more inclusive. In the end they were successful. No more drinking, of any kind, in cars. If you ask me, it’s a victory for Safety. And that’s why I pulled you over. Make sense now?”
“You guys are fascists. Next you’ll take away our right to breathe.”
“I don’t make the laws. I just enforce them. Take it up with your congressman.”
“Unthinking swine.”
“$300 fine.” Rico handed the kid a ticket.
“Fascist. What’s the purpose of the police nowadays? Nobody causes trouble anymore – everyone’s locked into their own worlds of internet music, video games, and 3-D Choosies – yet the new bullshit laws still keep coming. It’s like you gotta make your quota of arrests each year.”
“Are you sure you want to go this route?”
“Are YOU? You don’t need to give me a ticket for bullshit. Fight the power, man. You got a brain of your own. Use it.”
“You’re right. I do. Sit tight.” Rico walked back to his car. When he returned he was carrying a device that looked like a radar gun.
“What’s that?”
“I assume your car is fully electronic? That the doors and windows only open via the car’s computer?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Roll your window up till it’s open only a crack. You gotta be able to breathe.”
“Dude, what are you gonna do?”
“DO AS I SAY!”
The kid eyed Rico suspiciously while rolling up his window most of the way.
“This is an EMP gun. When I do this…” Rico pointed the gun at the car and pulled the trigger. It made one brief bleeping noise and the lights in the Starbucks on the other side of the car turned off. “…then your car doesn’t work anymore. Circuits are dead. Go ahead, try starting your car or opening your door.”
The kid tried starting his car. Dead. He pressed the door switch repeatedly. Dead.
“YOU MOTHERFUCKER! THIS IS MY DAD’S CAR!”
The kid looked at his cell phone and watch. Double dead.
“BIG FUCKING MAN, AREN’T YOU!?”
Rico laughed. “I didn’t want to do this, but you kept pushing me. When will you punks learn that arguing doesn’t do any good. Have you ever seen an athlete change a ref’s mind by acting like a jackass? Same principle here. I was going to let you off with a warning, but now a truck will be by later to TOW YOU TO JAIL! I’d enjoy bringing you in myself but I’ve got a termite-infested building to attend to.”
“MY DAD IS GOING TO SUE YOUR BALLS OFF, PIG!”
“Almost forgot. I can legally brand your car now.” Rico went to his car and retrieved another gun, his branding gun. It had a cornucopia-shaped barrel, like a blunderbuss you’d see in cartoons. Rico pressed the barrel against the left rear side of the car and stamped a bright red, dinner-plate-sized letter A on it.
“YOU FUCKER!” the kid shrieked, tears forming in his eyes.
Rico approached the window, pointed fiercely at the kid, and said, “The ‘A’ stands for ‘Asshole’!”
It most certainly did not. The “A” stood for “Arrested”. The mark warned the community that a driver of the vehicle had been arrested at some point. Gangbangers wore their marks proudly, viewing a car stamp as a rite of passage into manhood.
Rico got in his car and headed toward 12th Street North. He planned on letting the kid remain entombed for several hours before he made a call to the station.

Meanwhile, two blocks back…

A crowd had gathered to see a cop kicking what appeared to be a civilian down into a storm drain. Many people were taking videos with their cell phones.

Both of Jenkins’ shoulders were underground, and both were now separated. His rib cage was mostly inside and most of his ribs were cracked or outright broken. O’McTally had taken to kicking parts of Jenkins’ body that didn’t even need to be tenderized. For example, there was no need for him to break his shinbone.

Jenkins had almost reached his pain threshold, the crossing of which would knock him out, but he squirmed and sucked in his gut and pulled as determinedly as ever. O’McTally yelled a lot to motivate Jenkins. “Get in there! Get in there GOOD! Get in there! Get in there GOOD!” Kick! Kick! Kick! Kick!

Each jolt of pain brought stars to Jenkins’ eyes. Every time O’McTally said “Get in there GOOD!” Jenkins briefly hallucinated O’McTally shouting the same thing to a group of naked men. Jenkins had a floor’s eye view in these hallucinations. He didn’t know what to make of these.

Finally Jenkins’ torso was fully underground and O’McTally easily stuffed his legs down into the hole. Jenkins fell, bounced off a foot-wide concrete ledge, and splashed into the filthiest river he had ever been in. In the next second, he reflexively rose like a cornhole-colored Phoenix and flopped his battered, fecal self onto the ledge. Somehow, despite all his pain and broken bones, and the next minute’s constant vomiting, he was able to pull himself to his feet. He turned on his flashlight, rubbed the shit off the light as best as he could, and examined the corridor. The blood trail followed the ledge alongside Shit River. Jenkins found a lever next to his head right beside storm drain opening. It took all he had to raise his arm above his separated shoulder, but he managed to reach it and pull it down. The bottom of the storm drain opening clanged and dropped about six inches, producing an incline at the opening he could have easily slid through. Too bad he hadn’t seen that before. Hindsight is 20/20; current sight has occipital lobe damage.

Jenkins limped along Shit River, aiming his flashlight at the blood trail and trying to stay conscious. Everything was fuzzy with a slight gold halo around it, but it was better than seeing dicks.

The blood trail ended at a padlocked steel door labeled “Maintenance”. Someone had spray-painted “Fe” at the beginning of the word in silver letters. “Iron Maintenance?” Jenkins thought.

Shooting the lock was out of the question. Shit River had ruined Jenkins’ gun. However, the mass of the gun had remained intact, and its poundage was all Jenkins would need. He poundaged the lock with the butt of his gun until it broke.

Jenkins opened the door to the DARKNESS WITHIN. He fumbled along the side of the wall to find a light switch. No way he was going to overlook valuable levers this time. His body got broken last time he did that. He found a switch and lit up the room.

It was a small room with two cots, a video camera on a tripod, and a stack of shoeboxes. Medical  supplies littered the floor – bandages, gauze, hypodermic needles, First Aid kits, mini First Aid kits inside of normal First Aid kits, First AIDS kits (popular among the Blackrican-American set), assorted pills. Much of the bandages and gauze had been used, and were rolled into a tumbleweed of fabric, blood, and pus. Jenkins sidestepped this bloody abortion to look for more sanitary clues.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Nine shoeboxes,” Jenkins counted. The shoeboxes were stacked in a column in a corner. Time to take inventory. Jenkins thought it would be easier to start with the box on top and work his way down, rather than vice versa.

Box One = Nine overripe, black bananas and two pornographic comic books about Blackrican-Americans titled “Dem Doin’s!”, dated 1931.
Box Two = Fifteen cell phones. Police badges for Traay’an’jan “Eye Patch” Smith and Muhammad “Unlucky Cat” X the X. (That is, “Muhammad X the Tenth”. To further clarify, he was NOT the tenth generation of Muhammad X’s. Think about it – that would reach back in history to ancestors living before it was fashionable for blacks to cast off the names inherited from slave-masters. No, he was named Muhammad X the X because of the ten different daddies he had while growing up. His momma thought that’s how the numbers in boys’ names worked.)
Box Three = Eighteen packages of Newport cigarettes
Box Four = Jewelry. Mostly ostentatious – necklaces with large gold chain links, oversized crucifixes, silver dollar-signs, bejeweled gold bananas, and other ornaments. A couple of those gold and silver covers the blacks put on their teeth.
Box Five = 9mm ammunition.
Box Six = Lined thick with “Negrosun” cards. Three rows of cards stacked on top of another three rows of cards.
Box Seven = Puzzling organic material. Looked like a hybrid of soil, moss, and dreadlocks.
Box Eight = Several of what appear to be surveillance photos of Nickasun – getting a lap dance at Club Blue Balls, examining rocks at an excavation site, walking down the street, playing saxophone at a club, etc. Also photocopies of his driver’s license, bank statements, birth certificate and…death certificate?
Box Nine = Forty-five unlabeled DVDs.

Jenkins removed the video camera from the tripod, set his weary, battered bones on the cot, and grabbed a random DVD from Box Nine.

The movie opened with a shot of the very cot he was sitting on. A slightly fat, 40ish woman in a bra and panties entered and took a seat. When she looked at the camera, Jenkins recognized her as Mayor Schulberg’s wife. An off-camera voice said, “Dayummmm, shoatie!” and Mrs. Schulberg smiled shyly. The two blackops walked into the frame with their big dongers hanging out. Eye Patch looked at the camera and said, “Watch an’ learn.” The blackops tore the bra and panties off the mayor’s wife and penetrated her from both ends – Unlucky Cat dongered her doggy-style and Eye Patch dongered her mouth. Jenkins watched for about ten minutes and three sexual positions, then he switched to another DVD. Same deal – girl walks in, sits on the cot, “Watch an’ learn”, and then the blackops copulate with her. This girl was Chief Hockley’s attractive, 20-something daughter Tracy. Cops liked to make lewd comments about Tracy when Hockley wasn’t around. The next DVD had both of Mayor Schulberg’s daughters. The girls seemed to enjoy each other more than the blackops, but that’s not to say they didn’t like having the blackops’ proboscises inside them. Next disc was a city councilor’s wife. Following that was another councilor’s wife. Jenkins whipped through the next four discs because they were people he didn’t know; however, the dark-haired, voluptuous Italian woman with the cigarette caught his eye and interrupted his investigation for a half hour. Janine, the police dispatcher, was on the next disc. This disappointed Jenkins because he had a crush on her. There was something about seeing her moaning with pleasure from the two big, black dicks simultaneously shoved into her that made Jenkins’ heart sink. Following this were three more discs of women he didn’t know.

Then he got to the Grand Daddy Video. Jenkins had seen this woman only one other time, and then, as now, he feared for his life simply by seeing her. Back at the police station there was a framed 9/11 poster in one of the offices depicting the moment the second plane struck the World Trade Center. At the bottom of the poster it said, “Why We Fight”. And below the type Jenkins noticed a very faint arrow pointing down, an arrow only the most astute observer would see. Ever since he was a boy Jenkins had a predilection, an addiction, for solving mysteries. And the arrow on this poster gave him the curiosity itch. In perhaps the most daring move of his life, Jenkins removed the poster from its frame one night. Just as he suspected, there was something on the other side of it. It was a sentimental photograph of a smiling, happy family sitting at a picnic table on a bright, sunny day. A father, mother, two daughters, and one son. Jenkins looked at the photo for five seconds before deciding that was enough. His body quivered as he frantically reassembled the poster and frame and hung it back up. Now he was looking at the mother from the photo again, through the eyepiece of a video camera in the (Fe)Maintenance room in the sewer. The mother appeared to be as happy as she was in the photo, but this time it was less about the joys of family and more about the joys of getting her anus and vagina stuffed at the same time by the two blackest cops on the police force. If Detective Shitface found about this, the odds were good that he would not repeat the rarely seen (once-seen?) happy and carefree face he had in the photo hidden behind the poster.

Meanwhile, at the intersection of 12th Street and Industrial Way…

A barricade of squad cars surrounded the ten-story Zinc Enterprises building. Officers shielded themselves behind their cars and had their guns drawn and locked on the building’s murder holes. Five civilians lay dead near the building, some riddled with bullets. Dozens of filing cabinets and desks had been forced through the deteriorating walls and smashed apart on the sidewalk below. Eight-sided diamond debris was everywhere. From an upper floor a gunman with long black braids and a light-blue latex body suit poked out of a hole to spray machine gun fire down at the cops. Shitface, Asscock, and Rico hunkered down together behind a car.

“Where the fuck is Jenkins?!” Shitface fumed.
“I think he went in the sewer to look for Eye Patch,” Rico shouted over the gunfire.
“He said this building was ‘crumbling’ at a spectacular rate. Bastard sent us into a firestorm without warning. I may have to CRUMBLE his face later. More than it already is.”
“Not Jenkins’ fault, sir. That was all the info he had. I was there when he took the call.”

A filing cabinet burst through the fifth floor wall and dropped to the ground amid a shower of diamonds made of steel, plastic and marble.

Officers exchanged fire with three blue-suited men with machine guns. A fourth blue-suit appeared and fired a rocket launcher, exploding two cop cars and turning the six nearby officers into screaming piles of fire.

“This is the real shit,” Shitface said excitedly.
“Yeah,” said Asscock anxiously.

Chief Hockley crouched over to Shitface.

“Just talked to their leader on the phone. He says they want to cut a deal.”
“Tell them to fuck off?”
“Someone told them Zinc Enterprises was loaded with diamonds.”
“Looks like it is.”
“Yeah, the leader said his men were promised guns, ammunition, and the location of the motheringest mother lode of diamonds in the country under two conditions: 1) That they wear Avatar costumes when robbing the place, and 2) That they rob it sometime this week.”
“WHAT kind of costumes?”
“Avatar. Movie from a few years back.”
Shitface’s eyes narrowed. “Some old greaser geezer kept trying to push Avatar merchandise on us today. Did he say who their weapons provider was?”
“No, but he said he would if we give them a helicopter. He said they didn’t plan on hurting anyone. Inside men at Zinc were supposed to help them get the diamonds and get out. When it turned out there were no inside men or diamonds, one of their Avatars went crazy, started killing people. The leader said they have ‘taken care of’ that guy and they’re willing to be civil now.”
“They don’t seem civil. I recall one of them exploding several officers AFTER you got off the phone with them and walked over to me.”
“Probably just an aftershock.”
“If it was, it was bigger than the earthquake. No officers were dead before that.”
“We have to comply. We can’t match the Avatars’ firepower, and they have hundreds of hostages inside. They’ve got to be pretty upset, getting played like they were. No telling what they might do if we don’t work with them on this.”
“Diamonds, diamonds everywhere, but valueless in Zinc.”
“You can see how this could make them mad.”
“Avatars got the form but not the content.”
“Yes.”
“Who owns this building?”
“I don’t know. Is that relevant?”

Suddenly the Johnny Cash song “Folsom Prison Blues” TORE THROUGH THE AIR! Shortly thereafter, a jeep/Hummer/tank-like vehicle pulling a hot dog stand barreled up Industrial Way, knocking cars off the road and sending pedestrians scattering. The music became deafening as the vehicle ROARED closer. Hockley, surprised and terrified out of his skin, knee-jerkedly shouted, “KILL THAT THING!” The police turned their guns on the vehicle and battered it with bullets for ten long, hot, smoky seconds, doing nothing more than giving it a dimpled, golf-ball-like texture. Officers dove out of the way as it RIPPED through the cop-car barricade and RAMMED through the front door of Zinc Enterprises, coming to a stop after most of the hot dog shaft had penetrated it. The floors of the building caved into a slight “V” shape above the point of impact. Everything was quiet for a second as the officers set their sights on the visible portion of the hot dog stand, which was under a mound of diamonds and dust. Then the sound of gunfire, rather exceedingly explosive gunfire, GRATUITOUSLY LOUD GUNFIRE, came from inside the building.

“Hmmm,” Shitface said.

By Dr. Gonzo Kablaa

Nickasun was getting tired.  Very tired.  His adrenaline rush had long since dissipated.  He had been driving for 14 hours, and was well outside of the city.  Well away from Shitface and Asscock, well away from dead Eye Patch and dead Unlucky Cat and dead cab driver, and well away from Negrosun.  There were 13 voice messages on his phone.  He wasn’t inclined to check any of them.

His brain really hadn’t come to terms with the fact that he had seen three people murdered.  Well, he hadn’t SEEN them being murdered, but he had been in very close proximity to three people being murdered.  His brain hadn’t come to terms with that.  The murder proximity.

When he had first started driving, he had thought his heart would never stop racing.  Every time he saw a police car, a new shot of adrenaline was pumped into his veins.  But none of them seemed to notice him.  Maybe the police weren’t after him.  Or maybe they just hadn’t gotten the word out yet.  How far would he have to drive before they didn’t look for him, if they were going to look for him?  Would they look for Nickasun in Pittsburgh?  These thoughts no longer lent themselves to energizing paranoia.  They had transformed into a consistent gnawing anxiety, constant but much more dull.

Pursued or otherwise, Nickasun was extremely hungry in addition to being tired.  His paranoia had faded enough and he figured he was a safe enough distance away to stop for some food.  He took an exit promising a Wendy’s, thinking a cheeseburger and fries would really hit the spot about now.  All he had eaten the entire time he’d been driving, and really ever since the pancakes Grutch had bought him, was some chips he bought at his last gas stop.

When he got closer to the restaurant, he noticed it was the only restaurant off the exit.  In fact, it was the only building off the exit.  It was surrounded by grass and fields and trees.  Just one fast food restaurant sitting in the middle of nowhere.  Not that this really mattered to him, as long as it had edible food.  And no Negrosun.

He parked and walked to the door.  When he entered the restaurant, he saw it was completely empty.  And there appeared to be only one employee working.  A tall, scraggly looking man, probably mid to late thirties, with shoulder length hair and a goatee.  When he got up to the counter, the lone employee spoke to him in a genuinely friendly tone, with a weird sort of trailer park drawl.
“Welcome to Wendy’s.  Can I help you?”
“Yeah.  Can I get a number three?”
The employee shook his head apologetically. “Nope.”
“Oh.  Ummm…why?”
“Outta beef.”
“You’re out of hamburger meat?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.  How about a chicken sandwich?”
“Sorry.  Outta chicken.”
“Fries?”
“Nope.”
“You’re out of fries?  What do you have?”
The employee shrugged. “What do you want?”
“What’s available?”
“Lotsa things.”
“Ok.  How about a Frosty?”
“We’re outta Frosty.”
“Well…what things does your restaurant HAVE?”
“We have hamburger, chicken nugget, baked potato–”
“You said you were out of hamburgers.”
“Outta beef to make ‘em.  They’s on the menu, though.  That’s what Wendy’s have.”
“Do you have baked potatoes?  You know, currently available?”
“Sure do.”
“Give me three baked potatoes then. Sour cream and chive.”
“Anything else?”
“What else are you not currently out of?”
“Well, only other thing we got right now is donuts. You want some donuts?”
“No.”
“Tell you what.  On account we’re outta hamburger, two donuts on the house.”
“No thank you.”
“You don’t like donuts?”
“Not really.”
“Who don’t like donuts?”

Who didn’t like donuts?  Well, NICKASUN didn’t like donuts.  Why was this guy trying to push donuts on him anyway?  Wendy’s wasn’t even SUPPOSED to have donuts.  He was very tired and very hungry, and this guy was making some sort of Spanish Inquisition about Nickaun’s taste in food?

“I just don’t like donuts.  I hate donuts.  I don’t even want to be near any donuts.  I fucking hate donuts, and I don’t want any donuts, ok?”
Nick’s tirade had no noticeable effect on the employee.
“You seem like you’re havin’ a bad day.”

“This guy has no idea,” Nickasun thought.  He hadn’t eaten in almost two days except for some potato chips.  He might very well be a fugitive from the law.  His apartment and all his things had been turned into cubes.  And then there was dead Eye Patch and dead Unlucky Cat and dead cab driver lying around dead at Clue Blue Balls.

“Yeah.  Listen, I’m sorry about snapping at you.  Can I just get a Diet Coke with the potatoes?”
“Things probably ain’t as bad as you have ‘em out to be.”
“What?”
“Things probably ain’t so bad.  You wanna hear a story?”
“What?”
“Got a story.  Make you feel better.”
“What story?”
“Story with a point.”
“No…no thank you.  Just the potatoes and the Diet Coke.”
“Once, there was a conductor.  A train conductor.”
Nickasun gave him a confused look. “What?”
“The story’s ‘bout a train conductor.”
“Listen, I’m sure it’s a good story, but–”
“He had worked as a train conductor for over 26 years.  Never wanted to be a train conductor, though.  Not when he started, and less so every year.  But when he was in his 20’s, the opportunity presented itself, and the money was decent.  So he became a train conductor.  Always thought about switchin’ jobs, or going back to school, but he didn’t want to risk a steady income.  Too risk averse.  See? Always thought he’d just do it later.  Every year, he become more and more miserable.  What’s the word?  Stagnate.  He stagnated.”
“Is this like a metaphorical story or something?”
“This story illustrates a point.”
“What point?”
“I guess you gonna know when I finish the story.  Where was I?  Oh, right.  So this train conductor is miserable and depressed, and each year he become angrier.  Started doing things like yell at his wife and children.  Not to say his wife didn’t have it comin’.  Class-A Cunt.  When he was startin’ out, worked late nights to get the money and promotion, wasn’t around much.  She cheated on him, with some repair man or something.  He find out, she screams at him, say it’s all his fault, he’s never there, put his job above his family, he ain’t a real man, on and on.  So he resolved to put his family first.  Come home earlier, don’t work weekends.  Don’t get the promotion, his best friend does.  She fucks his best friend.  He finds out, she scream at him, say it’s all his fault, not enough of a man to provide for his family, he’s a worthless piece of shit.  When he takes to yellin’ back, she divorces him.  Take the house, take the dog, take everything.  He was happy at first.  Thought he was free now.  But there was alimony payment and child support payment and other things.  Expenses piled up.  So he stayed a conductor.  After 26 years, it was too much for his brain to handle.  One day, he’s collectin’ tickets, and he come across a business man.  Classic Wall Street Asshole.  Fancy suit, Harvard MBA, Rolex watch.  Kind of guy everyone love to hate.  Conductor ask for his ticket.  He says back, in a sort of hoity-toity way, ‘I forgot my ticket,’ and the conductor tell him ‘Well, that ain’t good.’  Business man say something back, like ‘Yeah, whatcha gonna do about it?’  You know, in a sort of talk-down Wall Street man kinda way.  Gone and fucked up, though.  Conductor loses his goddamn mind.  Balls to the wall.  Grabbed the business man, opened the door, and threw him under the train.  Damn well dissected him at the torso.  Blood and guts everywhere, caused a mess all up on the tracks.”
“This isn’t real, is it?”
“What?”
“This didn’t actually happen, did it?”
“It don’t matter.  This story is about the point.  Don’t matter whether it happened or not.  So, the business man is good and dead, ‘cause he’s two halves.  And the train authorities are fumin’, because now they’ve got customers being cut in half and that doesn’t look good.  Police are called in, and the conductor is arrested.  They charge him with murder.  He claims insanity, says he severely depressed and whatever.  The jury ain’t buyin’ it, though.  Not about to let him off the hook for some ‘depressed insanity’ defense.  Gets the hammer brought down on him.  Gets the chair, too.  Death sentence.  And, well, he makes his appeals, held up for a time, but his big day comes.  On your big day, they ask you what you want your last meal to be.  You know, like ‘Hey, you dying and all, but we’ll get you a good meal.’  Seems dumb, if you ask me, but I guess they figure a shitty last meal would be too much of a ‘Fuck you’ from society, so they get to choose.  He says ‘Bananas’.  They ask ‘Bananas?  Anything else?’ and he say ‘No’.  ‘You want a banana shake, or a banana split, or what?’ ‘No, just a couple bananas.’  So they get him bananas, and he eats his bananas.  After he’s done, they bring him to the room, strap him down, and read him his last rites.  They wait till midnight, and throw the switch.  Nothin’ happens.  The technician check the chair, everything seems fine.  They throw the switch again.  Nothin’.  This might not sound like a big deal, but ‘cause of a loophole in the laws or something, this guy now technically dead, cause they threw the switch.  So, since he technically dead, he technically served his sentence.  And they have to let him go.”
“Wait, what?  They let him go?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“That doesn’t sound right.  They wouldn’t just let you go if you didn’t die.  This didn’t happen, did it?”
“I told you, it don’t matter if it really happened.  What’s important is the point.  You ever read a book before?  You the type of guy to read ‘Crime and Punishment’ and ask yourself every two goddamn paragraphs if it really happened?  The point is the STORY.  So, anyway, they let him go.  And he’s trying to get his life back together, you know, attend church and shit, but it ain’t going so well.  No one wants to hire him, cause he killed a guy.  Funny thing, though.  Train industry is goin’ through a conductor shortage.  All they’s conductors dyin’ or retirin’ and no one wants to become a conductor.  It get so bad, they’re looking for anyone.  They call him up and offer him a job.  Now, they put him through psychotherapy first.  You know, make sure he still ain’t all fucking psycho nuts.  And first couple months, they keep someone with him to watch, make sure he don’t take and throw someone off the train again.  But he’s fine.  Does his job just fine.  Don’t cut anyone in half.  Couple more months go by.  Nothin’ happens.  Well, they ain’t about to pay some guy to stand around and watch him when nothin’s happening, so they let him work alone.  Couple more months.  Now the job’s gettin’ to him again.  Every day, loses it more, ‘til one day, he’s asking a sweet old lady for his ticket.  She apologize, says she forgot it.  SNAP.  Conductor don’t hesitate a second.   Grabbed her and threw her under the train.  Got her legs cut clean off.  She don’t die right away, but she bled out.  So, he’s arrested again.  And there’s a news frenzy.  What the hell this guy doing workin’ as a conductor again when he already killed someone?  Gets charged with murder again.  Convicted again, death sentence again.  His day comes, and they ask what he want as a last meal.  He says ‘Bananas’.  Then they figure, this guy ate bananas last time, maybe that has something to do with him not dyin’?  Sounded stupid, but after he ate his bananas they wash his hands and made him brush his teeth, just in case.  And this time, they double check the chair and everything else before they strap him in.  Same executioner as last time.  Flip the switch.  Nothin’.  Flip the switch again.  Nothin’.  They check everything again, but nothin’s wrong.  They can’t do nothin’.  So they have to let him go.”
“They let him go again?”
“Yeah.  Now stop interrupting the story.  So they let him go, and he can’t find a job anywhere.  Gets to be that he’s homeless. Drunk, penniless bum.  But he’s actually the happiest he’s been in years.  No more being a conductor.  Just drink the day away.  Drink, puke, drink, sleep.  Not a bad way to live, to his mind.  But then, things get worse for the train companies.  The conductor’s union go on strike.  There aren’t that many to begin with, and now they’s none.  The law requires conductors.  Trained conductors.  Otherwise, no trains.  So they need scabs.  They call up retired conductors, fly in conductors from around the world, put people through ultra-quick conductor programs.  Ain’t enough.  Trains at a standstill.  They’s desperate.  They call up the conductor.  Actually, they call his ex-wife.  He got no telephone, so they can’t call him.  His ex-wife finds him, and she put the guilt trip on him.  You know.  ‘How you gonna provide for your kids and help pay for their college and all when you’re a fuckin’ loser drunk?’  The conductor loves his kids.  So he cave in.  Train company puts someone to watch him again.  And they don’t take him off after a couple months this time neither.  They ain’t risking that.  The strike continues, his job continues.  One day, the guy watchin’ him is in the shitter.  Wasn’t gone long.  Another guy supposed to take his place, but he’s busy on account some old man took a diarrhea shit all over one of the aisles.  Passengers are flippin’ out, he’s trying to calm them down, trying to figure out how to clean this shit up.  Shit, actual shit, keeping both guys busy.  So he’s off on his own.  He sees a little boy, ‘bout 4 years old, and asks him for his ticket.  Little boy says ‘I ate it’.  The conductor snaps.  Opens the door, grab the little boy by his legs, and starts bashin’ him against the outside of the train.  Got like retard strength or somethin’, but instead it’s balls to the wall psycho strength.  Brutal.  Then he ties a rope around the kid’s neck, throws him out, drags him behind the train.  Parents find him, conductor says he still gotta charge half ticket price for rope seating.  Mother started screamin’, dad started gettin’ violent, conductor cracks the dad across the jaw with a monkey wrench.  Mother pays the ticket fee, conductor drags the kid back into the train.  Bones all broken, skin peeled off, all bloody.  Dead as hell.  Real sick shit.”
The fast food guy shook his head as if to indicate that it really was, in fact, sick shit.  “Anyway, he goes back to court.  Judge threw the book at him.  Literally threw a book at him.  Judges don’t like tri-homiciders.  Not at all.  Goes on death row again.  Last day.  What’s he want?  Bananas.  They can’t turn his request down.  State law and all.  Reasonable requests granted.  And what’s more reasonable than some bananas?  But this time, they ain’t fuckin’ around.  After he eats the bananas, they go to town.  Make him brush his teeth, gargle mouth wash.  Take his clothes off, spray him down with a high pressure hose, douse him in disinfectant, exfoliate with steel wool, scrubbed down, scrubbed down again.  Scrub-down they gave him might’ve been worse than the actual killing part.  Remove any trace of banana on this guy.  They check the chair, hook-ups, everything, again and again.  They test the chair out on a monkey they went and got just for this execution.  PETA hippies threw a fit, but they do it anyway.  Chair fries the monkey well and good.  So they strap this guy in.  Same executioner.  Midnight hits.  Executioner flip the switch.  Nothin’.  Flips it again.  Nothin’.  Executioner start flippin’ it back and forth like crazy, no result.  Finally, the executioner loses it.  He’s seen this guy three times.  Should’ve been dead twice before, can’t figure out what the fuck is going on.  Starts screaming at the guy.  ‘WHAT THE FUCK!?  GODDAMN COCKSUCKIN’ CUNT SHIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THE BANANAS?!’  He says back, ‘I just like bananas.’  Executioner scream ‘THEN WHY WON’T YOU FUCKIN’ DIE?!?!’  He looks at the executioner, and he says–”

*****

Nickasun woke up in his bed.  “Boy,” he thought.  “That conductor story I heard from that fast food employee while I was driving to Pittsburgh a vague and ambiguous amount of time ago sure was stupid.  I’m glad it’s the year 2047 and I’m President of the United States of America now.”  He had run as a Rock Party candidate, a party of his own fashioning.  It had been a landslide victory.  Landslide.  Election victory reference + geology reference + Filipino reference.  ENTENDRE DOMINATION.

*****

Nickasun woke up in a hot dog stand.  Someone was banging on the exterior.  He looked out.  It was Deputy Grutch.  There was something strange about it all, though.  It wasn’t strange that Grutch was there.  This WAS his hot dog stand, so why shouldn’t Grutch be there?  No, there was something else about this that made it all not quite right.  Something more to it.  Perhaps it was the gerbils.  There were gerbils crawling all over Grutch.  “GODDAMN RETARD GERBILS!” he screamed.

*****

Chief Hockley woke up in his bed.  “Goddamn it,” he thought.  “What is with all these retard gerbil dreams?”

*****

Nickasun woke up on the floor in front of the Wendy’s counter.  There was a pillow under his head and he was covered with a blanket.  It took him some time to remember where he was.  “I must’ve passed out during that conductor story,” he thought.  The employee was looking down at him from behind the counter.

“You all right?”
Nickasun felt groggy and was still very hungry, but other than that, he felt ok. “I think so.  What happened?”
“You passed out right there on the floor.”
“How long was I passed out?”
“Maybe four hours.”
“Four hours?  You just let me lie here?”
“You looked real tired.  Figured you could use a rest.”
“Oh…thanks, I guess.”
“Feelin’ better?”
“A little.”
“Told you that story’d make you feel better.”
“Yeah.  How did it end?  I missed the end.”
“Oh.  Well, the conductor looks at the executioner, and he says ‘I don’t know.  Guess I’m just a bad conductor.’”

“You Make My Dreams Come True” started playing on the restaurant’s speakers.

By Crag Dakkins

When Sofia woke up this morning encased in her soft, smooth, creamy epidermis, she knew someone was going to ask her about Crag today. She could feel it in her boobs. Her fleshy boobs. They were shapely – like her hips and butt, but more mammary. Feminine softness was sexy to Sofia. Her doctoral thesis had been on her Theory of the Sexual Affinities Between Hards and Softs. Men are hard, women are soft. Hards don’t mash together well with other Hards because there is strong resistance. It produces sparks, like striking a flint. A Hard and a Soft mash together better because a Soft yields. Mashing a Soft with another Soft has the least resistance, and therefore this marshmallowy pairing is optimal and most common. It doesn’t always mean that sexual behavior follows the sexual interest, but it often does. Her research had shown it.

The two plain-clothes cops – a fat, sloppy one and a fit one in reflective shades – sat at a four-person table near the entrance of the deli. They both sat on the same side, an atypical seating arrangement that told Sofia they had seen her and wanted to be oriented so they could sneak peeks at her peaks at their convenience. Why wouldn’t they check her out? She was the kind of Soft that any Hard or Soft would LOVE to mash against. With her long black dress, her flowing, lustrous, black hair, and her notably clefty cleavage, Sofia was all of fifteen feet away from the officers in this compact, little deli. The short breadth allowed the officers a solid view of her body in all its boobily glory. She sat at a table, her bare foot set on the chair pulled up next her, causing her dress to fall into her lap to reveal the totality of that particular leg and part of her undergarments. She was smoking a cigarette, too, to complete the sultry Italian look.

“Come in! Come in!” Giuseppe said to the cops who had already come in.
“Take a seat!” he said to the already seated.
“I-a get you a sandwich! On-a the house!” They didn’t yet have a sandwich, so points for Giuseppe there.

Uncle Giuseppe was usually hot-tempered when he was working, all about the “Whatsamattayou”s and “I keel you!”s and the flogging of young male customers with his broom, but whenever the cops came in he overcorrected by becoming friendly to the point of stupidity.

Sofia knew the cops liked what they saw. The fat one especially. She preferred the not-fat cop because he wasn’t horrendously disgusting. He had a nice set of shoulders and biceps on him, and he looked like the type of man who could bifurcate a girl with his cock-thrusts – in a good way, not in a death way. He looked like he could pound a girl in the vagina and come out her butthole – again, in a good way, not in a disemboweling way. Sofia didn’t like the mustache, though. That would have to go.

“Here-a you go! The best-a we have!” Giuseppe excitedly slapped ceramic plates holding complimentary eggplant parmesan sandwiches in front of the officers so hard that they cracked down the middle. The cops didn’t seem to notice. They were too busy drinking in an eyeful of Sofia. Normally when persons did this, Guiseppe would grab his Polaroid camera, and get right up in the gawker’s face and snap a photo. Then he would grab his broom and alternately smack them with the broadside of it and poke them around the eye area with the bristles until they had no choice but to leave. The eye-crime perpetrators were banned from the deli for a month and their photos were posted behind the cash register. The close-up aspect of the photos made it hard to see more than an eyeball or a nostril, and the camera flash whited out most of the image, but Giuseppe was surprisingly good at identifying the banished whenever they tried to return.

“Oh, so you like-a my niece? She’s-a nice, right? Sexy time?” Guiseppe grabbed his Polaroid. But instead of going to the cops, he went over to Sofia and took a photo of her face.

“Here-a you go! A keep-a-sake on-a the house!” Guiseppe handed a bleached photo of Sofia’s right eyebrow to the officers.

Sofia rubbed her eyeball where it had been blasted with the flash. She loved her uncle like a daughter loves her father, despite the temporary blindness incurred whenever cops came in to eat. When she was five years old, Giuseppe had first played “Horsey” with her, bouncing her on his knee to help her forget about her family back in the old country. He continued to play Horsey with her over the years whenever she was out of sorts. When she was little the bouncing was on his knee bone, and over the years it gradually shifted up his femur bone, and by the time she was 16 she was bouncing on his pelvic bone. That is where Horsey had remained for the last 19 years. After Crag’s death last week, Giuseppe had consoled Sofia by bouncing her up and down on his pelvis all the live-long day. She could count on her uncle to make all her troubles go away. Most of the time, anyway. If a week or two went by without her uncle’s doting, Sofia would show up at the deli in her sexiest outfits and show off her goods to the customers. She didn’t know why she did it – she didn’t even know THAT she did it – she just did it. But she usually ended up playing Horsey afterwards, and that was all that mattered.

The cop with the mustache looked at the photo of Sofia’s eyebrow and tossed it aside. The fat cop looked at it and pocketed it. Then he whispered something to the mustache cop, and the two rose from their seats. They left their sandwiches and approached Sofia.

“Ma’am, are you aware that it is illegal to smoke in enclosed spaces or within fifty feet of an enclosed space?” Mustache Stud said.
“The window’s open. Hence, not an enclosed space, boss.” She gave him a wink and a smile.
Mustache sat down across from her; his fat companion expanded onto the seat next to him.
“We can get into a semantics war if you want, tits-for-brains. But I’d be willing to bet there’s a refrigeration unit in the back room, and under the law that would be an enclosed space, one you are within fifty feet of. My advice to you, smother that cigarette so this goes smoothly. I got kids and a wife to take care of, and, long-term, I can’t do that if I’m lying in bed with lung cancer; short-term, I can’t do that if I lose my cool here with you and end up doing something I regret. See?”
Mustache Stud took off his reflective glasses and gave her a stare that sent an icicle way up into the butthole of her vagina.

Sofia stubbed out her cigarette. She had read this cop wrong. This man was an enigma, one she couldn’t control with her wiles, feminine or otherwise. In this sense, he was like Crag, but he was more handsome and muscley than Crag, and, to use Crag’s words, he was “much more kill”. She hadn’t misread his dopey partner, though. Fatty sat there staring at her, mouth agape, water pooling underneath his saggy eyelids on his soggy, acne-scarred, jowly, raw hamburger face.

“Let me get right down to it,” Mustache Stud said. “What is Negrosun?”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Is your uncle the owner of this place?”
“I am. Hence the name ‘Sofia’s’.”
“Let me guess. Crag Dakkins left you this place in his will?”
“No, but I thought you might ask me about him.”
“Why?”
“A woman just knows these things,” she said, giving her boobs a playful pinch as thanks for their prognostication.
“How did you know him?”
“He was sort of a boyfriend.” She paused. “Kind of. It’s hard to give it a label.”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” said the fat cop, sweating profusely. “I’m Detective Ass…Glasgow.” He extended his hand. “I just want you to know that you can do much better than a sorry son of a bitch like him. Guy left lot of messes for us to clean up. He’s lucky he’s not alive or I might make time with him.”

Sofia shook his hand, and when she let go she saw that hers was now covered with horny sweat and Skittles residue.
“Crag didn’t leave any messes. If anything, it was the most courteous suicide ever. ‘Punctual’ isn’t the right word for his suicide, but it FEELS right to me.”
Mustache Stud put his glasses on again, seemingly so he could pull them down his nose and look at Sophie over the top of them.
“No messes, huh? Funny you should say that. I got a bunch of cubes, pyramids, a shit-spraying heating duct, fourteen hospitalized officers, two dead officers, one missing officer, three dead civilians, one missing civilian, and something called Negrosun that say otherwise.”
“You listed a lot of things.”
“How would you characterize your relationship with Mr. Dakkins?”
“Like I said, it was kind of hard to say. I’d visit him once in a while. He’d put in a movie and tell me to watch it. Then he’d watch me watching it.”
“Likes to watch, eh?” said Man Tits, laughing. “I know the type. Sicko sons of bitches.”
“It didn’t have the accompanying behaviors of someone who gets off on it. Believe me, I’ve been with that type. He would just sit next to me in the lotus position, and watch me watching the movie.”
“Did he have any friends or associates that you know of?” Mustache Stud asked.
“Other than me, no.”
“Did he ever talk to you about Negrosun?”
“He didn’t talk about much. He said he didn’t see much point to it since talking sounded like barking dogs to him. He was a writer mostly. He wrote lots of parables and stories.”
“Did he ever write anything suspicious to you? Anything about Negrosun or Nickasun or Club Blue Balls?”
“Those words don’t ring a bell. Most of his emails to me were perfunctory – setting up our dates and such. One time I emailed him a 30,000-word philosophical treatise of mine to open up a dialogue with him. His response was to mail me a 30,000-word HAND-WRITTEN essay where every word was ‘kill’. On the internet you can find his better writings with more diverse word usage.”
“No, I think we’ll be staying off the internet, thank you. We have more genuine places to be,” Lard Ass said. “Sounds to me like the computer boy couldn’t give a woman like you what you need.”
“Not true. Sometimes we would meet, and he wouldn’t be able to find a movie he wanted to watch me watch. He didn’t want me to come over there for no reason so…”
“Shit,” Tonnage said. “If you were my woman, the only time I’d watch you is when you’re watching me show you how to treat a woman right.”

Over the years, Sofia had become very good at masking feelings of disgust at others’ interest in her. It took all she had to do so now. She thought about unicorns, bubblegum, glitter, cell phone accessories, drinks with tiny umbrellas in them, and other favorite things.
“Crag didn’t have much of a sex drive. More of a sex walk. Doesn’t matter. That wasn’t what I liked about him.”
“What did you like?” Fat Shit said. “Sounds like a gay to me.”
“His intelligence. His writing. His unique perspective, which he said was neither unique nor a perspective. But the best thing about him, what was really sexy to me, was his uncanny ability to realistically depict women in his stories. It was like he could look inside our minds and see all the gears working.” Sofia paused. He ovaries were acting up again. It felt all ticklish in her uterus area! LOL!

“You know what my wife likes about me?” Mustache Stud asked. “That I bring home the bacon, that I pay the bills on time, that I fuck her till she doesn’t know what’s what. You know, REAL things. What are you doing with a deli? You sound like a college teacher.”
“I used to be one out east. We moved here to be closer to Crag. That is, my uncle and me. He’s the only family I have.”
“What was your field?”
“Psychology.”
“Oh,” said the Fat Retard. “Like Sigmund Frood.”
“Freud was a pervert who was largely full of shit. Not very scientific either. He made a lot of speculations about unconscious motivations that were, if you ask me, just plain wrong. We know much more about the human mind today.”
“You think you can read my mind, lady?” Mustache Stud glowered.
“I’m not a clairvoyant.”
“You abstract-thinking, college-educated types are all the same. Later in life you reflect on all the wasted years you spent inside your own faggy heads and up your own faggy asses and it’s too much to take. Then you put a bullet through your brain like Dakkins did.”
Fat Fuck turned to his partner. “Although we’re still assuming he might have been murdered, right?”
Mustache grimaced and waved as if he was trying to clear the air of what had just been said. “Jesus, wake the fuck up, will you?”
Gloppy looked dejected, defeated.

Sofia had conflicting feelings about competition, the attribute that is unique to males. On the one hand, witnessing the competitive drive in men made Sofia’s nipples lust-hard, as if two little gnomes were grinding their butts on her luscious boobs. This is how she felt while being grilled by Mustache Stud and watching him scold his partner. On the other hand, whenever she found herself in a competitive atmosphere, she wondered, “What’s wrong with just doing stuff for fun?!” Sofia knew that women are not intrinsically bad at chess, math, filmmaking, writing, managing, logic, etc. – in fact, sometimes they are quite good at these things – but when you throw those activities into an arena, women become flustered and can’t do them as well as men. Even in the feminine fields of cooking, fashion, and hair design, men consistently outperform women in our competitive, capitalist society. To take this even further, you could set up a competition between men and women to see who could be the LEAST COMPETITIVE, and men would win, simply because they would lose. It made Sofia angry and hot and bothered just thinking about it.

Giuseppe entered from the kitchen. “Look-a what I got for you!”
He was pushing a floating, golden, breadbox-sized cube at the height of his head out from behind the deli. The cube had a question mark on it. Beneath it a metal square moved along the ground on wheels, synchronized with the cube’s movements. The whatever-it-was emitted a humming noise.
“Lady, tell me quick what the fuck he’s doing or I will destroy him,” Mustache Stud said.
“It’s one of those things from The Super Mario Experience several years back. When they went bankrupt, they donated a lot of the question-mark blocks to Italian-Americans.”
“Why is it making that noise?”
“It’s a magnetic field. Just punch the underside of the cube. My uncle wants to give you a gift. The gifting blocks are an Italian tradition.”
“You do it, Asscock. I got a family to think about.”

Fattie stood up and cautiously gave the cube a gentle tap. When he didn’t die, he gave the underside of it a good fisting. The top popped open. A small speaker on the lower square made a computery noise and an item ascended from inside the box.
“It’s-a yours! You take!” Giuseppe exclaimed.
It was a poster. Fat Shit unrolled it.
“Avatar? What’s that – a movie? Why would I want this?”
“He must have heard us talking about Crag,” Sofia said. “Crag was obsessed with that movie. He gave us some of his Avatar memorabilia.”
“We don’t give a shit what movies the guy liked,” Mustache Stud said.
“He didn’t like it; he was OBSESSED with it. My uncle was just trying to help out.”
“Why couldn’t your uncle tell us this himself? Is his English a-not so good?”
“We’re legit citizens, if you’re implying otherwise.”
“What are you Italians doing operating on the north side. From what I hear, Don Puncinello would consider that a great offense. He’d think you were turning your backs on your people.”

Just then a uniformed Jew Cop walked in the deli. Sofia could tell he was Jewish by the usual signifiers. I won’t go into them here.
“Detective Shitface, sir, this building appears to be structurally sound. No evidence of Platonic Solids anywhere.”
Mustache Stud got a call on his radio at the EXACT SAME TIME as the Jew said this. The dialogue overlap caused destructive sound wave interference.
“Jenkins, repeat what you said. I got a Loudmouth Jew jabbering in my ear.”
“Sir, we got a dick call about a building breaking apart into diamond shapes, 8-sided diamonds, at 12th Street and Industrial Way. This one is crumbling AT A SPECTACULAR RATE!”
“North or South, Jenkins? FUCKING SPECIFY!”
“North, sir.”
“Take a few officers over there to check it out. By ‘a few’, I DON’T MEAN TWENTY! We’re on our way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mustache Stud turned off his radio.
“Schneiderman, you overthink things,” he said. “Your highly involved plus-this, minus-that, numerator, denominator bullshit brought us to this place, which is not crumbling into those Jew Shapes you keep talking about, nor was it owned by Dakkins. The crumbling buildings appear to be in a straight line, on eight-block intervals. If you had used common sense instead of your Mystical Jew Numerology we would be at the right place right now.”
The Jew Cop gulped. Apparently, he feared Mustache quite a bit.
“However, you really are a LUCKY Rat, Schneiderman,” Mustache continued, looking at Sofia, “Your egg-headed stupidity did us one good thing. Somehow your random-number gymnastics brought us to maybe the one person in this whole damn city who knew Dakkins personally. And somewhere inside that inferior woman-brain of hers, she has a clue that will lead us to Negrosun.”
“So Negrosun IS still our suspect in the Dakkins death?” Porky asked.
Mustache Stud ignored this. He said to Sofia, “Honey, jog that memory of yours. We’ll be in touch.”

The cops began to leave. The fat cop walked backwards so he could continue looking at Sofia as he did so. Giuseppe rushed up to them.
“Here, it’s-a for you! On-a the house!”
He placed an Avatar 10th anniversary plastic McDonald’s cup into Mustache Stud’s hand. Mustache Stud grunted and threw it hard against the wall. The cops walked out the door.

The cup-throwing force exhibited by Mustache Stud made Sofia wet, like she was secreting vagina juice or leaking boob juice down into her underpants. His power reminded her of horses, and horses reminded her of Horsey, and horses and Horsey reminded her of oversized phallic objects, and oversized phallic objects reminded her of regular-sized phallic objects, and those reminded her of penises, and penises reminded her of her own groin where the penis appeared to have been forcefully removed, leaving her with a gaping wound. Sometimes simply witnessing an act of power was enough to make her feel whole again. Oh weird, she thought as her eyes widened, Freud was right after all!

After the cops left, Giuseppe went into the back room and the deli became very quiet. They never got much business, probably because of all the broom assaults. Fortunately, Sofia wasn’t in need of money.

She felt the tadpole swirling around in her guts. Crag had warned her that she’d get really ugly as the baby grew inside her. All women did, he said. She worried about that. But he assured her that pregnancy was the pupa stage to becoming a butterfly. In the mutually parasitic mother-fetus relationship, the mother is much stronger than the fetus, so she siphons more Life Force out of the fetus than it can siphon out of her. After the pregnancy, and after she worked off the baby fat, she would become hotter than ever before.

Just a few days before he died, Crag told Sofia that he had big plans for their baby already set in motion. When she asked him what they were, he planted his face between her boobs and motorboated her for an hour and a half before telling her to go home. Whether the plans were for something heinous or brilliant, Sofia was curious to see them realized. She hoped that Crag’s death didn’t preclude that possibility. She also hoped the cops wouldn’t interfere with the plans as they investigated Crag for whatever they were investigating him for.

Much uncertainty was in the air and it gave Sofia a headache. She stood up, adjusted her bra, reapplied lipstick, and went into the kitchen. A surefire cure for malaise was just several hundred Horsey bounces away.

By Dr. Gonzo Kablaa

Sergeant Nozick was standing around in Detective Jenkins’ office.  He had been bored, and he had decided to ask someone about the Club Blue Balls collapse that happened yesterday.  So he walked to Jenkins’s office and found Jenkins.  Even though, all things considered, Detective Jenkins should’ve probably still been in the hospital.  In the collapse, he had broken two ribs, dislodged some ligament or something his spine, and had suffered some internal bleeding.  He was still urinating blood.  But the morning after, he was back in the office all the same.

Nozick wanted to hear all about the collapse.  It sounded like interesting shit.  Nothing interesting ever happened to Nozick.  Detective Jenkins, though, turned out to not be much help in the “compelling story” department.  He was hard to hear because of his injured jaw and the bandages, and anyway, he said he didn’t remember most of it.  Even stranger, Jenkins kept throwing the work “Dick” into his sentences, seemingly at random.  Like “The last dick I remember, fecal matter started spraying from a pipe” or “I woke up in a dick in the hospital.”  Nozick thought Jenkins might’ve been doing this intentionally as a joke or something, but Jenkins wasn’t laughing.

“Why do you keep saying ‘Dick’?”
“Saying what?”
“‘Dick.’ Why do you keep saying that word?”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.  I didn’t realize I was.”
“What’s that?” Nozick pointed to an envelope on Jenkin’s desk.
“I’m not sure.  After Club Blue Balls collapsed, I woke up in the hospital and I was clutching this envelope.  I was in the process of completing the paperwork to log it into evidence when you walked in.”
“Let me see it.”
Nozick held out his hand and Jenkins handed him the envelope.
“It says ‘Urgent’ on it and it looks like it was addressed to that Nickasun guy.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s open it up.”
Detective Jenkins shook his head. “No.”
Sergeant Nozick looked at Jenkins quizzically. “What?”
“We can’t open it up.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“To open it, we either need the permission of the addressee or we need a warrant of some kind.  Otherwise, it’s a federal offense to open mail.”
“What?”
“It’s a federal offense to open someone else’s mail.”
“Jenkins…are you fucking kidding me?  A building collapsed, on a bunch of POLICE OFFICERS, and there’s an envelope inside marked ‘Urgent,’ and it’s addressed to the guy who OWNED the building and who recently DISAPPEARED from police custody.  I think these are exigent circumstances.  I’m opening the envelope.”
“I can’t allow that.  I’m ordering you not to dick that envelope.”
“Order?  Jenkins, you’re a fucking detective FIRST RANK.  I’m a Sergeant.  You try ORDERING me around one more time and I’ll SLAP you around.”

Sergeant Nozick looked down to the envelope and started to open it.  Then he heard a gun cock.  He looked up to see that Jenkins had drawn his pistol.
“No, you’re not.”
Nozick drew his pistol too.
 “Jenkins, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DRAWING YOUR PISTOL FOR?!”
“I cannot allow you to open that envelope.”
“Jesus…it’s a fucking ENVELOPE, Jenkins.  There’s not even a fucking STAMP on it, Jenkins.  There’s not even a FUCKING ADDRESS on it, Jenkins.  IT’S NOT EVEN FUCKING MAIL, JENKINS!”
“Be that as it may, we must assume it was intended as a dick to be placed in the care of the United States Postal Service.”
“Jenkins, you put that fucking gun away.”
“I won’t allow wanton disregard of the law, Sergeant Nozick.  Not on my watch.”
“Jenkins, I’m going to open this envelope.  And then I’m going to read what’s inside.  And you’re going to put your fucking gun away, and if you’re lucky, I won’t PUNCH YOU IN YOUR JEW FACE!”
“Don’t open that envelope, Nozick. And I’m not Jewish.  I’m Dick.”

Nozick started opening the envelope.  Jenkins fired his gun.  He didn’t fire it at Nozick, though.  Instead, he fired it into the air to get Nozick’s attention.  It worked.  Nozick stopped what he was doing.  Instead, Nozick pointed his pistol at Jenkins.

“JENKINS, YOU STUPID FUCK!  YOU’RE GOING TO SHOOT ME OVER A FUCKING ENVELOPE?!”
“It’s the law, Sergeant Nozick.”
“IT’S A FUCKING ENVELOPE, JENKINS!”
They both stood there, pistols pointed at each other.  Nozick’s face was contorted into a mask of rage, his teeth clenched and his eyes burning with anger.  Jenkins appeared to be much calmer, though it was hard to tell with all the bandages on his face.  At this point, the door flew open.  Detective Shitface walked into the room.  A number of other police cops stood outside the room, also drawn by the gunshot, but they all figured to let Shitface handle this.

“WHO THE FUCK IS FIRING GUNS IN MY DEPARTMENT?!”

Nozick pointed at Jenkins.  Shitface turned to Jenkins.  He was bubblegum pink.
“I fired a warning shot in the interests of preserving law and order, Detective Shitface.  Sergeant Nozick was about to open the piece of mail that he’s holding without any kind of dick to do so.”
“So you fired a pistol, Jenkins?  So you fired a fucking pistol?”
“Police Procedural Episode 2, Chapter 4 clearly states the continuum of force to deal with violations of the law, sir.  Verbal warnings were ineffective, so I fired a warning shot before resorting to a higher level of force.”

Shitface walked over to Jenkins.  Then he reached out, took a handful of his face bandages, and yanked Jenkins’ face forward to bring it close to his own.  The pain was incredible on Jenkins’ part.

“Jenkins, do you mean to tell me that you’re firing a gun, in police headquarters, BECAUSE OF A FUCKING ENVELOPE?!”
“Yes sir.  The law is the law.”
Shitface pushed Jenkins’ face away and turned to Nozick.
“GIVE ME THE FUCKING ENVELOPE!”
Nozick handed the envelope to Shitface, who grabbed it from Nozick’s hand and tore it open.  He took out the piece of paper inside, unfolded it, and read it.  Then Shitface turned a cherry red.  Jenkins cocked his head to look at what was on it, figuring he might as well since the damage was already done.  The only thing written on the paper was “Kill.”  Shitface crumpled the piece of paper into a ball and dropped it on the floor.
“What do you think it means?”
“Jenkins, get out of this office.”
“Sir?”
“Jenkins, get out of this office, before I POUND YOUR FUCKING FACE INTO OBLIVION.”

Jenkins walked out of the office.  Shitface was dangerously enraged and very much wanted to destroy something.  Another brutal face pounding might have killed Jenkins, though.  Not that Shitface really cared for Jenkins.  But one, it would probably look bad if Shitface beat a fellow detective to death in the middle of police headquarters, and two, the precinct was already running a little low on officers.  The Club Blue Balls collapse had put 14 in the hospital, and had killed Officer Simmons.  Poor Simmons had been pinned to the floor by the debris, and had drowned in a puddle of liquid shit.

Nozick didn’t dare speak.  He just stood there, trying not to shift any of Shitface’s focus upon himself.  Shitface was gritting his teeth, and his fists were shaking.  The air in the room seemed to be saturated with a dangerous sort of fury. After about 30 seconds of this awkward rage silence, Officer Schneiderman and Detective Chang walked into Jenkins’ office.  Schneiderman’s face was bruised and he was limping slightly, from injuries he had suffered at Club Blue Balls.  All in all, though, he had gotten out relatively unscathed.  This had earned him the new office nickname “Lucky Rat.”  Chang was carrying a stack of papers.  Chang started talking excitedly.

“I think we have it cracked!  Also, was that a gunshot we heard?”
Shitface’s fist flew out and slammed into Chang’s face.  He picked Chang mostly because Chang was closer.  The blow caused Chang’s head to snap backwards.  His arms flew out, and the papers he was carrying went upwards, flying every which way and scattering throughout the room.  Chang landed on the ground with a broken nose.  A CRACKED broken nose.  Get it?  Shitface did.  Because he followed his punch up by saying, “If it wasn’t before, it certainly is now.”

Lucky Rat looked at Chang lying on the floor, blood pouring out of his ruined nose.  Shitface looked at Lucky Rat.  Papers were still raining down throughout the room.
“What do you want, Schneiderman?”
“Oh.  Uhhh…where’s Detective Jenkins, sir?”
“Detective Jenkins is not here.  NOW WHAT THE FUCK IS IT YOU WANTED?”
“Uhh…well, like Chang was saying, sir.  I think we have it cracked.”
“Have WHAT cracked?”
“The pattern, sir.”
“What pattern?”

Lucky Rat looked around the room.   There were papers everywhere.  “The Platonic Solids.”  He dropped to the ground on his knees and started looking through them, taking a brief look at this one or that and discarding it to move on to the next one.

Schneiderman had spent the whole night working on this project.  He couldn’t get the Platonic Solids out of his mind after being pulled out of the wreckage.  After dusting himself off, he had headed back to the office to work on the pattern, and he had enlisted the help of Detective Chang, figuring Chang would know a thing or two about mathematics since he was one of those Chinese types.

“The Platonic Solids?  What the Christ fuck are you talking about?”
“Club Blue Balls, sir.”  Schneiderman was still looking through the papers.  “And the newspaper facility.  One was deteriorating into 6-sided cubes, and the other into 4-sided pyramids.  Both Platonic Solids. But there are five Platonic Solids total: 4-, 6-, 8-, 12-, and 20-sided.  There’s a pattern here.  Look!”

Lucky Rat grabbed a particular piece of paper, stood up, laid it out on Jenkins’ desk and pointed at it.  Shitface looked it over.  It appeared to be a map of the city, and there were drawings everywhere on it.  Lines, arrows, equations, numbers.  It all made sense to Lucky Rat.  He had watched the two extra videos required to get his Police Math Certification, and had studied some math before becoming an officer besides.  To Shitface, though, it was all a hodge-podge of mathematical nonsense.

“Schneiderman, what the fuck am I looking at?”
“It’s a map of the city, sir.”
“I KNOW IT’S A MAP OF THE FUCKING CITY!  I meant what the fuck am I LOOKING at?”

Schneiderman started gesturing excitedly to the map.
“It’s all a pattern.  You start at the center of the city.”  Schneiderman pointed at a spot on the map, presumably at where the center of the city was.  “The first Platonic Solid, the 4-sided one.  Take 4, you know, 4 sides, and you multiple that by 1000 yards, and you get 4000 yards.  Then, starting from 0 degrees, you go 45-degrees for each side, which is 180 degrees from the center of the city, or due west.  4000 yards west.  That puts you right at 4th Street South and Industrial Way.  From there, you subtract 4 from 6, 6 being the next platonic solid, and you get 2.  That’s 2000 yards and 90 degrees from 4th Street South and Industrial Way, or due north, putting us at 4th Street North and Industrial Way, Club Blue Balls.”
“So?”
“So, we can calculate the next building!  Where the next building will be deteriorating!”
“The 8-sided one?”
“Yes!  All of them!  The 8-sided one, 8 is 2 more than 6, sir.  So that’s 2000 yards, and 90 degrees again, which is due north again.  So, 2000 yards north of Club Blue Balls should be a building deteriorating into 8-sided shapes.  And then 4000 yards due west of THAT should be the building deteriorating into 12-sided shapes.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“The math seems to prove it, sir.”
“Why intervals of 1000 yards?  Why 45 degrees?”
“I don’t know, sir.  But that’s what the pattern has been.”

Shitface thought for several seconds.
“What’s the address of the next building?”
“It should be the first building on the 1200 North block of Industrial Way.  Which is 1208 Industrial Way.”
“What is it?”
“What?”
“The fucking BUILDING, Schneiderman.  What the fuck kind of building is it?”
“Oh.  It’s some kind of deli, sir.”
“A deli?”
“Yes.”
“Who owns it?”
Officer Lucky Rat shrugged.
“I don’t know.”

*****

One floor down, Asscock sat at his desk.  He’d be watching TV right now, but it was currently lying around broken on his floor.  Asscock hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.  Or cleaning up the mess of the old one.  Instead he was fiddling with a small hand-held radio.  He was trying to find a genuine American baseball game, but all he could find so far was public radio and some sort of grating, auditorily-disgusting blackrican music.  Maybe Asscock could’ve tolerated the ragtime black music of yesteryear, but this music seemed to be little more than a heavy bass beat laid over some urban talk-speak.  He wondered why they didn’t make the Price Is Right into a radio program.  He might prefer that to the television program anyway.

There was a box of powdered sugar donuts sitting in front of him, right next to his typewriter.  The box currently sitting on his stomach was empty.  He was debating whether the energy necessary to expend to get the second box of donuts would be worth it when his door flew open.  Hockley stormed into the office.  He looked angry.

“Goddamnit, Glasgow!  What the fuck is this?!”

Hockley threw a file at Asscock.  It hit him in the face and landed on the desk in front of him.  Asscock picked up the file.

“It looks like a file, Chief.”
“It’s a REPORT, Glasgow.  A POLICE REPORT.  Do you know who it was taken from, Glasgow?”
“No.”
“From a teenager, Glasgow.  A 16-year-old teenager.  Apparently, an officer put this teenager in handcuffs and beat the shit out of him for no apparent rational reason, Glasgow.  That file is a report from THAT teenager, who, by the way, is DEFINITELY planning on suing the shit out the department.”
“Ok.”
“This teenager,” Hockley jabbed his finger at the file, “who is a minor, says a police officer in plainclothes and in an unmarked squad car stopped him on the street, handcuffed him, fired several rounds from a HANDGUN into his hat, punched him in the stomach, and MACED him.  Apparently for wearing his hat sideways.  Does that ring any bells, Glasgow?”
“No, sir.  None of the other officers have made any reports I’ve run across that match that description of events.”
“And then, Glasgow, this is my favorite part.  And then the officer left, but he either forgot to or purposefully decided AGAINST taking the FUCKING HANDCUFFS OFF before he drove away.  Does THAT sound familiar, Glasgow?!”
“Sir, I and the other officers investigate a great deal of suspicious activity on the streets.  I don’t remember every single incident, and I don’t imagine they do either.”
“Other officers, Glasgow?  Other officers?  Goddamnit, Glasgow, are you fucking DENSE?!  This report is about YOU!”
“Me?”
“YES, GLASGOW!  YOU! HOW MANY OFFICERS DO YOU KNOW OF THAT ARE MORBIDLY FAT AND PERPETUALLY COVERED IN POWDERED SUGAR AND ASSAULT YOUTHS FOR NO APPARENT REASON, GLASGOW?!  BECAUSE WE’VE HAD AT LEAST SEVEN REPORTS OF YOU DOING THIS EXACT KIND OF SHIT!”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about this report, Chief.  A lot of these young ruffians don’t remember things too well on account of their stupefied brains.  It’s one teenager’s word against a cop’s.  I’d take the cop’s words any day, and most judges do too.”
“CHRIST ON A FUCKING CROSS, Glasgow!  That’s not even the POINT! And I’d be fucking ESTATIC if that was the only reason I was in here, Glasgow!  Do you recognize this?!”

Hockley dropped a Ziploc bag onto Asscock’s desk.  Inside was a revolver, and it appeared to be covered in shit.
“It looks like a pistol covered in shit, Chief.”
“That’s EXACTLY what it is, Glasgow.  And do you know whose pistol it is, Glasgow?  CARE TO WAGER ANY GUESSES, GLASGOW?!”
“Is it the teenager’s?”
Hockley looked ready to explode.  He ran his hands down his face.  Then he picked up Asscock’s typewriter and walked toward the window.  When he got about five feet away from it, he spun around in several circles and released the typewriter, almost like he was throwing shot put.  The window shattered and the typewriter flew outside.  Hockley turned back to Asscock.  He was red.  Not like a Shitface-level red or anything, but impressively red all the same.

“THE TEENAGER’S?!  THE TEENAGER’S, GLASGOW?!  GODDAMNIT GLASGOW, IT’S YOUR FUCKING PISTOL, AND I THINK YOU DAMN WELL KNOW IT IS!!”
“Mine, sir?”
“And do you know where it was FOUND, Glasgow?  Do you care to guess?  It was found in the ruins of Club Blue Balls, Glasgow.  Right next to the dead body of Officer Simmons.  And do you know what else was found, Glasgow?  BULLETS.  Bullets from THIS gun.”
Hockley jabbed his finger at the gun.  “And do you know where the bullets were discovered?  IN THE SKULL OF THE DEAD HOBO YOU ‘FOUND’ AT THE NEWSPAPER FACILITY WHERE YOU WERE AT, GLASGOW!!  ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO SAY ABOUT THAT, GLASGOW?!  ANY NOTES YOU’D LIKE TO PROVIDE?!”
“Sir, that was an antique typewriter.”

Hockley pounded his fists on the desk, one of said fists smashing the second box of donuts.  He then used both his arms to swipe everything off the desk and on to the floor.

“FUCK THE TYPEWRITER, GLASGOW!!  START TALKING!!  NOW!!!”

The door to the office flew open again, and Shitface walked in. Lucky Rat and Nozick were following close behind him, Lucky Rat carrying a stack of papers.  Shitface looked to Asscock, then Hockley, then Asscock.  He spoke to Asscock.

“Asscock!  Get your shit ready.  We’re going a on a field trip.”
“Field trip?”
“1208 Industrial Way.  Let’s go.”

Hockley spoke up, addressing Shitface.
“Detective, I’m having a conversation with Glasgow here, and I’d appreciate if you’d leave the room, and let me continue.  In other words, please Get the Fuck Out.”
“Asscock is my partner, chief.  We’ll need him for this.  We’ve got a new lead in this Platonic Solids case.”
“Platonic Solids?”
“Schneiderman just cracked a code of some kind with his Jew math.  We’re on our way to investigate.”
“Be that as it may, Detective, there are some Things I need to Sort Out with Glasgow at this Very Moment.  You’ll have to go without him.”
“You can talk to Asscock later, Chief.  I need him for now.”

Chief Hockley stared at Shitface.  He was about to start screaming again, but he noticed Shitface’s mustache was twitching slightly.  It wasn’t that Hockley was scared of Shitface.  Actually, yes, that was exactly it.  Hockley was scared of Shitface.  He wasn’t terrified of him like some of the other officers were, but he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of Shitface’s violent physical outbursts, even if he was a superior and he could torch Shitface’s entire career for doing something like that.  Sometimes, Hockley doubted he could even do THAT.  He had seen Shitface talk to Commissioner Zybdek before, and even Zybdek seemed to give Shitface wider berth than Shitface’s position as a Detective Lieutenant might demand.  He made his decision to let it be for the time.  He could deal with Glasgow later.

“Goddamnit.  If this is important, so be it.  Get the fuck out of my sight.”  Hockley turned to Glasgow.  “This conversation isn’t over, Glasgow.  When you get back here, in my office, Right Away.  Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Chief.”
Hockley left the office.  Asscock looked at Shitface.
“Why are we going to 1208 Industrial Way?”
Shitface shrugged.  “I don’t know.”  He jerked his thumb toward Schneiderman.  “Ask the Jew.”

By Dr. Gonzo Kablaa

No one hated Shitface.  Mostly because people were too scared of Shitface to hate Shitface.  Shitface was an angry man, and this anger terrified everyone else at the department.  At the moment, though, things were relatively calm.
Then “American Pie” started playing on the boom box.
“TURN THAT FUCKING SHIT OFF!” Shitface screamed.  Rather than wait for another officer to remedy the situation, Shitface drew his pistol and unloaded the entire clip into the boom box.  That definitely remedied the situation.
“THERE!  NOW NO ONE WILL LISTEN TO ANY MUSIC, EVER!!  ARE YOU FUCKING HAPPY NOW?!”
Shitface threw his pistol at the destroyed boom box to clarify his position.  He was more volatile than usual.  Mainly because of the whole disappearing Nickasun thing.  And he wasn’t all that happy about the Vinnie Stacks thing either.  Or the whole retard gerbil thing.  There were retard gerbils crawling around everywhere, and he was sick and tired of it.  His face had been at a constant threat-level pink for most of the day, and the boom box thing had raised it to strawberry red.
All of the sudden, the door flew open.  No, that’s not quite right.  I meant to say the door tore off its hinges and exploded forward.  And it kept going forward, until it slammed itself into Officer Lee’s skull in a spectacular and awesome way, making a sort of thunk-crack sound.  Officer Lee promptly fell to the floor and died.
The other officers looked to the door-less doorway.  Standing in it was Deputy Grutch.  And he was spraying sweat.
“WHERE IS NICKASUN?” Deputy Grutch demanded in a booming voice.
Shitface turned a maroon red.  He pointed to Grutch.  “YOU!  I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU, ASSHOLE!” 
“WHERE IS NICKASUN?” Deputy Grutch repeated.
This was one demand too many for Shitface.  He picked up a printer and threw it at Grutch.  Grutch deftly maneuvered himself out of its trajectory, and it smashed into the wall behind him.
“I WILL BREAK YOU!” screamed Shitface.
“NOT IF MY GUN HAS ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT!” Grutch replied.  And with that, Grutch held his clenched fist out in front of him.  Also, his gun was in his clenched fist.
“THIS IS YOUR TIME TO PAY!” he said as he took aim.  “THIS IS YOUR JUDGMENT DAY!” he said as he fired.  There was a deafening roar.  Two of them.  One from the gun, and one from Grutch.
The first bullet exploded Officer Rico’s left leg, creating a red cloud of shattered bone and flesh.  Officer Rico was unprepared to stand on only one leg, so down the to ground he tumbled, blood spurting every which way.
“YOU LAZY SONS OF BITCHES!! IT’S TIME TO REAP WHAT YOU NEVER BOTHERED TO SOW!”
Grutch seemed to fire indiscriminately.  I don’t mean that he fired into the air at random.  I mean that he chose his targets with the appearance of indiscrimination.  No one could’ve persuasively expounded as to why he fired at Officer Rico’s left leg, but it exploded all the same.
“YOU BETTER GET READY TO DIE!” Grutch said as his second shot removed Officer Weinbeck’s right leg.  “YOU BETTER GET READY TO KILL!” he said as his third shot removed Officer Winter’s left arm.  “YOU BETTER GET READY TO RUN!” he said as his fourth shot removed Officer Campbell’s right arm.  “CAUSE HERE WE COME!” he announced as the fifth shot exploded Officer Smith’s skull.  Deafening roars, spraying clouds of gore, and spurting blood accompanied each shot.  The whole time, Deputy Grutch stood there with his teeth bared in a sort of weird smile.
Between Rico, Weinbeck, Winter, Campbell, and Smith, there was a whole lot of persons.  But amongst them all, there was now not a single person who was whole.  “HOW STUPIDLY PROFOUND,” Grutch mused as he broke Officer Tanimoto’s jaw with the barrel of his gun.  He then turned to Detective Shitface.  He had saved his sixth and final shot for Shitface.
Shitface had watched the succession of exploding appendages.  “Gee,” he thought, “MAYBE I SHOULDN’T HAVE THROWN MY GUN AT THAT RADIO.”  “TOO LATE FOR THAT,” someone might’ve said, if Shitface hadn’t been THINKING that instead of SAYING it.
Grutch took careful aim. “WE’RE ON A CAR RIDE TO HELL, AND YOU’RE RIDING SHOTGUN!”
You might think there’s an apparent flaw in this pun. However cylinder slot number sixth actually contained a shotgun slug.  Now, I guess it’s still debatable whether the line applies, since he was still firing a REVOLVER, even though he was USING a shotgun slug.  Whatever the case, there was a sixth deafening roar, and Grutch’s slug hit Shitface square in the chest.  Luckily for Shitface, he was wearing Kevlar body armor, so instead of exploding Shitface’s body the slug merely knocked him backwards.  And by that, I mean that Shitface flew through a fucking wall and into another room.
“HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?!”
Shitface didn’t like any of the apples.  He had just flew through a wall.  His sternum and most of his ribs were cracked, and it hurt like hell.  But he was alive.
Grutch did not know Shitface was still alive.  Or rather, Grutch didn’t stop to think about it one way or another.  All he knew was that he was out of bullets.  Officer Larson also noticed this, and was running at Grutch in order to tackle him.  Grutch dropped his gun and threw out his hands out to catch Officer Larson’s face.  Grutch jammed his thumbs into Officer Larson’s eye sockets, wrapping his remaining fingers around his skull to get a good grip.  Then he swung Larson’s head 180 degrees and started slamming it against the corner of a desk repeatedly while gouging his nails into deep Larson’s eyeballs.
“IF ANYONE’S WORTH DOING, IT’S WORTH DOING RIGHT!” said Deputy Grutch, quoting Johnny Depp as he pounded Larson’s skull into destruction.  Either the pounding or the gouging by itself likely would’ve sufficed, but Grutch was the type of man to THOROUGHLY SEE THE JOB THROUGH.
Officer Denson was the next to make a move, barreling toward Grutch at top speed.  Grutch tossed away Larson’s ruined skull and clothes-lined Denson, causing him to do a 720 flip through the air before landing on the ground.  Grutch then picked up Denson and raised him into the air, gripping his hair with one hand and his groin with the other.  Once he was high enough, Grutch brought him back down and smashed Denson’s back into his skull, snapping Denson’s spine.  “LIFE IS HARD!” Grutch told Denson’s corpse as he threw it to the side.
At this point, you might be wondering what the other officers were doing.  Because you’d think they’d be trying to fill Grutch full of bullets.  Well, this is what many of them did want to do.  However, once Grutch’s giant revolver started exploding things, a lot of the officers had fled the room.  By now, though, many of them had regrouped in another room.  By careful auditory observation, they determined that Grutch had fired six bullets and was out of ammunition.
“It’s payback time,” said Officer Stewart as he drew his pistol.
“INCORRECT!” said Deputy Grutch as he exploded through the wall.  “IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME!”  Proving that his assertion was predictive rather than merely normative, Grutch planted his fist into Officer Stewart’s face, shattering most of the bones in it.  Grutch stomped on Stewart’s face repeatedly after he fell to the ground, serving to shatter the remaining unbroken bones.
The other officers in the room weren’t about to stand by idly.  They drew their pistols and began firing. Some of the officers were no more than 5 feet away from Grutch.  However, Grutch’s intimidation sweat had the effect of making the officers very poor shots, and almost every bullet missed.  Only one bullet, fired by Sergeant Ink, managed to hit its mark, and it put a hole in Grutch’s left cheek.  Blood gushed from the wound.  Intimidation blood.
“YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” Grutch said as he smashed a computer monitor on Ink’s head.
Grutch then grabbed the next nearest person, Officer Sanders, by the hair.  “WELCOME TO AMERICA!” he said as he sliced Sander’s throat wide open with a filet knife.  Blood sprayed everywhere.  None of it on Grutch.  As Office Grossman was reloading his pistol off the side, Grutch threw his filet knife at him, landing it in his chest and piercing his heart.
“LET ME DRIVE THE POINT HOME!” Grutch said as he drove his foot into the knife, sending the it completely through Grossman’s chest and into the wall behind him.
“TIME TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH!” Grutch’s voice boomed as he picked up a trash can and slammed it down over Officer Bruder.
Blood was everywhere.  On the wall behind Grossman, on the ground under Grossman, spurting out of Sander’s throat, pooling around Ink’s smashed head, and spraying from Grutch’s wound.  At this moment, Shitface walked through the hole in the wall that Grutch had just recently created.  His face was a dark chocolate brown and he was carrying a chair.
“YOUR JURISDICTION LACKS CROMULENCE!” screamed Shitface as he swung the chair at Grutch. It smashed into pieces upon impact and knocked Grutch backwards.
“THAT’S MY LINE!” said Grutch as recovered his balance.  Then Grutch reached out and ripped of Shitface’s mustache.
If you knew anything about Shitface, it’s that he derived his FURIOUS RAGE POWER from that mustache.  And Grutch knew at least one thing about Shitface.  So Deductive Logic would show that A = A, and Grutch knew about the significance of Shitface’s mustache.  Unfortunately for Grutch, Shitface had another mustache hidden underneath the first mustache.
“NICE TRY, ASSHOLE,” said Shitface as he punched Grutch in the face.  If you knew two things about Shitface, the second thing you would know is that he was good at punching things in the face.  The blow knocked Grutch backwards.  Shitface landed several more blows, each knocking Grutch backwards.  Grutch finally managed to duck one of Shitface’s punches.
“HAVE YOU GOT THE GUTS?” Grutch asked Shitface as he punched him in the stomach.  Shitface doubled-over, and Grutch used this opportunity to pick him up and throw him across the room.  He was about to walk towards the spot where Shitface had landed to give him some additional what-for when a shotgun blast that emanated from Lieutenant Marsh hit Grutch directly in his stomach.
“WHOOPS!” said Grutch as blood and prolapsed guts poured out of him.  It was a bad turn of events.
“WELL,” he said, “WHEN YOUR TIME IS AT AN END, THEN IT’S TIME TO KILL AGAIN.”  He was now holding something in his hands.  It appeared to be a large bomb.  Not like the black spherical bombs you see in cartoons.  Like a bomb you’d drop out of an airplane.  ‘NUCLEAR BOMB’ was written on the side of it.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Lieutenant Marsh wondered.
“LET’S SEE IF THIS TOKE TAKES YOU OVER THE LINE!” Deputy Grutch said as he threw the bomb at Shitface.  Upon contact, Shitface’s head exploded.  You might think it had something to do with the bomb, but the bomb hadn’t even exploded yet.  There was simply too much anger coursing through Shitface’s blood for his skull to remain unexploded.
However, even if Shitface’s head hadn’t exploded of it’s own accord, it sure would’ve when the bomb detonated, because the writing on the bomb wasn’t just for show.  IT WAS A LABEL.  And there was DEFINITELY truth in advertising.  A nuclear explosion ripped through the headquarters and good portion of the city surrounding it, blasting it into oblivion.
“OH SHIT,” blacked the President of the United States of America as the nuclear explosion indicator light started blinking furiously.  “Probably those goddamn Russians,” he blacked to himself as he got to work blacking various buttons to send a counter-black.  But he was too late.  The Russians had accurately predicted the president would blame Russia, and they had already executed a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
The only things left alive were cockroaches.  And retard gerbils.  They were too retarded to know they were supposed to die.

By Crag Dakkins

For a second Asscock thought he was going to need his crow bar to pry the boards off the door. A light tough of his hand, though, proved this would be unnecessary. The boards, the door, and much of the surrounding doorframe crumbled away in a shower of blocks.

Reports were made of Extreme Shooting at 4th Street and Industrial Way. When Asscock arrived the place was quiet as hell – that is, as quiet as hell would be for today’s folk who depend on the incessant chirping and beeping of all their frivolous technological devices to update them about the latest froo froo. Oddly quiet for an Extreme Shooting. Usually crowds would gather afterwards.

Another thing was weird. It looked like Asscock was the first one on the scene. Ever since he had made detective, he had made a specific point of showing up at least 45 minutes after everyone else. Then everyone else could assess the situation and give the gist of it to him, and not the other way around. The odds that everyone had already left were pretty low. Officers were instructed to wait for the lead investigator to show up. And usually crime scenes were cordoned off with police tape, not wooden boards. Boarding up doors was against protocol.

Asscock tinkered with the idea of getting some donuts before the other officers arrived, but he went through the steps of this operation in his head – cramming himself into his car, turning the key in the ignition, stepping alternately on the gas and brake pedals, getting out of his car again, buying food, chewing food, getting in his car again, etc. – and decided against it.

*****
The things lying under the blankets looked like erect dicks bulging against pants. The things walking around looked like a bunch-a dicks walking around, erect-like. Dicks. Dicks. Dicks. Everywhere with the dicks. Lately Jenkins couldn’t stop seeing dicks for some reason. They weren’t obvious when they’d first appear, but they would always creep into the foreground if he didn’t keep his mind occupied. He closed his eyes, shook his head vigorously, and opened them.

The crime scene was swarming with officers. Way more than were needed. At least twenty were milling around, drinking coffee and eating donuts, playing grab-ass, kicking rubble with their feet.

A cool breeze blew on Jenkins’ bare ass. He was wearing a hospital gown. The last thing he remembered before waking up in the hospital was escorting that uppity teacher Mrs. Johnson out to his police car. The next thing he knew, he was waking up to the sound of Janine on his police radio beside his bed. She told all units to respond to the Extreme Shooting at 4th Street and Industrial Way, so Jenkins had rushed to the scene immediately.

His memory of the last several days was fuzzy, and he seemed to black out every few hours. He remembered talking to a psychiatrist at some point, but the exact nature of the conversation eluded him. He remembered cops slamming him against lockers and accusing him of going Serpico on everyone’s ass, but he’d be damned if he knew why. Then there was the dicks. Knowing that he was hallucinating didn’t make them go away. It was like a phobia – if you’re afraid of heights, you’re afraid of heights, and no amount of reasoning with yourself was going to change that. Jenkins thought he would just have to get used to the mystery dicks.

Jenkins was no slouch to begin with, a true By the Video Cop if there ever was one, but the constant dick-seeing and accusation-receiving in the workplace motivated him to work harder than ever before. Staying active cleared his mind of hallucinations and gave his co-workers less reason to doubt his loyalty. His new work ethic served the dual purpose of making his fellow officers look and act less like dicks.

A dick walked up to Jenkins. An especially circumcised one from the looks of it, as if this dick’s Covenant With Abraham was purer than most. Jenkins shook his head and the dick morphed into Schneiderman the Jew Cop.

“Are you OK, sir?” Schneiderman asked.
“Never better. Why do you ask?”
“You’re wearing a hospital gown and your face is covered in bandages. You might want to put some shoes on. This debris has a lot of sharp corners.”
“It’s not important if the corners cut me. What IS important is that I don’t cut corners. Tell me all the details you know about what went on here.”

*****
“Blackassacide,” said Asscock, pointing to a Negro leg poking out underneath an enormous pile of empty Bom Diggity cans. Asscock loved him some 1940s, but there were times when he would have preferred to live in the 1840s. Back in the 1840s the killing of a black would have been an act of vandalism. Unfortunately for Asscock, he doesn’t live in the 1840s, so he was going to have a lot of 1940s-style paperwork to do.

The roof of the building was gone and daylight illuminated the place, thankfully making it unnecessary for Asscock to poke around in the dark with his flashlight. The light glinting off all those energy drink cans made it really easy to find the scene of the crime. Asscock liked things that were easy.

On the wall, spray-painted in big, red letters, it said “Negrosun kill traters” with an arrow pointing to the body and cans. Asscock thought this might be a clue.

*****
“Two dead. One’s a cab driver and the other we think is Officer Unlucky Cat,” Schneiderman said. “His head was blown clean off and he’s not in uniform. No ID in his wallet either. But when we arrived his body was still twitching, and Officer Rico said he’d recognize that swagger anywhere.”
Jenkins lifted the blanket and looked at the obliterated bodies. Smoke from the spent ammunition still hung in the air. Jenkins wasn’t sure if the strong scent of iron was coming from the large pools of blood on the ground or from the holocaust inside his own nasal cavity.
“Was Unlucky Cat working undercover?” Jenkins asked.
Schneiderman flipped through his clipboard.
“No. I was told he has been reprimanded time and time again for not wearing his uniform on duty. Both he and his partner, Eye Patch, were known for doing this.”
“Where is Eye Patch?”
“We can’t find him. A trail of blood leads out the front door, across the street, and down into the sewer. It may be prudent to look into that.”
“Could be worth investigating. What’s with the mess? Was someone playing Tetris in here? This place is in violation of numerous building codes.”
Schneiderman flipped through his clipboard. “I’m told the owner, man by the name of Nickasun, said the previous owner, Crag Dakkins, sabotaged the place with termites. We’ve taken numerous debris samples.”
“I’d like to speak with both of them.”
“Dakkins blew his brains out in a spectacular display not too long ago. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”
“How about Nickasun? Where is he?”
Schneiderman flipped through his clipboard. “He was in police custody for Highly Suspicious Behavior and now he is listed as a Missing Person Presumed Dead.”
“How did he get from Point A to Point B?”
He flipped through his clipboard.
“I don’t have that information.”
Over by the remaining half of a popcorn machine, where Rico, O’McTally and Taggert were shooting the shit over coffee, Jenkins saw a pattern on the wall of interlocking dicks, a theme inconsistent with the aims of a gentlemen’s club.
“Do you ever have hallucinations, Schneiderman?”
Schneiderman flipped through his clipboard.
“You won’t find the answer in there.”
“What?”
“On your clipboard.”
“Oh.”
“What were you looking up just now?”
“Not much. Just a thing.”
“Let me see that.”
“It’s nothing, sir.”
“As your commanding officer, I order you to give me your clipboard.”
Schneiderman reluctantly handed over his clipboard. Attached were about 100 sheets of paper that were blank but for small drawings on the lower right corner of each page. Betty Boop’s penis was erect and she was sodomizing Felix the Cat. Jenkins flipped the pages from back to front and front to back. It didn’t matter which order you played the cartoon. Felix had a pained expression either way.
“Does this woman have the male apparatus, Schneiderman?”
“Uh, yes sir.”
“That’s reassuring at least.”
“You’re not mad, are you, sir?”
“Sometimes I’m not so sure. If I were you, I wouldn’t let Detective Asscock see how you’ve portrayed these vintage animated characters.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is Asscock anyway?”
“He must be around here somewhere. I’ll go find him.”

*****

“Where the FUCK is everybody!?” Asscock said aloud. Like most people, Asscock appreciated a good echo, but this building wasn’t giving one to him. Too many holes, too few surfaces to bounce his voice off of. Other than that, Asscock liked the place. It felt genuine. It was a large brick structure with a large central room. Up against the walls were about twenty large, metal machines hearkening back to a time when men were strong. They were brawn-powered machines, not electromajig-powered, not http-colon-backslash-backslash-powered. Man, who nowadays has been relegated to the middleman in all industrial processes, powered these machines his own damn self. It made Asscock tired and sweaty just thinking about it. He needed to sit down soon or he would pass out. It was shameful how these Giants of Old were left to sit in a condemned building when they could be doing more important work educating youth about the tall-standing of their forefathers. A few of the machines were still in good condition, but the rest were half crumbled like most of the things in this place.

Asscock lumbered his stagecoach physique over to the pile of Bom Diggity cans and sent them clattering with a sweep kick, which put him right the fuck out of breath. He crouched down to regain his composure and maybe catch a gander at that dead body. For an Extreme Shooting there sure didn’t appear to be many holes in this kid. Zero, in fact. He was a black kid, about 14 or 15, a sideways-hat-wearing embarrassment to the nation. The strangle marks on his neck were hard to miss. Asscock had seen some strangulations in his day, but NEVER any this severe. The shape of the kid’s neck reminded Asscock of beer cans he had crushed into similar shapes.

Asscock took out his radio.

“Janine, get me Jankowski.”
“You know, you can contact him yourself with the technology we have now.”
“NONE OF YOUR POLITICS, WOMAN! GET ME FUCKING JANKOWSKI!”
“Jankowski here.”
“Where the fuck are you?! Where the fuck is everybody?! I’m at the crime scene and there’s not a God damn fucking one of you here!”
“Are too. Where are you? In one of the back rooms?”
“I’m in THE fucking room, Jankowski! The big fucking room! The one with the crime scene! Where are the rest of you ass-hat-wearing ass-hats!?”
“There’s a lot of officers here, sir. Raise your hand and maybe I can find you.”
Asscock raised his hand. “I’m raising my hand, Jankowski? Can you see me, Jankowski? Can you and anybody else who ISN’T here see me, Jankowski? LET ME SPEAK TO THE FUCKING OFFICER IN CHARGE!”
“I guess that would be Jenkins. He’s wearing a hospital gown but everyone seems to be answering to him.”
“I DIDN’T ASK FOR YOUR NARRATION! PUT JENKINS ON!”
“This is Detective Jenkins.”
“Jenkins, you commie son of a bitch. Are you behind this? What kind of diversionary chicanery are you trying to pull? You can’t take this line of work, pal. We all know it. A bad apple like you can’t stand the heat so it should get out of the kitchen before it spoils the bunch. You can’t make American apple pie with spoiled apples.”
“I don’t understand the hostility, detective. Where are you? A mutual homicide took place here. One of the reciprocated homicides was a police officer.”
“Which officer?”
“We think it was Unlucky Cat. His head is gone.”
“I was told the Extreme Shooting was at 4th Street and Industrial Way.”
“Yes, detective, that’s where we are.”
“How can that be, Jenkins? That’s where I am right now. Are we in PARALLEL UNIVERSES, Jenkins? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“You must be at 4th Street SOUTH and Industrial Way. That’s in Black Town. We’re eight blocks north of you, at Club Blue Balls.”
“God dammit!” Asscock had never liked the way this city had renamed its streets. A few years ago white Liberal crusaders were successful in removing the “North” and “South” designations from all the city’s streets, their contention being that since most of the blacks lived on the south end of the city, it was insensitive to remind them constantly, via street signs, of the faction that supported slavery during the Civil War. The removal of “North” naturally followed, because “North” wouldn’t make sense without “South”. In the years since then, nobody could agree on a new way to distinguish the streets. So the confusion remained, and one got used to making assumptions about which side of town things were located. The country club was on the north side, the Baptist churches were on the south side. You get the idea.
“I’m so fed up with the street signs around here, Jenkins. They lack genuine intelligence. I assumed the shooting was in Black Town.”
“Not a bad assumption. I guess everyone else came here because Club Blue Balls has been a sizable blip on our radar lately. I hadn’t thought about it, but you were the only one of us using inductive reasoning vis-à-vis the blacks vis-à-vis gun violence.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“As for the street signs, I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit for their genuineness. Think about the streets of old, which were laid down willy-nilly and named in such a way that knowing an address wasn’t enough to get you there. Back then, the city planners, if you could call them that, did a fine job of separating the weak from the strong with their designs absent of clarity or pattern. I wouldn’t let the setback today get the best of you. I have a feeling a cop like you will win many address battles in the future.”
Asscock was silent for about twenty seconds.
“Jenkins, you’re off the hook for now.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Send some officers over to my location. I’ve got a dead gangbanger here. Strangulation. And hurry up before this place falls down. I’m up to my tits in rubble here.”
“What a coincidence. Is it cube-shaped?”
“No, mostly pyramids. With four sides. And a few weird-shaped pieces here and there, too.”
Schneiderman overheard this and perked up. His Knowledge Training from years of Jew School started coming back to him. It was a rare on-the-job occurrence when he’d ever get a chance to use it. “The Platonic Solids.”
“What?” Jenkins asked.
“The five Platonic Solids are familiar to anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons: the 4-, 6-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided dice. These are the only three-dimensional shapes constructed entirely of identical regular polygons that exist in nature.”

*****
Asscock heard someone snoring just then and turned off his radio. Sleeping against a wall with his back to Asscock was a man in a grey suit. Asscock approached and rolled the man over.

This was no man. This was a hobo. A hobo wearing an expensive Armani suit.

The hobo appeared to be quite stupefied from drink, but when he opened his eyes and saw Asscock, he quickly sat up and became attentive.
“I’ll be on my way. Sorry, suh.”
“What is this? You think this is a hotel? The Hobo Hotel?”
“No, suh. Dakkins say I could sleep here on account nothing goin’ on here no’ mo’. He a great man, suh.”
“A likely story. What’s your game? Where’d you get that suit?”
“I didn’t steal nothin’, suh. Done took it from the trash outside. Saw policeman put many fine suit just like this in there. I didn’t want to put no suit like this to waste.”
“A policeman, you say? Was this officer wearing a uniform?”
“No, suh.”
“Then how did you know he was a policeman?”
“He look like rule book.”
That’s the look alright, thought Asscock. Definitely a cop.
“Could you describe him for me?”
“Tense. Flexing. And biggest mustache I ever did see.”
Asscock tried to jiggle his fat mind around why Shitface would be coming to this place to dump Armani suits in the trash.
“Later he come back, brung that boy’s body here, covered it with pop cans. I didn’t pay him no nevermind. Then board up the place with me in it. I figger he have his reasons. I stay out of police business. I don’t want no trouble.”
Asscock didn’t understand hardly any of it, but now he understood enough. This was information that couldn’t get out. The future of his partner, his best friend on the force, and the best damn cop in the world could be ruined by the word of a common hobo. Asscock would be damned if he let that happen. As fast as his ham hock arms would allow, he pulled out his gun and fired two rounds into the hobo’s brain.

The other cops would be here soon. Asscock had to hurry up and dispose of his gun. Later he could retroactively report it missing. The bathroom would be the most promising spot – Asscock was pretty sure a place like this would have an old toilet with a muscular, 1940s-power, flush-vortex, not one of these low-flow, environmentalist, “Green”, froo froo flushes of today. You could flush a human head down one of those old toilets.

Asscock found the bathroom, and he was in luck – the handle on a rope hanging above the toilet was indicative of the toilet’s oldness. Shit was piled way above the brim. That hobo must have been shitting in there for weeks. Asscock’s nose was too packed with powdered sugar to smell it, but the sight of it still made him sick. He plopped his gun on the wet shit mound and pulled the handle. Nothing. Fuck, thought Asscock, the place probably doesn’t have the basic utilities anymore. Then he saw a switch on the back of the toilet. It was in the center position and it looked like you could flip it left or right. Asscock flipped it left and tried to flush the toilet again. Whoosh! The pile of shit and the gun were sucked away with a force that could have turned a toilet-sitter inside out.

*****
Several dicks had just started up a game of hacky sack when Janine’s voice started coming out of the dick in Jenkins’ hand. She was transferring a call from Asscock again.
“Where the hell are your officers, Jenkins?! I got two bodies over here!”
“I just sent them out. Did you say TWO bodies?”
“Yeah, open your fucking ears. Like I said before, TWO bodies. One strangled, the other shot. Looks like some well-dressed yuppie Negro came to the wrong neighborhood to get his coke fix and –BLAM! – got more than he bargained for. Maybe strangled this kid first, maybe didn’t. Looks like Negrosun is involved.”
Schneiderman approached Jenkins. “Sir, I have some information that could be important. I just checked with City Hall and they said the buildings at both 4th Street and Industrial Way addresses were owned by Crag Dakkins. The other is an old turn-of-the-century newspaper office and publishing plant that hasn’t been used for fifty years.”
“The similarities between these two places get curiouser and curiouser,” Jenkins said.
“Yeah,” Schneiderman said. “I have a theory. What if Dakkins owned three more places around town, which are right now falling apart into the remaining Platonic Solids – the 8-, 12- and 20-sided dice shapes?”
“That would be worth looking into. Something doesn’t fit, though. Asscock said there were some other shapes at his location, too. Not just pyramids.”
“Tetrahedrons don’t pack neatly like cubes. There would be other shapes to fill in the gaps.”
Officer Rico overhead this and fumbled his kick of the hacky sack. “You know what don’t PACK NEATLY, Schneiderman? Your sister! It’s messy every time! And I got a SHAPE to FILL IN her GAP right here!” Rico said, grabbing his crotch. All the surrounding officers except Schneiderman and Jenkins laughed at this witticism.
Jenkins asked, “Do you suppose there are other 4th Street and Industrial Way addresses in this city?”
Schneiderman scratched his head. “No, that would be sort of really stupid. But it could be that all his buildings are on the same street. Or they could form a pentagon.”
Jenkins shuddered. “I wonder if there are more murders at these other locations!?”
A loud sigh mixed with static came through Jenkins’ radio. “If you two pin-dicks are done playing The Da Vinci Code, I COULD REALLY USE SOME INVESTIGATORS OVER HERE!”
Jenkins turned off his radio so he could think.
Suddenly the pipes in the building began groaning. They got louder and louder, working their way up to a tremendous decibel level. Everyone covered their ears. Then the pipes sounded like they were shifting, moving about like the inner guts of a clock. And then all was quiet.
A heating duct above the popcorn machine flipped open and everyone’s eyes angled toward it. A gush of hot air forced a stream of liquid shit out of the duct at an incredible speed, splattering all over the popcorn machine and five officers standing nearby. Officer Taggert, who was standing directly in front of the duct, got the worst of it. The fire hose blast of shit knocked him to the floor.
After he recovered Taggert said, “Jesus, something hit me!” He was covered from head to toe in shit, and rubbing his head.
“No shit,” said Rico. “I mean: Yes, shit.” Everyone laughed at this witticism.
“No, I mean apart from that,” Taggert replied. He stooped over to examine the floor. He picked up and object out of the muck. “Found it! Lookie here!” Taggert held up a shit-covered handgun for everyone to see.
Jenkins pondered this. Everything was getting more complex. If he stayed focused, the mental activity required for these new developments was more than enough to keep the dicks away for the next few days.

Or was it?

Jenkins looked out one of the gaping holes of Club Blue Balls and thought he saw a giant dick rolling by. But he breathed a sigh of relief when he looked closer and saw it was just some military vehicle hauling a giant hot dog down the street. And that’s when Club Blue Balls collapsed on everybody.

By Dr. Gonzo Kablaa

The taxi cab’s radio started playing “You Make My Dreams Come True” as it drove down 4th Avenue.  Nickasun’s heart was racing.  His hands were shaking.  Approximately 15 minutes ago, he had walked right out of a police department, right out the door, and hailed a taxi cab. Never before had he experienced such a rush of adrenaline.

He had been in an interrogation room for 36 hours.  Another interrogation room.  That made about four days total in interrogation rooms.  Four days he hadn’t worked, four days he hadn’t played guitar, and four days he hadn’t seen Khandee.  It’d be a miracle if he still had his geology job.  After all, minerals needed sifting, elemental compounds needed sorting, and earth core samples needed sampling, and they didn’t much like it when you didn’t show up for four days.  God knows if anyone was keeping watch over his rock experiments.
All this interrogation room nonsense was getting pretty annoying.  Right after he had finished talking to Deputy Grutch, he had gone inside the ruins of Club Blue Balls, and not ten minutes later Eye Patch and Unlucky Cat had shown up, black walking and jive talking.  They were not happy, and they said he had to come with them.
“Told you to lay low, keep yo mouf close, now we hear you been livin’ in damn inturrogation room.”
“But I didn’t have a choice,” Nickasun had protested. “The Asscock guy put me in handcuffs!”
Blackop 2 responded, “Shut yo mouf, bitch! Yo cracker-ass problems ain’t our concurrn.”
Nickasun had asked if he was under arrest, but that just made Eye Patch and Unlucky Cat blacker, and he forgot all about Deputy Grutch’s warning about being wrath-choked.  And even if he HAD remembered, he wouldn’t have been inclined to make a lesser-of-the-two-evils comparison of violent retributions. After all, the blackops were standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM.  Grutch was not.  So he went with the blackops.  This time, though, he was taken to a different precinct than the one before.  The more blacker one.

This precinct’s interrogation room had been considerably worse than the other interrogation room.  The other room had a cot, and a TV, and a comfortable chair.  This room just had a table and a chair.  An uncomfortable chair.  There hadn’t even been a clock.  During this last confinement, he hadn’t been able to sleep much.  He had to bang on the door to get anyone to take him to the bathroom.  They didn’t let him call a lawyer.  And every time he tried to ask a question, they told him he’d have to wait for either Eye Patch or Unlucky Cat.  Apparently, neither of them had been around in 36 hours.  Apparently, Nickasun had NOT been free to go, since the door to the room was kept locked.  Most apparently of all, Deputy Grutch had been dead serious when he told Nickasun he didn’t want to get him out of police custody again.  Dead as hell. The icing on the shit cake was that the only food they provided was donuts and coffee. Fucking donuts.  Every six hours or so, the cops left more donuts in the room (“Police Procedural Episode 3, Chapter 16: Interrogate, Also, Accommodate” was clear on requiring that consumable foodstuffs be provided every 360 minutes).  Nickasun didn’t eat any, and the cops never took any away, so the donuts had just sort of piled up.  He couldn’t stand the smell.  The putrid, disgusting smell.  So he had vomited.  That green bile kind of vomit, since there wasn’t really any food in his stomach to vomit.  And it was still there.  On a pile of donuts.  The room stunk of vomit and donuts.

There HAD been music.  Specifically, the local Jap-run radio station.  Every hour, on the hour, “You Make My Dreams Come True” played.  The continuous hourly repetition might’ve struck Nickasun as strange if he hadn’t picked the song.  Three weeks ago, 105.1 KQXL had selected him “Plenty Song Time Hero”.  By selected, I mean that a diminutive Japanese man had accosted him on the street, screaming, “YOU WINNER!  PLENTY SONG TIME HERO! YOU PICK SONG!  PICK SONG NOW!”  So he picked a song.  And he had to listen to it every hour, on the hour.  OH THE IRONY. Anyway, that was how Nickasun had kept track of the time that had passed.  He had been there for 36 “You Make My Dreams Come True”-s.

The idea for escape had struck him when one of the officers accidentally left the door to the interrogation room slightly open, and thus unlocked.  The idea took two hours to fully gestate into a plan of action.  It might’ve taken longer, but Nickasun was tired and hungry, and there was vomit and donuts everywhere.  He couldn’t take many more “You Make My Dreams Come True”-s of this.

He had opened the door slowly.  Very slowly.  There were police cops walking around, but they didn’t even look at him.  After making sure police cops wouldn’t reproach him for opening the door, he started walking, pausing after every step to make sure they still weren’t taking notice of him.  Eventually, Nickasun realized no one was paying any attention to him anyway, and even if they were inclined to do so, his step-wait-step-wait approach might draw suspicion.  So then he just walked normally.  Right out the door.

Now he was heading back to the ruins of Club Blue Balls, in a gum-infested taxi cab with an irritable foreign driver.  He wanted to find Grutch.  He also kind of wanted to ask the cab driver to switch radio stations, but the driver’s constant twitching was unnerving to Nickasun, and it dissuaded him from engaging the driver in any sort of conversation.

The taxi stopped, and the foreign driver turned to face Nickasun.
“This where you stop?”
“Yes, this is fine.”
“Ok.  Twelve and seventy nine of cents.”
Nickasun suddenly realized he didn’t have any money on him.  Or anything on him.  He had been taken into police custody the first time right after he had woken up, so all he had was the clothing he’d slept in.  And the second time, he hadn’t finished talking to Grutch for ten minutes before the Blackops showed up, so he hadn’t had time to change or grab anything.
“I have money in this building.  Can you wait here?”
The taxi cab driver pushed a button and the car’s doors locked.
“I not falling for trick.  Too many times.  Too many times, my friend.”
“What?  No.  It’s not a trick.”
Nickasun motioned to Club Blue Balls.  “There’s money right in there.”
“Why I believe you?”
The cab driver also motioned to Club Blue Balls. “Place look like shit.  You dressed in pajamas. Who know? Maybe you crazy.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
“You pay me.”
“I can’t.  I don’t have any money on me.”
“Well, my friend, it’s no good.  You owe thirteen and forty three of cents.”
“That’s more than before!”
“Meter still run.”
“What?  Uhhh…can we drive around and look for my friend then?  His hot dog stand should be around here.  He might have some money.”
“Hot dog stand?”  The cab driver shook his head. “No.  Is no good.  Why I drive more?  You just say you not have money.”
“What difference does it make? The meter’s running either way.”
“Movement for PAYING customers ONLY.”
“Jesus Christ.  Can’t you just come in with me?”
“What? You think I’m stupid? You run from me when you get out.”
“I don’t think there’s any other way.  I don’t have any money on me.”

The cab driver stepped out of the car.  He walked to the back door and opened it.  Nickasun was getting ready to step out when he noticed the cab driver was holding a pistol.  He was surprisingly unfazed by this.
“Why do you have a gun?”
“You no run from man with gun.  You no look stupid.  Come. I don’t have all the day.”

Nickasun got out of the car and walked toward Club Blue Balls.  Or at least what was left of it.  The exterior of the building was somewhat intact, though the doors and windows were all gone, as was most of the interior.  The bar, the interior walls, his apartment furniture and appliances, and most everything else inside had deteriorated into cubes.

Nickasun walked through the doorway and the cab driver followed him.  Upon entering, he noticed that Unlucky Cat and Eyepatch were standing in the ruins.   This came as a surprise to Nickasun.  Speaking as a neutral observer, though, he probably should’ve known they’d be there.  Twelve hours before his escape, Eye Patch or Unlucky Cat or whatever had stopped by the interrogation room, and told him to get out as soon as possible.
“But you’re the ones who brought me here,” he had protested.
“Muthafucka! I KNOW my own biznass.  Don’t need yo cracker self telling me.  And now my biznass telling you to git yo ass OUTTA HURR!”
“How am I supposed to get out?” he’d asked.
The blackop had shook his head and said, “You mus’ be damn fool.  Only escape is through open do’.”

Anyway, right after Nickasun noticed the blackops, the blackops noticed Nickasun.  And then they noticed a man with a gun.  So the blackops drew their guns.  The taxi cab driver saw two men, un-uniformed and appearing as non-police run-of-the-mill urban blackricans, draw their guns.  So the taxi cab driver started firing his gun.

The gun shots did faze Nickasun.  He dove to the ground. Despite the twitching, it turns out the cab driver was a good shot, because he blew Unlucky Cat away before he even started firing.  Eye Patch pumped a couple rounds into the taxi cab driver’s torso, and landed another that exploded his left ear, but not before Eye Patch was hit in the neck, part-way slicing open his jugular vein.  The two men continued to fire at each other, hitting one another in the shoulder, gut, thigh, and various other non-immediately-fatal locations.

Nickasun didn’t see any of this, as he was on the ground covering his head with his hands.  If Nickasun hadn’t been on the ground with his eyes closed, he would’ve seen two men blasting guns at each other, one missing an ear and one with blood spurting out of his neck.  Eye Patch didn’t seem very concerned with the blood spurting out of his neck.  He seemed much more concerned with making the cab driver dead.

When both men ran out of ammunition, they ejected their used clips and re-loaded, and another exchange of fire began.  You might wonder how the two men could still be firing when they’d both been hit as many times as they had.  Well, Eye Patch was wearing a bulletproof vest, so that helped him out a lot.  And he was full of BLACKRICAN anger.  Each bullet just seemed to make him blacker.  As for the taxi cab driver, he was currently in the fourteenth hour of 16-hour shift, and was jacked to the nines on PCP.

They were screaming at each other as they fired, though Eye Patch’s voice sounded very not normal.  He sounded like that kid from Little Rascals. Froggy.
“Muthafucka!  You gwyne die now, muthafucka, you gwyne die!”
“Motherfuck!  Die, you motherfuck!”

After emptying their second respective clips, both men fell to the floor.  The cab driver went unconscious and died approximately 37 seconds later.  Eye Patch, though, remained alive and black for the moment.  He turned to face Nickasun, blood still spurting from his neck, and spoke.
“What ‘dis?  You think to kill me? Think you gwyne best Negrosun?”

Nickasun continued to cower on the ground.  He didn’t move, or volunteer any answers to Eye Patch’s questions.  Eye Patch tried to get up, but the immense loss of blood finally put him out, and he collapsed.  After another minute, Nickasun looked up cautiously.  Eye Patch and Unlucky Cat both appeared to be dead.  He stood up slowly.  He could hear faint sirens in the background.  Not good.  He sure as hell didn’t want to spend any more time in interrogation rooms.
Nickasun looked around the ruins.   All he saw was cubes.  Big cubes, smaller cubes, smallerer cubes.  And massive amounts of blood pooling around Eye Patch, Unlucky Cat, and the cab driver.  But other than bodies and blood and cubes, nothing.  Even his mattress was gone.

Then he noticed his box.  His cubic zirconia box.  It was half-covered in cubed debris, next to where his mattress should’ve been.  He stepped over and picked it up.  Completely intact.  Apparently, super termites didn’t eat cubic zirconia.  Inside were his keys, wallet, cell phone and guitar tuner.  The sirens were getting stronger.  Nickasun closed the box and moved toward the door.  When he got outside, he ran the three blocks to his car.  He didn’t see Grutch’s hot dog stand.  By that, I mean that he didn’t see Grutch’s hot dog stand because it wasn’t currently there.  Not because he didn’t see it even though it WAS there.  Do you see?

After getting in, Nickasun started the car, threw it in drive, and took off.  He passed several police cars, but they were heading toward the ruins of Club Blue Balls and didn’t seem to notice him.  After five minutes, with massive amounts of adrenaline coursing through his veins, he turned on his GPS device.  He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go yet.  When the screen came up, though, there was already a destination entered.
“Turn left now.”
Nickasun turned left.  He figured he might as well follow the directions until he picked out a new destination. When he finally accessed the destination indicator, it said Pittsburgh.
“Pittsburgh,” he thought.  “Why does it say Pittsburgh?” He certainly hadn’t entered Pittsburgh into the GPS.  He tried to erase the destination, but the machine wouldn’t let him.  It kept displaying some error message.  It must’ve been broken.  Finally, he thought he might as well go with it.  Why not drive to Pittsburgh?  After all, Negrosun wasn’t in Pittsburgh, and neither were super termites and dead blackops and bile-infused donuts.
Nickasun had never been to Pittsburgh before.

By Crag Dakkins

GRUTCH: My attorney is very useful, despite his racial handicap. I think he’s Samoan.
NICKASUN: What?
GRUTCH: You remind me of a movie. Hop in.
NICKASUN: Where are we going?
GRUTCH: Is Pancake’s House still here?
NICKASUN: What’s that?
GRUTCH: What does it sound like to you?
NICKASUN: A place with pancakes?
GRUTCH: Very good. Pancakes would cromulate right about now. Since you haven’t heard of it, I assume you don’t know if it’s still in operation. That’s what we call critical thinking. I’ll drive over there anyway. Don’t cost nothin’.
NICKASUN: Officer, am I free to go?
GRUTCH: No officer here. Call me deputy. You’ve probably been free to go for some time. How long were you in the interrogation room anyway?
NICKASUN: Two days, maybe three.
GRUTCH: Jesus, son! Without a formal charge against you they can’t detain you for more than 24 hours. All you had to do was ask if you were free to go and they’d let you. It’s all spelled out for them in the police rule videos they have nowadays.
NICKASUN: So, OK, will you let me go?
GRUTCH: Weren’t you listening? I said we’re going to Pancake’s House.
NICKASUN: Yeah, but you also said I was free to go if I asked.
GRUTCH: Their rules are not MY rules.
NICKASUN: But…you’re a cop, right?
GRUTCH: I never said that. Now listen here, tell me about Crag Dakkins.
NICKASUN: He was my landlord for a while and then he blew his brains out.
GRUTCH: An excellent summation of the man’s life! YOU WIN THE PULITZER!
NICKASUN: Um…
GRUTCH: Let me tell you about Dakkins. See, he was a guy I knew, a friend of mine. Because of this friendship I took special interest when I read his death notice in my newspaper. You can guess how I felt when I read it.
NICKASUN:…
GRUTCH: I said, YOU CAN GUESS HOW I FELT!
NICKASUN: Uh, sad?
GRUTCH: YES, YES! I felt sad. See, Crag and I had gone on some adventures about ten years back. Others were there, too, like Dr. Gonzo Kablaa, Doug Willis, EBOC, Jioux, The Stick Man, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and so forth. We saw much death and calamity in places such as Vegas, Border Town, Tokyo and others. All interesting tales, probably. And we met a few of the Greek gods. Did you know that they’re real? Well, they are, sort of. I’ve seen ‘em in the flesh.
NICKASUN: I know Gonzo. How is he doing?
GRUTCH: HOW SHOULD I KNOW!? Anyway, the reports I read about Crag’s suicide were suspicious, suggestive of foul play, so I came back to this godforsaken place to see if I could piece everything together. My follow-up investigations showed me it was a pretty cut and dry suicide. All witnesses confirmed that it was A THOROUGH BRAIN-EXITING, the self-inflicted likes of which you read about every day, only this time more thorough than usual.
NICKASUN: What does any of this have to do with me?
GRUTCH: Hold your horses, son, and you’ll see that I’m pretty good at answering questions before they are asked. In the reports I read, I saw your name mentioned as someone who might have information on Negrosun, whose business card on Crag’s person was the supposed impetus for the murder investigation. It was just my luck you happened to be in the interrogation room at the same time I came to the police station to see if I could make some sense of this clusterfuck. From there it was just a matter of escorting you outside, and that is how you ended up being a passenger in my vehicle.
NICKASUN: I see. What kind of car is this?
GRUTCH: What kind of car would you like it to be?
NICKASUN: Uh?
GRUTCH: NAME THE CAR!
NICKASUN: Oh. Uh…?
GRUTCH: NAME IT!
NICKASUN: A…Dodge?
GRUTCH: DODGE WHAT?!
NICKASUN: Dodge…traffic?
GRUTCH: Well, there you go. It’s a Dodge Traffic. Had this vehicle designed for me special by some military guys I know. Alliteratively speaking, it traverses treacherous terrain terrifically. You know?
NICKASUN: I don’t know. Looks like it uses a lot of gas.
GRUTCH: No, my Dodge Traffic runs on propane and propane accessories. Not that this is any advantage over gasoline. I just wanted to incorporate Hank Hill somehow.
NICKASUN: Since you’re not letting me go, is this another interview? I’ve had so many lately. I keep telling everyone I don’t know who Negrosun is!
GRUTCH: We call them interrogations, not interviews.
NICKASUN: Whatever. I want to talk to a lawyer before the inter-irrigation.
GRUTCH: But how can you say that when the interrogation has ALREADY BEGUN!?
NICKASUN: Could you just let me go? I have to take care of a termite problem.
GRUTCH: Be cool for a while. Just think of it as two guys driving around on a nice day having an ordinary, every-day conversation. You’d be surprised by how common conversations are around these parts.

SHITFACE: Where the fuck is he?
HOCKLEY: More importantly, where the fuck have you been? You were called in to interview him a long time ago.
SHITFACE: We call them interrogations, Chief, not interviews. You should know that. Although that’s the kind of ignorance I’ve come to expect from this turdwater police department in this turdwater burg.
HOCKLEY: You are out of line, detective!
SHITFACE: Am I? Sometimes I think I’m the only one who is in of line around here, sir. Where is the fat Samoan?
HOCKLEY: He’s Filipino, actually. That’s what we’re trying to find out. We figured you might have done something with him, half-cocked, troubleshooter you are. And I mean the bad kind of troubleshooter who shoots trouble at everything, not the good kind who shoots everything at trouble. One day your renegade ways are going to get you stuck in some muck and I won’t be able to pull you out.
SHITFACE: Save the lectures, Chief. I’m not in one of my lecture-hearing moods. I’ve been doing you favors. The last several hours I’ve been doing damage control, working my mustache off to save the police department.
HOCKLEY: What happened now?
SHITFACE: Never you mind. I didn’t want you to worry your sweaty, fat head about it. And this is the thanks I get?
HOCKLEY: Take it easy now. Nobody’s doing any lectures any more.
SHITFACE: I don’t have the rock guy, so let’s hear your second guess for where he might be. I have to speak to him immediately.
HOCKLEY: The other possibility makes us look bad, so keep this between you and me, OK?
SHITFACE: I’d sooner bite a man’s ear off than fill it with gossip.
HOCKLEY: Good. Something odd happened a few hours ago. Lieutenant Marsh said a man in plain clothes calling himself “Deputy Grutch” came in, bossed everyone around, asked questions about Negrosun, and laid out a punitive assault on O’McTally.
SHITFACE: Hmm, he rooted out the Alpha. Must be FBI, NSA, or CIA.
HOCKLEY: For some reason Marsh didn’t check him for identification. I searched the police database and checked with those agencies – no records of a Grutch anywhere. Could be he works for this Negrosun, which would mean this case isn’t the steaming pile of BS I once thought it was, but it would also mean we’ve lost our one valuable informant, probably permanently.
SHITFACE: How’d he get the Samoan out of the interrogation room?
HOCKLEY: Someone must have let him in, again without asking for credentials. I’m looking into it. I gotta tell ya, sometimes I just I don’t have enough shades of red in my facial spectrum to express my anger.
SHITFACE: Don’t sweat it, Chief. I got more than enough colors for the both of us. I will find this Man Grutch. And if need be, I will end him.

MRS. JOHNSON: I can’t have you go in there like that?
JENKINS: Like what?
MRS. JOHNSON: You know what I mean.
JENKINS: Oh, this mess of bandage wrappings on my face? I promise you, if I take them off it will be much worse.
MRS. JOHNSON: Maybe you should come back next week…when you’re better. I mean, you’re still bleeding.
JENKINS: Listen, ma’am. I swore an oath as a D.A.R.E. Officer to be at your classroom at the scheduled time every week. It’ll take a whole lot more than facial disarray to stop me from doing my part to prevent future Pablo Escobars and Scarfaces.
MRS. JOHNSON: I highly doubt these students…I mean, this is the Gifted and Talented class. Statistics show–
JENKINS: Ma’am, statistics don’t show diddly squat. I woke up in the gutter one morning with shattered cheekbones, my nose bent and crushed in every sort of which-way, and a headache like you wouldn’t believe. I have no idea how I got there. I am no bruiser, drug user, abuser, or gay cruiser, so the statistics show a low chance of me awakening in such a state. Yet here I stand before you, a mashed-up living testament to the deceptiveness of statistics.
MRS. JOHNSON: I honestly think you should go to the hospital. I could pass out your D.A.R.E. sheets for you.
JENKINS: No, ma’am, only police officers may distribute D.A.R.E. approved activity sheets and related D.A.R.E. accessories, as stipulated in Police Procedural Episode 12, Chapter 1. Now, if you don’t mind, please step aside from the door. I’ve got a tough job ahead of me. Success of the D.A.R.E. program is tricky to define, but if I can prevent just one child in twenty from turning into Pablo Escobar, I feel I have done my job.
MRS. JOHNSON: Oh my God! Look at your eyes!
JENKINS: Ma’am, you’re in my way.
MRS. JOHNSON: We’ve got to get you help – one of your pupils is three times bigger than the other one!
JENKINS: Ma’am, you are under arrest.

KHANDEE: Don’t you have any music in this place? iTunes or something?
ASSCOCK: I have a Bakelite radio run by vacuum tubes, if that’s what you mean.
KHANDEE: Neat-o. Can you check email on that?
ASSCOCK: Email is not genuine.
KHANDEE: Could you turn the AC on? It’s fucking sweltering in here.
ASSCOCK: Air conditioning is not genuine.
KHANDEE: So your place is kind of old, huh?
ASSCOCK: Stop saying stupid shit and come suck my dick. I’m ready again.
KHANDEE: Honey, you weren’t ready the last time. Or the times before that. It’s like chewing gum in my mouth for an hour. My jaw is sore.
ASSCOCK: I nutted, didn’t I?
KHANDEE: Yeah. Eww, that was weird.
ASSCOCK: I still have more money left. Get your tit-gristle whore-ass back over here so I can solicit more consensual sex acts out of you.
KHANDEE: No, I think I’m gonna get going. I should pick up my kid.
ASSCOCK: GET OVER HERE OR YOU WILL REGRET IT! I WILL PANCAKE YOU!
KHANDEE: Like you could even catch me. Look at you sitting there, struggling to breathe. You’re gross. I shoulda charged you extra.
ASSCOCK: PAY EXTRA? THESE MODERN-DAY INFLATIONARY PRICES AREN’T GENUINE TO BEGIN WITH! GET BACK HERE, YOU CUNT!
KHANDEE: See ya, fatty! Have fun with your old-ass shit and your donuts! Bye bye! Ha ha!
ASSCOCK: BIG MISTAKE, BITCH! I WILL FIND YOU! YOU WILL GET YOUR COMEUPPANCE! YOU WILL RUE–Oh, the hell with it. Whatever. Go ahead. Goodbye.

GRUTCH: Those pancakes hit the spot, didn’t they?
NICKASUN: I didn’t want to order any. You made me order them.
GRUTCH: You can’t go to Pancake’s House and not order pancakes. You’d regret it for the rest of your life.
NICKASUN: Look at me. I need to lose weight if you haven’t noticed.
GRUTCH: Yeah, you’ve needed to do that for many years, right? I know how it is. Having pancakes one day of the year isn’t so bad. You need to learn to enjoy things.
NICKASUN: Whatever.
GRUTCH: It’s hard to believe they still have Pancake’s House in a year like this year, 2025.
NICKASUN: I know what year it is.
GRUTCH: I’d hope so, but you look like the kind of guy who needs to be reminded of that every now and then. Anyway, we’re in a period of cultural stagnation. They don’t make new movies or books so much any more. Ever notice how when people talk about movies they almost always talk about movies made in or before 2010? All they do nowadays is turn old movies into 3-D or Smell-O-Vision or Choosies, etc. They turn the old books into Pop-Ups or Sensies or get the celebs to play-act their favorite parts on Hulu. No new content, just changes of form.
NICKASUN: Do you ever get to the point? Why do you even need me here? At the pancake place all you talked about was some dead cop you like named Tommy Gibbons, and now you’re telling me what year it is and what movies are like.
GRUTCH: It’s my process. I don’t tell you how to polish rocks.
NICKASUN: Geology is more than–
GRUTCH: So anyway, there’s a lot of cultural recycling going on. For the average man, such as yourself, this isn’t a big deal. You don’t mind being told the same things over and over again.
NICKASUN: That sounds boring.
GRUTCH: NONSENSE! Years ago Dakkins told me about you. He said he had to tell you the same things over and over again about how to straighten out your shit, and you didn’t appear to ever learn anything.
NICKASUN: Oh. Yeah, but he always said stupid stuff.
GRUTCH: YOU WANT ME TO THROW YOU IN THAT RIVER? BECAUSE I WILL! NOBODY EVEN KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW!
NICKASUN: Sorry, sir. I guess he was right about some things.
GRUTCH: Damn straight. Dakkins was right about the plateau we are on. He wrote constantly about it like some mind-stuck imbecile. He said art needed to become freewheeling in order to bring about new myths for our age – you know, Joseph Campbell style shit. Crag thought that by creating our own new myths people would become more confident and happy. Now, me, I would term it a little differently. I would say what we have been missing isn’t myths but heroes, although maybe the myths and heroism go hand-in-hand.
NICKASUN: I like the movies now. I saw “Monsters vs. Aliens” again a while ago and it was like I was watching it for the first time. I got to change the characters’ outfits and there must’ve been at least ten endings to choose from!
GRUTCH: Crag placed most of the blame for our shitty art on “Avatar”, that 3D and CGI extravaganza from about 15 years ago. By Crag’s reckoning it was the most imaginationless piece of art he’d ever seen in his life, and made all the more depressing by all the time and money that had been spent on it and the public’s adoration of it. The problem, he said, was the imbalance between the attention given to the form and to the content, with favor to the form. Crag said after “Avatar” Man was tricked into thinking he could satisfy his primal need for meaning by adding dimensions of immersion and interactivity to recycled narrative content. Books and movies were basically becoming video games, lame video games. To be sure, authentic video games are fine – they have their own place in satiating Man’s aggressive instincts – but Man is also an intellectual creature who craves meaning, and this is something that can’t be gained by immediate sensory gratification.
NICKASUN: I didn’t like “Avatar” much, but the black girl in it was hot. I liked her in the “Star Trek” remake.
GRUTCH: Interesting thing was, Crag’s annoying fixation on these theories came about five years after the movie was released. Every day, I’d get a new variation on this theme in my emailbox. He’d also throw in comments about the deleterious effects of internet videos and so forth, but mostly it was about “Avatar”. Some people think global warming will destroy us, Crag thought it would be “Avatar”. The last time I visited him he had about thirty copies of the movie sitting around his place. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” he told me.
NICKASUN: Why’d he buy lots of copies of a movie he hates?
GRUTCH: I just told you, son. Things don’t stick to you, do they?
NICKASUN: Why do you call me son? You gotta be only five years older than me.
GRUTCH: It’s either “son” or “boy”. Take your pick.
NICKASUN: Asun.
GRUTCH: What I’m beginning to suspect, son, is that Crag’s death wasn’t a suicide at all. I’m thinking his rantings about culture didn’t escape the notice of some very powerful people, and this sealed his fate.
NICKASUN: Who do you think it was?
GRUTCH: Occam’s Razor. I think “Avatar” director James Cameron has something to do with Crag’s death.
NICKASUN: Really?
GRUTCH: No.
NICKASUN: …
GRUTCH: I don’t go to the movies much but the other day I saw my first mash-up. A buddy of mine and I went to “Animal Lebowski”. It had lines like “Fat, drunk, and this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass is no way to go through life, son”. Most of the movie was shit like that – unrelated scenes from the two better movies put together for comedic effect. Together these micropackets of supposed amusement were stitched together to comprise a macropacket of bemusement. It was irritating, like an episode of Family Guy.
NICKASUN: I like Family Guy.
GRUTCH: The audience laughed the whole way through the movie, but I bet they didn’t retain much of anything from it.
NICKASUN: The last mash-up I saw was “Blazing Frankenstein Producers”, the sequel to “Young Saddles”. It was better than the first one ‘cause now there were THREE movies combined instead of two. The Mel Brooks mash-ups are the best.
GRUTCH: How well did you and Crag Dakkins know each other? It’s hard for me to imagine him wanting anything to do with you.
NICKASUN: I didn’t see him very much. He was pretty annoying, always playing practical jokes on me. One time he broke into my place and stocked my fridge with Naked drinks. He said I had to drink those to lose weight.
GRUTCH: Don’t look a gift burglar in the mouth. Did you drink the drinks?
NICKASUN: No. I threw them out. I don’t like fruit juice.
GRUTCH: Unwise. You ought to take care of your health. We aren’t young men anymore. Me, I have a prolapsed prostate. You don’t want that. My doctor says my guts are such a mess down there they defy description. You don’t want that either. You want to be able to describe things. Take care of yourself.
NICKASUN: Are you taking me home?
GRUTCH: This is your place, huh? It isn’t much to look at.
NICKASUN: Yeah, it’s all gone now. I guess it’s too late to call the exterminator. Shit like this always happens to me.
GRUTCH: Don’t play the victim game, son. There’s nothing gained by it.
NICKASUN: Yeah, but it still sucks. My house fell down. So did my strip club.
GRUTCH: I’ll tell you what – see that hot dog trailer there?
NICKASUN: Yeah.
GRUTCH: I rented it. I was going to hole up in there for a while and scope out this area for clues. I’ll let you sleep nights in there if you need a place to stay. I’ll be out patrolling during the nighttime anyway.
NICKASUN: Thanks, I would like that.
GRUTCH: During the daytime, you’ll have to scram, though. Lay low. I don’t want to have to break you out of the police station again. But you can’t hide here, because I’ll be working undercover selling hot dogs. I don’t need you gumming up the works. Got it?
NICKASUN: Won’t you need to sleep sometime?
GRUTCH: You let me worry about that. From time to time I may call on you. And you better do as I say, because whatever threats this Negrosun has made, it’s nothing compared to the wrath you’ll face from me. Ever strangle a guy to death with his own two arms? No? Well, I have. Understand?
NICKASUN: Yes sir. Do you want my cell number?
GRUTCH: Not my way. I’ll navigate the land to find you. It’s what I do well. Now get outta here. I have to open the hot dog stand.
NICKASUN: You didn’t ask me one question about Negrosun.
GRUTCH: Do you want me to?
NICKASUN: No. It’s just, I was going to thank you.
GRUTCH: I got all the information I need from you.