dogshitart

Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, 2011

Oil on Found Wood

9" x 12"

The Process

Paul: (sharp exhale through clenched teeth) OK, so this is what I got so far. Keep in mind, it’s the early goings. I’m not married to the concept. Ideas welcome, as always, ‘specially from you Captain Simmons.

Gene: OK, lay it on me soldier. I have a boner already.

Paul: Me too, destroyer, me too. Ok so…

Peter: Wait wait…

Paul and Gene and Ace (in perfect three-part blending): What is it PC?

Peter: I have a boner too. No…Wait…Ok, yeah. Definitely. Like a petrified banana down there.

Paul (after silently mouthing the words “petrified banana” into the piece of white paper he‘s holding): Ok. Here it is. Ok, wow. Kinda’ nervous here. Sweaty. Ok here it is.

Gene: Just say it amigo, everybody here loves you brother.

Paul: Thanks Dr. Love. Here it is: (Standing and clearing his throat, then singing in a fragile, reedy tenor):

Lick it up. Lick it up. Whoa-ohh-oh.. Lick it up. LICK it up, Whoah ohh oh.

(Total silence for 29 seconds)

Gene: Go on…

Paul: (confused) Whaddaya mean?….No. That’s it. that’s all I got so far. You like?

Peter: Uhhhh….

Gene: (takes a beat to collect his thoughts) OK. Well, first off, Paul, I think it’s great. Fucking awesome, Ok? Of course, we’ll have to sharpen it up a bit maybee-uh…

(Paul‘s face goes instant from hopeful/expectant to resigned/melancholy)

Gene:… figure out a bridge or ah….But whatever, no, it’s great. Fucking ambrosia. I mean it.

(Paul’s face now ecstatic and ebullient, he does a little clap and jump)

Peter: Am-what?

Gene: We love it. I love it. Let’s hear it again shall we? Can I get it once more?

Peter: I love it. I think it gave me wood! No wait…

Ace: I had wood yesterday.

Paul (singing a bit louder this time, gesticulating with the hand not holding the lyrics and imitating chord voicing with the word “DUM“ ) :

LICK IT UP - dum dum dum dum - LICK IT UP - dum dum dum dum dum - OHHHH OH OH!…
Weeeeeee! I’m so excited (more jumping and clapping).

Gene: you know what? I think I got it. Don’t get me wrong brother cause your words are tight and compelling as usual. I only offer suggestions, nothing we can’t veto.

Peter and Ace: Veto?

Paul: Yeah dummies, “veto”, it means “wine” in Italian.

Peter: Fuck you, does not!

Paul (hits Peter in the arm with a closed fist while speaking) : Does too taint-master! My cousins name is Vino, and it’s ‘cause my Aunty Helen likes wine.

Gene: Yes. Paul‘s right. But that’s not the point, not now. Get ready with those chords one more time maestro…(now Gene gets up, cracks knuckles, makes odd throat clearing noises before singing. in rich baritone):

LICK IT UP…

Paul: Dum Dum Dum Dum

Gene: LICK IT UP

Paul, Ace (and Peter after the first two “Dums”): Dum Dum Dum Dum Dum

Gene (louder, and with great gesture) : OH OHH OH - IT”S ONLY RIGHT NOW!!!

(All rise and high five around the room. Paul and Ace are now doing the jump/clap together.)

Paul: AMAZING. Truly inspired, as usual, god of thunder. It rocks, it’s fucking KISS, it’s TOTALLY fucking Kiss.

Ace: Genius dude. You’re like Churchill.

Gene: Right? Right? Let’s get a few takes today for some beds and we’ll spend tomorrow orgy-ing with groupies, and posting the SHIT out of our new, Paul Stanley penned masterpiece: LICK IT UP!

Paul: IT’S ONLY RIGHT NOW! You get it? See? It’s only right? Now?

Gene (thrusting out a heavily blinged hand): Brothers: Hands in! “lick it up” on three:

Gene, Paul, and Ace: ONE TWO THREE, LICK IT UP!!

Peter: Awesome…Lick what up?

(more jumping, clapping, and high fiving)

DSL on the internetz...

Green Cat (I Am Nothing), 2008

Digital Print

Slow week here at DSL w/ both principles on late summer hiatus. So we thought we'd lay out all of our links here in one easy to use post. Hopefully, if you haven't already, you'll join us on Facebook, Twitter and check out our deviantArt page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dogshitland/164861500234651

http://twitter.com/#!/dogshitland

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dogshitart

Snap Dragon, 2010

Spray Paint on Paper

9" x 12"

Praise Him

Goddamn her. GodDAMN this motherfucker. Twenty-five people in the clan, ten of them women of age. The others - seven healthy men, one older couple, and six toddlers - are running like clockwork. The killing floor, the offerings, the fucking worship (praise him), all of it smooth and hassle-free, and now his own flesh and blood, his brother, and Walt's ridiculous wife: making noise and agitating. Nine fucking waiters. At least nine banquets. A simple math for simple people, and always - like our words tell them -“We move on…”. And now this.

Jack Hartley was sitting watch on his valley and running down his appointments and worries in his mind while he sharpened the bone-hilt dagger his mother had given him almost twenty-three years ago.

It was bad luck (and, unfortunately, all too common) for a waiter to have second thoughts and dread feelings about the Price. As clan leader, Jack dealt with anxious, terrified waiters on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis. It was a twenty-four hour, heart-and-soul gig simply to keep them focused on bare survival without his own family playing the treasonous malcontents. Jess had made a hideous example for the others, especially - he feared - the new family. They heard Jessa’s proclamations and threats from dawn to dusk almost from the moment they’d arrived three weeks ago. The mother, Meegan her name was, had been hardening her stare at him almost from the moment she’d stopped thanking him for saving her family’s lives. He’d expected them to spirit off in the night for days now, to flee their strange new family and seek a more immediate safety somewhere lower in the valley. Once they arrived there - he knew - they were as good as dead. Would that blood be on his hands? His brother’s?

***

I didn’t knock. They were at the table praying when I came. Walt was leading, and Jessa and the girls were staring at him with faces twisted, like he’d just asked them to factor out pi or some shit. I was mad enough to interrupt, praise HIS name. Manstock couldn’t be allowed to live a minute passed three years and Jessa knew that. We were four fucking hours away. Risking fucking damnation. Praise HIS name. I was yelling, but the girls looked at me and they were already crying so I quieted down pretty quick. I says:

Jessa, Walter…I understand the reservations. I know where you are - both of you. But we are too damn close here. There’s too much at stake.

That was it. That was all I got out and Jessa was all over me like a mountain lion:

The Choice. Everybody gets a choice Jack you said it yourself.

She’s talking now about the choice. The option. Four hours left and it’s the bloody choice HE made. Praise HIS name.

Fuck the Choice, Sister.

I says to her. I says:

His choice, praise HIM, so we never have to make it. Never. Now come. I’ll go with you. Rhea already dressed theirs, so we’ll be alone in there.

Now Walt pipes up, and it’s another hour of: “Well that’s not the way I’m reading this Jack….It’s an interpretation Jack…The choice Jack“.

He’s waving the book around the whole time he’s raving and yelling.
Meanwhile it’s getting colder, and my people need to live through a winter. The world is moving on and I’m treading old, rotten ground. I swear If they weren’t family I’d have marched them out to the pyre and we’d all have feasted, unexpected. Praise HIS fucking name.

Well after a few more minutes of this, Walt’s quiets down. He says to me, (and looking back on it now, I guess I should have known right then): “OK then Jack, I guess you’ve made the choice for us. Now we’re going to have to live with it.” Then Jessa says “You too, Jack. You’re going to have to live with it as well”

Yes, looking back, the things that they said just then were foreboding, but rushing like I was, I didn’t see. Just like I didn’t see the weird looks I’d been getting around the camp, or the way the children had stopped eating blessed meat for the last two weeks. When I’m under the gun I tend (or tended) towards myopia. I was an average student at best, so I have to concentrate right?

Now we got minutes. Fucking minutes. I grabbed the instruments and blessed it. Walt spoke, I spoke. We were down there ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Praise HIM.

***

They were in the pen at 11:40. And by the time they checked and readied there were like, five minutes left. Jessa woke the stock, a giant male, fat and wide and clean. He’d been on a valium and ethyl drip for three weeks and hadn’t had a non-alcoholic drink in two years. His skin was the color of the smooth cement floor. He was hairless, and his eyes were only colored quarter-spheres on the upper part of his face, like an abbreviation of eyes. Panting and snoring when we went in, he didn’t scream until the very end and even then not very loud or very long. Jack's killing stroke was to the neck, and he only needed one swing. The doomed manstock's eyes and mouth blinked and twitched for what seemed like hours, by the time they'd stilled, Jack was halfway done dressing the meat for banquet.

A giant yield, and tasty although they did not know it then. Jenna caught Jack just as he has finished fetching water from the cisterns to wash the killing floor. He’d dumped only the first of six buckets when Jessa pounced:

I’m out.

Jack didn’t speak.

Hello!? I said I’m gone, you heartless fuck. It’s atrocity! You know it…

Jack - dumping water and brushing with an ancient mop - said nothing.

Not answering me won’t make this any less true. Walter and I are heading south, looking for others. I need your word you won’t send Lu out after us, won’t send anybody after us. The kids, Jack. I can’t…We can’t do this anymore. Elyse and Michael are asking questions. Last week he snuck out of the house and we…

She sobbed then, and sniffled. The lake of tears that had been pooling in her eyes since he first saw her in the kitchen finally outgrew it’s banks. The flood tide rolled and rolled as she pressed on:

They were at the door of the pen :

Jack. Michael said he knew he had a brother down there. He wanted to see his brother. This is wrong.

He’d dumped the last bucket and finished up. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t listen to the things she was saying, and he felt that if she continued, he might have to cuff her around a bit. It was late, and he knew that somewhere the new family was wide awake, hearing all of this. He moved towards the bulkhead steps with a stack of empty buckets. Jess gave him three steps before wounded and crying she turned frustrated and enraged:

Fine. Fine you ignorant fuck, listen up: We’re out. Don’t look for us. Don’t ask after us. If you send riders I’ll kill them. If you hurt anyone of my people I’ll kill you, Jack. That’s it. That’s all the warning you’ll get.

She left the pen before him.

***

She’d talked about it forever. Since before, before. When it was just the three of us she used to threaten to leave. “And go where?” he’d answer. Usually the idea wasn’t broached again until her next shift, at which time she’d become enamored of her impending child, and the cycle would begin again. It was amazing to me how hypocritical! When the plates were served she was only too happy to reap the nutritional benefits of the “atrocities.” On top of that, thankless and unappreciative. I broke the rules for her. More than once. Tell me: if your ex-wife shacked up with your brother after fucking him in secret for a half-decade, would you be inclined to turn the cheek and offer your hand in friendship? Right. Not many would. Not only did I not exile them, I allowed them to have a child together and keep it. Every time Jessa looks on Reni’s face she should fall to her knees and praise me right along with HIM.

Instead she just wants more. By this time she’d served the tribe three times and had two more kids of her own. You’d think there would be some hardening there, a resignation to fate. But no. She protested each time and skipped the meals until another waiter had served. It was embarrassing. For the last two years she and Walt had threatened almost every month, hell every fuckin’ WEEK, to leave us. Walt’s even taken to the streets, preaching the Choice, preaching a new way, preaching AGAINST me. It was sickening. I guess this time I’d just had enough.

Taconic

The story is told of a young couple and their small child who decided to have a picnic at a nearby campground called Taconic. The picnic grounds there were on a sprawling field of grass surrounded on three sides by canyon walls hundreds of feet high. A waterfall topples from the highest point, and the stream that feeds it is so small that the falls turn to mist before meeting the rocky well two hundred feet down. The family, the Wickers, they were called, were very excited. Taconic was a favorite, and it was a gorgeous day. As they hiked the ten minute trail that would bring them to the box-canyon, they were smiling and playful. The Wicker boy was running ahead and running behind and howling into the woods. His name was Robert and his parents loved him very much.

They set up the picnic. It was a little colder that day than it had been, so mom Wicker corralled Robert and put on the sweatshirt she’d brought just in case of that very condition. She felt good sliding the thing over her son’s shoulders. She was protecting him, warming his body and being prepared on his behalf. When she’d finished the boy ran into the field again, frolicking and jumping about, shouting some strange song or another. His excitement and boldness were spellbinding to his parents, and they sat rapt, and appreciated the canyon walls, the sun high in the May sky and the most important person in either of their lives. They didn’t even talk to each other, but instead sat content with the silence between them and the natural sounds of the day.

After a while, Dad Wicker got horny. Mom Wicker could tell by the way his breathing ticked up and his face flushed in the noon sunlight. She looked at his jeans and thought “bingo!” She attacked him then, kissing, biting, fuming and moaning all over him. She took out his cock and swallowed it whole. Fifty yards away, the boy, Robert found a toad. He was chasing it around on his hands and knees when his father bent his mom over the oven fried chicken and shoved the length of him into her with conviction. Mom Wicker cried out in equal parts pain and pleasure. Dad pumped away, screaming obscenities and growling as he thrust. There were a few other couples in the park when the Wickers had arrived, but they’d bolted when the loud moaning started, all except for one man. He was alone, and he was watching everything carefully. His name was Doug Salvatore and he’d come to Taconic to kill himself.

But the family didn’t notice. They also didn’t notice as the man turned, and headed for the far wall of the canyon. There was a path there, switching back and forth as it climbed. The man followed it, and fifteen sweaty minutes later, he was off it. Now the man was above them almost 200 feet, perched alongside the waterfall with the toes of his sneakers lipping over the edge. If the Wickers had been paying any kind of attention, they’d have been really weirded out by this climbing, perching man. Perhaps they’d have called their son back over. Maybe they would have left the area, or called the DEM cops stationed at the entrance to the park. Instead, the boy, Robert had a tea party with his toad and two imaginary friends while his father and mother tried for orgasms five and six respectively.

I’m gonna fuck your ass. I’m putting it up your ass Mom Wicker!

Oh put that cock in my ass Daddy. Ohhhhh Daddy. Ahhh. Ahhh. Ahhhhhooooooouuuuugh. Augh. Augh. Augh!!!!

Ugh.

Ugh.

Ugh!

Ugh!!

Uugghh!!!

Oh! Ow! Ow!. Whoaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mom Wicker was screaming full throat now, emboldened by the recently deserted field. Her shrieks filled the air and rolled like a noisy tide across the fields, bouncing in confusing ricochets off the high cliff walls. A flock of sparrows who’d been chattering and bleating in a nearby tree suddenly took wing all at once. A family of beavers, hard at work all morning, was startled from their damming. Robert Wicker, a bit bored now with his tea party, jumped at the sound and looked over at his parents.

Then two things happened at once. The first thing was that Daddy Wicker shouted:

Ass to mouth Mommy!

And began laying the physical groundwork of a position switch.

The second thing was that the man who’d been standing at the top of the Taconic Waterfall jumped.

Mom Wicker loved the idea. She reverse thrusted, and Daddy Wicker came out of her with a loud “Thook” sound. Little Robert the three year old was staring intently now; fascinated by this weird sort of play his parents were into. He had no clue what was happening, but he knew the words flying from her mouth were bad words. Was Daddy hurting her? Was Mommy in pain? The boy began to sprint towards his parents to help out however he could.

Meanwhile, in the sky over their heads, the jumper had gone unconscious, which was ironic since he’d been worrying about that in the days and weeks before the big event. He wanted to make sure that he was out cold at impact, so as to avoid even the slightest instant of pain. He’d considered taking a bottle of Tylenol PM™ pre-jump but decided against it. He couldn’t risk passing out before he got to the launch pad, or worse yet, on the climb up to the launch pad. Doug Salvatore was a man with a deadline. If he didn’t make it, there were things much worse than death waiting for him.

Mom and Dad Wicker are just completing the position shift. Mommy is on her knees, about the make Daddy’s shit-smelling erection disappear in her throat. The little boy, Robert, after running as fast as he could for 100 yards, had reached his parents. They finally notice him when he says:

Daddy stop!

Roberts’s parents - Daddy back-bending on his knees / mom kneeling forward with two hands on his cock like a microphone - both turn their heads at the same time, shouting in unison:

ROBERT!!!

And then Doug Salvatore, unconscious and at terminal velocity, fell on the boy’s parents with a noise like the world’s biggest baseball landing in the world’s biggest mud-puddle.

SPLURCH!

Robert was the one they would identify first. His fingers were all intact enough to get a print. Salvatore’s left foot (clad in a gigantic Timberland) clipped him on the head like a hammer strikes a roofing nail. The boy’s head exploded outward in a misty spray of brain, teeth, and hair. The rest of him absorbed the residual force and every bone in his body was turned instantly to powder. He kept oozing and sliding into the ends of the body bag they zipped him into.

His parents were another story. Doug Salvatore weighed 280 pounds, and most of that weight was first deposited directly onto the back of Mom Wicker’s head. Since her head was, at the time, hovering a few inches over her husband’s dirty dick, those two areas were all but annihilated at impact. They were compressed in an instant, everything burst and strewn about the area. Mom Wicker’s back took a knee like a jackhammer, splitting dramatically into a few pieces of meat and a spinal column. Her legs from the thigh down were left intact. They jumped and danced for a while. Daddy was turned - from the belly button down - into pile stinking crimson gruel. Above the abdomen, however, he’d remained intact. Doug Salvatore’s chin had met Daddy’s abdomen, which absorbed most of the force of impact. In the moments after the crash landing, just seconds before Doug realized he was still alive, Daddy’s poor carcass voided explosively onto the would-be suicide’s head. Doug became conscious when blood and shit started leaking into his open mouth simultaneously.

His gag reflex kicked in and he sat bolt upright, spitting, gagging, coughing, sneezing…He was dumbfounded. Taconic Park Canyon was 200 feet high. He looked around and saw the carnage all about him. Piles of shit, and puddles of gore glistened in the late day. The stench was otherworldly. He had fallen for what seemed like forever. There was no way he could still be intact but yet…

Next to him on the ground was Daddy Wicker’s head. Doug was staring at it, spellbound, when its eyes popped open. He didn’t have time to jump back before the head said:

Hi Doug!

Doug jumped back then. Yelling in terror and no longer puzzling about his fall. He had to leave. The park, the town, the state…He had to run as fast as he can from the fields and find his car and just keep moving. He took a last look at the head - silent now, eyes closed, and turned and ran straight into somebody else. A man. A non-descript man of medium height and weight. A man with eyes that changed color. Lu said:

Hi Doug!

And then Doug Salvatore closed his eyes, and shut down for a while.

Ethel Gumb

Age ten. That was when it really started. She was, uh…She was different, certainly, before then. Different since she was born, really. She would, like, go without dinner seven days straight, or not say anything, like not a word, for as long as she could. One time, I remember she lasted from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve without saying a fuckin word. What kid goes through Christmas without speaking?

Anyway, ten. She was ten. That’s the first time she was arrested and (at least as far as I know) the first time she ever caused somebody else physical pain. It was still summer, still hot. Like heat-wave hot, but she wore jeans and an old ratty grey sweatshirt. Same one, same everyday. She wore that stuff so long that it would start to reek. She wouldn’t wash and she stunk too. I’d come home and have to open windows…

She’d been wearing that smelly uniform and it’d been in the high 90’s for two weeks. This was back when I had a real job, so I wasn’t around during the daylight hours most of the time. The week she did it, I’d been working doubles all weekend and it was Monday. Fuckin’ day off, right? I was needing it, I remember. We’d had problems with the air conditioning at the shop, and everything was soaked thru with humidity. I needed rest. I was tired. I usually sleep until seven, eight o’clock no problem. This time though, Sarah was working too and I had to get up and check in with the girl. Just to see she’s ok and what-not, right? Like I’m home, but I’m really not there cause I’m fast asleep. Gotta say, “hello.” So I did. And it was two o’clock when I did. The messenger came - they told me - at 3:30.

Ethel had a knife. She had found a bunch of them in the kitchen and had picked the sharpest from a group of seven. I know that because I found the other six knives before the police came. She’d taken her time, and in the end, the knife she chose - a Ginsu with Cedar grips - fit the job just fine. It was a four inch blade, sharp and stiff. She’d answered the door and the guy had presented her with a box of three Reader‘s Digests. Gave her the clipboard, and asked her to sign. Instead - he told the police - Ethel reamed the Ginsu into the man’s crotch, severing his femoral artery like an umbilicus. The messenger - Mr. Ted Means, his name was - nearly died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital of massive blood loss. Mr. Means was in a coma for three weeks. Even today he forgets things easily and sometimes has trouble spelling.

He’d crawled for a telephone, trailing blood through our living room. Ethel - according to his account - followed him the whole way asking: “Does it hurt ?, huh Mister ? Does it hurt ?”

After that she wasn’t welcomed at school anymore. I had to quit my job just to watch her during the day. When asked about the incident, Ethel would always say she felt “scared” and “threatened” by the guy, and that’s why she stabbed him.

***

For a few years I guess everything went OK. I don’t remember anything too dramatic. There was a time she got in trouble - suspended actually - from school for selling booze in film containers in the bathroom. I think that was eighth grade. In ninth grade she stole a car, but it was her grandmother’s car and she gave it back unharmed. So I guess everything went well, comparatively. It was after she turned 12, definitely. The puberty age, right? That’s when they really lose it. Preadolescent females are realms and levels of frustration and delusion. Then they “grow up,” and everything starts sucking even worse than it did before.

So on her twelfth birthday she asked for a pony. Her father was a used car salesman. Mom’s a secretary. Girl asks for a pony with a straight face. I remember she was counting off the days till her birthday on a big, desk blotter calendar. June 28. Every morning we’d see a new, giant red X on another day. Always marked off and dry before any of us had been up.

With a week left, the place was like a crypt for the silence and fear. All of us except Ethel. She yelled and sung all that week, skipping everywhere she went. She hadn’t talked to anybody about the pony basically since she’d had the idea. Her mother and I tried, more than once, to address it with her but any mention of it was always greeted with tantrum. The leg would stomp, the pouting would begin. After that it was useless. My daughter could shut herself down inside on demand, all the while lashing out with wild gesticulation, awful screams, and groaning. There’s no reasoning with that, and so we did not attempt reason. We just watched it all tick by, like people who’d been thrown off a cliff. Eyes closed, praying, waiting on the impact.

But then fate stepped in: For her eleventh birthday, Ethel had been given a miniature beauty queen set. Make up, fake make up, some false eyelashes. Like a toy make up kit for little ladies. She hated it. Didn’t so much as take it out of the box, I don’t think. Except for one piece…There was a tiny nail file in the kit. It had a soft, green handle too, so the person filing wouldn’t have to hold the metal. It was pointed at the end, but not sharp. I never saw it as dangerous until Ethel stabbed her classmate Lisa Simas with it, taking Lisa out of Moses Brown School for ALL of spring term and Ethel out forever. We never found out why. Whenever any of us tried to get at the truth, Ethel would wind up and loose it, sometimes for days and weeks at a time. She’d hold her breath and spin and smash into walls. She’d claw her face and arms until they bled. What can you do with that?

It happened at a school event they called "Field Day". Once a year everybody’s parents went and brought food, and coolers full of drinks, and watched their kids compete in track and field events. It was the kind of thing that's probably fun for folks with normal, even semi-well adjusted children. For my wife and I, It felt like execution day after a few ugly months ripening on death row.

Ethel had been rooting through our stuff looking for her favorite lemonade so she could show her friend Lisa the kind she liked. My wife had her purse with her, and for whatever reason, a small pouch from the birthday makeup kit was in there. I guess Ethel saw it, started showing it to her friend Lisa. Lisa examined the file for a few moments and handed it back with a dissapproving snort, telling our sweet girl her file was a fake. That’s what she said: “It’s just a fake Ethel Gumb! You are not old enough,” and then she was crowing to anybody around who’d give her a glance “EthEL canNOT wear makeUP. Too YOUNG Too YOUNG…:” On and on and on. I heard her behind me still crowing away during one race or another. The attention of the hundreds of parents and faculty was firmly on the race until a different noise shattered the normalcy. The blood-searing scream of a small child in pain. I was first over to the girls. I found the Green handle sticking out of the girls left eye, and her face coated with a slick, red-tinged fluid that reminded me of egg white. She was losing consciousness and fell into my arms. I cradled her, as my daughter hit me - over and over again - in the head and face, as hard as she could saying: “let go…Daddy LET GO, LET GO!”

So: expelled...Again. And by the grace of God, not locked up in a psycho-ward. Ethel spent the dreaded twelfth birthday home, locked in a room, reading Laughter: The Best Medicine and listening to my Cole Porter records. She was mad enough not to talk to ME for almost two whole months after the Lisa affair. Like I had shit to do with it. See how she was? Batshit crazy. Forever. What do you do?

***

That summer, she was in a car accident. A bad car accident. Ethel had asked to go drama camp. In fact, I think it was because of this camp we sent her too, that she actually ended up in showbiz. Most things she tried ended up shelved. As soon as she found out that there was actually work involved she quit. acting and singing though, she actually seemed to dig. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I saw the camp as an important education for her. That was the lesson from a two week, two thousand dollar acting camp. Her singing was still just as shitty coming back after the camp, but at least she seemed to enjoy the experience.

She made friends fast in those years, nutty as she was. At the camp there was an eleven year old Korean girl named Kin. They hooked up fast and stayed tight throughout, although her mother and I only heard of this one by forcing impatient answers out of our daughter when we could catch her on the phone. Kin’s mom - she told us - wasn’t around and neither was her dad. Both her parents had been Korean, but Kin had been born and raised in China until her foster parent - A “tiger mom” of the very old school - moved to the US on a work visa. Kin had been here exactly fourteen days when the drama camp started.

Kin’s birthday was the Saturday after camp ended, but Ethel had asked to sleep over at her house that night and just stay right through the party. I met Kin’s foster mom at camp that afternoon and found her solid and sober, and when they pulled out of the driveway, I breathed a little sigh of relief. It had been a disastrous year, and next year loomed large and dark, with its new faces, new teacher, and harder class work. Meanwhile my precious daughter is getting more and more disconnected and surly. All of a sudden though, a taste of success. A new friend, and (we thought) enjoyable experience at a two-week, away from home, summer camp. Miraculous.

I got the call at 11:30pm that night and, I swear, I still think the police officer who called thought my daughter was dead. There had been an accident. An awful wreck between three cars. There were dead people: Ethel’s friend Kin, and her mother were gone. Ethel was at the hospital. I left the phone hanging there and broke speed limits for fourteen harrowing minutes. She greeted me at the ER entrance. Standing Up. Laughing.

There was rain that night, and they’d skidded into a sea wall. The little girl Kin had been thrown fifty-five feet and impaled on the rusty, decrepit post of an ancient chain-link. She was dead when the EMT’s arrived. Her mother had been halfway-decapitated by the impact, but she’d survived until they told her at the ER that her foster child was dead. After that she slipped away. “Blood loss,” they wrote on report. I remember that struck me as odd. Ethel had been belted in on the opposite side of the back seat from Jin. She said she was talking to Mrs. Yan after the crash before the rescue got there. She said Mrs. Yan kept asking about Kin. Ethel said she had seen Kin impaled on the pole:

I saw the pole…

She said later. Added:

It was inside her, Dad. I saw the fence inside my friend. And there was paint coming from her mouth, bright red. I know it was blood but it looked like paint. She went from the top of the pole all the way down. Her mom was asking me where she was. I kept saying “she’s there, right there, over there,” and when she hit the ground she was wiggling her feet. The pole was painted red, Daddy.

***

She didn’t go back to school on time. Officially because of “Traumatic episode effects,” but really, just because she knew she could stay home for as long as she pleased, and she pleased long. Before the accident, my daughter had “issues”. After the accident, the issues had her. The wreck was in August. School started in September. By the Thanksgiving break, she was already back home. It seemed the Catholic school that had agreed to take Ethel in had a case of what we in the used auto business like to call “buyer’s remorse.” Ethel had started school late in the term because of her “lingering traumatic stress.” She hadn’t been there three weeks before her “issues” struck again.

The victim was a sixth grader, an advanced placement student a full three weeks younger than my daughter. His name was Jesse. Jesse Smith. Jesse and my daughter had become fast friends in the days and weeks since she’d been at St. Mark’s. I’d always be a few minutes late for pick-up to avoid the rush at the carport, and invariably, I’d find Jesse and Ethel sitting alone in the little glass vestibule. She was always talking about how Jesse Smith was “the only one who really understands me.” The afternoon before their fight, I remember she’d told me that she’d probably marry Jesse one day, and that he‘d whisk her away from Grand Rapids. Lucky him.

They were lab partners. Three times a week they would get taught the laws, resolutions, and civic policies of our natural world. They would also - on occasion - be given assignments to perform experiments in the lab. The teacher - Terrance Leighton was his name - had picked this particular week to teach his sixth graders the nature and properties of H2 SO4, or - by its common name - Sulfuric Acid.

I’m not sure about the exact circumstances. For weeks following the accident I would meet, at the state police station in Providence, with the parents of the children who were there that day (and of course the children themselves). Needless to say, the accounts of the events of that day were as numerous and variegated as snowflakes. After twenty-five years though, it seems to me that the recollection of Jesse Smith himself was probably the most credible, even injured and incapacitated as he was in the aftermath. The story he told sounded more like Ethel than any of the rest.

Jesse said he’d been late to science class. That was the first problem Ethel had with him that day. He’d been in trouble with another teacher and had been sent to the office. By the time Science started he was still getting reamed out in there, and so he was ten minutes late for Leighton’s class. Ethel greeted him with what he described as a “punch even harder than my dad hits me.” Things went downhill from there.

The next day, When Jesse Smith arrived at Mr. Leighton’s 3rd period Science class (five minutes early) my daughter greeted him with a note:

Dear Jesse,

I hate you. My heart’s broken, and I never want to see you again. Even though I’m your lab partner. After today, I don’t ever want to see you again. I’m sorry.

Love,

Ethel Gumb

Jesse wasn’t amused, but he wasn’t afraid either. You see, he’d known Ethel long enough to realize that she was a bit extreme in her personality, and that the letter - ugly as it was - was probably just overreaction. He saw no threat (although looking back at the words, maybe he should have) in the letter. “If anything,” he’d admit later, “the note made me feel bad for her. After I read it I planned on being extra careful to try and make her happy. She seemed like she needed it”

Yes, I know. I found all this out during the police investigation. Since I was spending so much time at the cop shop, I was usually in the company of at least two officers, receiving the news at the same time they did. Jesse’s note was read by an investigator named Lu Bonham. He read loudly, and annunciated carefully. When he got to the part about my daughter needing happiness, the entire room’s attention shifted from him to me. I felt the weight of the stares wash over me like a giant black wave.

The kids ran their experiments and Ethel remained silent and cooperative for the entire thing. The task called for the donning of special gloves, and the portioning of the highly volatile acid into four separate beakers. After they’d finished that, Mr. Leighton cruised the room checking their work, smiling for some, and then shaking his head regrettably for others. Then it was time to burn. They took the acid in droppers and parceled out a few drips onto different material gauging the effects, and recording the results. First a section of two-by-four, then an apple, next was a pane of thin glass, and last - the grand finale - a thin square of tin. All of them, burned right through in short order. Only the glass was able to stand up for more than scant seconds. Ethel and Jesse finished before any of the other groups and Leighton dismissed them, provided the station was cleaned up and the acids disposed of.

Jesse had been the bookkeeper that day, and so he was absolved from the clean-up. He was almost out the door of the classroom when Ethel called to him: “Hey Jesse, hold on…Come back here.” He turned back, making for the table to help with the clean-up. Ethel - he must have seen - had all the acid back in the large beaker they had poured it from. As Jesse made his approach, Ethel grabbed the beaker casually in one hand. Jesse got to the table, and hung his backpack on the hook under the ceramic desk-top. He looked up at Ethel to ask what she wanted him to do. Ethel said:

Fuck you, Jesse Smith

And then she threw almost a pint of sulfuric acid into the boy’s face.

***

She was taken away from us for a while after that, and the Smiths had a lawyer. For weeks following the attack my world became strictly about damage control. I apologized, both written and spoken-word. I offered to have Ethel meet the Smiths in person; apologize to Jesse in the hospital (no interest - go figure). I called day and night to the house and the hospital room, offering platitudes and regrets and - underneath it all - begging for mercy for my hideous daughter. After three months Jesse Smith still couldn’t see. His face, basically erased by the acid bath, had to be reconstructed with tissue taken from his legs and ass. He lived in constant, searing pain and yet his body couldn’t so much as whisper a complaint. The acid had eaten through the maxillary bone and parietal plate, in effect removing the bottom half of his face. The doctors had to basically build him a new throat, again with his own tissue as the medium. He’d had a total of seventeen surgeries and he was looking at more. His blood pressure wouldn’t stabilize, and he’d had several major heart attacks.

The legal end of it was not pretty either. The threats and wrangling began quickly after the accident and lasted almost three years before the parties involved went their separate ways. Ethel was sentenced to twelve months in a psychiatric ward. “After which time,” the judge had pronounced, we will all meet back here and see what is what.”

We did, and we did. At least we thought we did. Ethel’s doctors reports were glowing right from the start. They seemed to know a girl I hadn’t spoken to in years. A girl who smiled and laughed a lot but, rarely at the expense of others. A helpful girl, with an amazing singing voice. An ARTIST. My visits reflected the same. After serving ten out of the twelve months, Ethel was released on a two month probation on the condition that if she fucked up again, she’d go away until she was fifty. Ethel praised the judges and thanked everybody involved, swearing up and down that she was reformed, and that she felt better, and was “herself” again. Her first act, upon leaving the Psychiatric wing at Wilshire Memorial and rejoining society was to change her name. Not legally, not at first, but she meant it. “JUDY now, Judy GARLAND” she’d instruct, and she’d keep reminding you until you complied.

***

Now she comes home for what will be the final three-month stretch. We do a sort of baby-proofing, getting rid of anything sharp and hiding - under lock and key - anything that could be made to produce fire. We put lock-guards on every free outlet, and took all shoelaces, twine, fishing line, and wire out of reach. Ethel / Judy comes with an instruction book this time, like a gold fish. Feed three times a day, no more no less…Stay in the bathroom with her while she goes…She must be in bed by such and such a time and get up exactly X hours later. Thorazine>Lithium>Valium>Temazapam. Lather, rinse, repeat…And for a while, it works. A month goes by, then another, and then - three weeks into a third episode-free month - bad luck leads to catharsis.

It was never my intention to have the paper delivered. Since - for the last few years -I’ve not been able to sit and read a newspaper for even a few minutes without courting certain disaster, I’ve taken to buying the thing while out on errands or even late at night. The wife, though, she’s on a different schedule. The promotion was this: The paper will deliver early am for three weeks, gratis. If, after this test-period, we feel we want to keep it up, then the paper will put us on the books and deliver forever more. The wife jumped at it.

Then she forgot it, and for two weeks the paper was delivered. The guy came, dropped it off, and left without saying a word. Fine. The third week, though, wasn’t fine. The third and last week of the newspaper promotion involved sending a man; in this case a gentleman named Arthur Quinn, out to interview the recipients of the paper and encourage continued patronage. Arthur Quinn came to our house at 8:30am ready to talk subscription. I was in the shower, Ethel / Judy answered the door.

When I think about this it always comes back to timing and coincidence. I shower every morning at the same time, just about 8:15. So that’s that. My daughter is usually in my room, watching Tom and Jerry during my shower. I stash her there to keep her from doing things like answering the phone, using appliances, or getting the door. To eliminate the door and phone risks, I usually just crank the volume on the cartoons to shut out any stimulus noise. Then I shower as fast as I can and blast out into the bedroom to make sure the kid hasn’t killed anything. All this was done as written on the morning of Arthur Quinn’s visit. The difference manifests exactly at the moment Arthur rang the bell to our house. At that very moment, the state of Michigan decided to test something called the Emergency Response System. In order to conduct the test, they interrupted all programming with a black screen, a series of ugly tones, and a period of silence exactly one minute in duration.

Mr. Quinn rang the door at about thirty seconds into the drill. Ethel / Judy bounded over to the door to get it.

We lived, in those days, in a tenement. Ours was the second floor, and accessed only by stairway. Tenements back then only featured the same type of stairway, which was very steep, and curved through an extreme angle to provide passage into the hallways on the floors. Judy opened the door to a man standing - for all intents and purposes - on a precipice of a seven foot drop into a steep staircase. He knocked, she opened, he asked if Mom or Dad was home, and Ethel doused him with Sterno (forgotten in the back of some kitchen drawer. Whoops! ). Quinn said “whaa?” and stared dumfounded, at his soaking clothes for seconds that seemed like minutes. Judy pulled out a Zippo lighter (hidden away - she told me later - since she was four years old for just such an occasion), flicked the top, and lit Arthur Quinn up like a roman candle. As he burned and screamed, she kicked him backwards down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, she came bounding down after, spraying more Sterno and laughing and crying. That’s how I found her. It took the firemen three hours to contain the blaze. Arthur Quinn was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, and the older couple - the Siravos - who’d lived above us for twenty-three years, were burned alive. They found their bones up there in the ashes, huddled together in a bathtub.

The next time I saw my daughter after that day was almost a decade later. She was staring in a MGM production called, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, with Mickey Rooney

dogshitart

Jihad, 2011

Oil and Oil Pastel on Canvas

18" x 24"

dogshitart

Atinob, 2011

Acrylic and Oil on Curtain Panel

48" x 96"

(Private Collection, Searsmont, ME)

Results

They took the village in the early morning, striking a few hours before the dawn as was the custom of their leader. It was quick work. They finished the butchery before the sun even rose, hacking off the last heads and limbs, and raping the last of the women in the angry pink glow of pre-dawn. The commander, a giant beast of a man called Jint, was over seven feet tall and sun-darkened, almost black. He sat at the prisoner’s feet then, leaving the tidying-up to the forty-odd blades left in his party. He popped a wine skin and looked up over his shoulder at his captive.

They’d trussed Am’Ram on his rolling gallows like a holiday fowl. His legs were corded round and round with thick black hemp rope. His head, held still by what looked like a crown of ropes and knots, fastening him to the big wooden works. It had been the new God King’s idea to send his father’s killer out with the raiders, and Jint had been impressed with the young prince’s ruthlessness. This Wrock-Ramses hadn’t seen even seventeen years yet, but he was obviously possessed of the merciless judgment of his blessed father. Looking up at the old man watching his people erased off the face of the earth, though, Jint had to wonder if it even worth the trouble. He had good men busy for a month solid just making a gallows that could be easily pushed along in a war-march, one had died of heat stroke. “All that work,” thought Jint “And look at him. Is this even his village or was that a lie? He looks on as stone faced as if we were out hunting desert-pigs!”

And so he did. The village was a sixty mile haul from the glass palace and the country was hot this harvest season. Am’Ram had been trussed as such for the entire cursed thing, and yet he never even asked for water. His hands were bound so tightly that Jint could see the new skin where the rope was biting into his wrist, yet Am’Ram hadn’t so much as gasped for his discomfort. All during the two day movement, the men in his command evaporated like dew under the great Sun God while Am’Ram, burning and tossing on his rolling death-machine, just watched it all, a blank look on his face and the smallest ribbon of sweat far up on his forehead. Of the sixty riders, servants and scouts he’d brought to the raid, he counted only thirty six left. Only two of those had died at the hand of the enemy. The desert had eaten the rest.

Take this old man…

He held the wine skin in front of his slave’s face like to give him wine.

…and tell me: How are you enjoying my murdering here today? You see just over there, where your tent used to be, I believe, no? The woman, see how my men have their way with her one after the other. Her eyes are glazed and red I can tell you, and she’s as good as dead even as my people befoul her. I fucked her myself, sir! I was first. While I fucked her, I fucked her ass with my knife!

It wasn’t true, Jint hadn’t fucked anybody this day but by now it had become personal. Jint would see this man suffer one way or the other. Pharaoh had said to bring him back as he’d left, but the young God-King knew that accidents happen on the battlefield. Am’Ram opened his mouth for the wine then, as if he’d heard the thoughts in Jint’s head. The commander squirted a small blip of nectar into Am’Ram’s mouth and continued:

Your people are dying today, sir. All of them. Afterwards I’m going to march you to the top of the sky at the Stone Spear. Then I'm going to set you on fire, and fling you off. It will be as the new God King had bid me. You are beaten. The people will see the last of you as a falling star, crashing and burning at the whim of the God-King.

Am'Ram, swishing the sweet wine around in his mouth and finally swallowing just smiled, all the while holding the awful soldier’s gaze with his own. The smile however, slight, one sided, and - yes - maybe even a bit smug, enraged the Commander as if Am’Ram had slapped him dead in the face. He grimaced.

Ok, old man, have it your way. Remember my friend, we are a long, long way from the palace, and you are in rough company.

Am’Ram just regarded whim, leaving the weird smile on his face, and not averting his eyes until Jint gave an exhausted grunt. Throwing the empty wineskin at the prisoner, he stalked off in a hurry through the by-now very hot desert morning. The trussed man watched him go and maybe smiled just a bit more as his tormentor moved off.

***

The dark woman ran as fast as she could. She felt her child’s head bouncing and her skin rolling and sliding under the impacts of her footfalls and it sickened her. “I can’t stop my love,” she said as she ran over a brown arroyo towards a grassy, sandy neck in the slow-moving river. She saw the sun playing off a million mica chips in a sparkling, mid-morning flood of sunlight. She ran harder now, heaving her legs for the high grass. She hadn’t turned to look behind her the entire sprint to the river, but she knew they were back there, catching up. Just as she was beginning to get loose from the sightlines of the village, she heard a voice - gruff and dirty – yelling:

Ashet ashet! Ashay Ashet Shet! Stop girl…Stop girl at once!

She had not, and she would not. She was still booking along at top speed when she gained the high grass, slowing only when the saturation at the surface started sucking at her feet. She had to walk the last few feet searching out her steps in the bog. “Damn the tides,” she though, plodding and puzzling over which roots looked big enough. Then, clear as the Sun God himself, she heard a voice - MUCH closer than she’d expected - saying:

Shet! Timas ay. Timas - zo ee zo…

Now! The grass there. The grass. You here, I’m following.

Her bowels turned to water as the men - mere yards behind her now - smashed into the grass. She felt them breathing, and she threw her weight forward, and fell out of the grass just as she felt something - a slung stone she guessed - hit her hard in the back of the head. She was ok, but she had a fleeting thought that the wound might hurt later on, after all the excitement.



***



The noon of the day turned viciously hot. The men had stacked the bodies of the villagers by the hundreds. The tiny town seemed to have made a home for ten times as many people as one would think. Commander Jint was impressed that many people could fit in such a tiny space. He was even more impressed that his remaining soldiers (heat had even further winnowed the God King’s men. The thirty-six had become sixteen, with the rest unconscious or moved off to seek water and shade. It was near noon. The desert was baking. Jint kept flashing looks at the captive as he ran about shouting orders. More times than not he found Am ‘Ram staring right back through bands of black hemp enwrapping his head. Jint had told them to make sure the prisoner was still “tightly bound.” Three men in helmets and skirts and nothing else had wrapped him head to toe in hemp, leaving only spaces for eyes and mouth. The black rope drank the sun. Jint thought he saw the ropes themselves smoking at one point. His captive remained unimpressed.

Finally there were no bodies left to stack. Jint's men fell back, and began to argue about who would deal with building the fire. It was a long hard discussion too. The day was hell-hot even without actual flames. The men shuddered to think what a real, hungry, well-fed fire would do to the area with regard to breathing, and remaining on one’s feet. Jint, though, seemed invigorated. He clapped his hands and told all assembled to thank the prisoner over and over for the wonderful jobs he’d provided all of them. He made sure that each man there knew exactly how it was that they’d ended up here, now. He was about to suggest, outright, that they fire the man there, and then he was interrupted. Shouting behind him and voices hailing him. He turned to look across to the tree-line and saw two of his men returning. They were carrying a third person between them, each arm over the other man, like drunks carrying somebody even more drunk. Commander Jint cupped a hand over his eyes to get a better look at the third man. His mind was already confirming for him the surreal horror of what he was seeing, but something in a deeper part of him rejected it. They moved closer though, and after a while it became impossible to deny. Jint could only watch as they made their way toward the captive’s rolling gallows.

***

She didn’t understand why they were all staring at her. She felt certain the God King’s men hadn’t caught her, hadn’t seen what she’d done. Until she knew however, she was stuck in a weird sort of catatonia. She could think only about Moses, and the floating carriage that his father had designed only a few days ago. He'd designed it so that the infant could bathe in the river with his mother, instead of having to burn in the heat on the riverbank. Lessi was hidden inside herself like that almost all the way back up to the village, but when she saw her husband, her trance was broken, and she started to run.

It was his wife. The third man was Am’Rams good wife Lessi. All at once he knew what had happened, and he looked off in the distance to where the river peeled off onto the border, or the Western Desert. They were - he saw now - carrying her almost completely. Her head was bowed, there was something wrong though, he could tell. The binds around his head and face were still burning and his face swelled and pressed against them. His vision was just skewed enough so that he couldn’t quite see Lessi’s face. He knew she’d be crying though, because she’d done what he’d asked her. She would cry, he expected, for the rest of her days. He thought it through, cooking inside the tight, black ropes. He was wrapped to an oak-wood Joist almost three feet around and the wood was turning to a spiky porridge with his sweat mixing in, and softening it. The small of his back up to his shoulder blades was white-hot pain as the splinters ground into his flesh. They’d brought him his wife. He growled between the ties at his mouth, one word, low and heavy and unmistakable:

Untie.

***

Jint was amused. The crusty old gypsy had stayed quiet and awake all day while watching his family and his friends sliced into pieces before him and burned. He’d been tied to a post from before the sun came up until now, almost a full eight hours. The Commander had been looking all day for some sign, some token glance or tiny sound to acknowledge the horrors being delivered upon him. There had been none. The man Am’Ram had watched as hundreds of his blood kin were slaughtered. Their houses put to the torch and their lands set aflame, and he’d said nothing. He’d not wept. He’d not moaned. He’d not swooned or cried or even so much as swore. On a day when the God King lost twenty-four faithful, skillful, soldiers to simple heat and bright sunlight, there sat his captive, wrapped in black layers and trussed up with hands behind back. His eyes never wavered.

But then he called to him. More correctly, he called to anybody. The murderous slave wanted out of his ropes.

Eshellk, Eshellk a da et, a da et.

Untie, Untie. The wife. My wife.

Jint spoke the gypsy language enough to know what the request had been, and staring at the guy’s wife he had no doubt why. The girl’s face was fine enough, and her flowing pink gowns showed no sign of blood or penetration of any kind. It was when her head bowed that her husband could see the truth of what had happened out deep in the grass at the river’s bend. His good wife, whom he’d married at age eleven and stayed with for these forty-eight years, his beautiful wife, who’d given him two healthy, strong sons and unconditional love for all their days together. This, his wife, his life, had a throwing axe buried deep in the base of her head just before the spinal cord. She bowed and lolled her head and made desperate, confused noises. There was piss, and runny black shit running down her leg. She was looking at Am’Ram, but she saw nothing. Her eyes were rolling back to white, and then spinning in the sockets like bearings in a wheel. She started coughing, and a fine pink mist of blood clouded the air in front of her. She looked at him then full, becoming - for an instant - his wife. Jint, watching closely from a few feet away, summoned the men from the battlefield and had them take a security perimeter at forty feet. Soon Jint, Am’Ram, and his wife were alone inside a small, safe circle of armor. Jint spoke as he cut:

You’ll do your duty as a husband scum, and I will pray for you to step out of line every second you waste. Be quick so I don’t reconsider. For the Pharaoh, two enemy heads is always better than one. Take it…

And then he’d slammed a gleaming white-bone dagger into the slave’s hand, moving away to a safer, more defensively sound position. Jint was a brutal man, but he knew the Gods must be served, lest more ill luck befall his raiders on the way back home. The old warrior Am' Ram would have to give his damned wife mercy and swing the dagger himself. If the slave decided to get jumpy with him, then so much the better. He would be on him before any such decision could be fully formed, and at last the old slave-dog would trouble him no more. Am’Ram finished up cutting himself free and then everything was still, if only for a few moments.

Slave

The light-skinned man from the coast had already lost. No money had yet changed hands (though plenty would before the night was out) no victor crowned, and no head yet separated from heaving, depleted shoulders. Nevertheless, it was over. As their Lord and ruler closed for the kill, his subjects - thronging in the central square since yesterday afternoon just to be here now - begun to swoon and scream for him:

Sagneet…Sagneet…Sagneet

They sang, thousands of voices blending and rising as one. The word meant “God.” The voices crested as the great man came on his combatant, the chant twisting and morphing into a crazed group war-cry. The pharaoh threw down the heavy staff he’d bested the man with and took the man’s shaved head under the chin. Nobody noticed the slave's free hand: a sudden gleam, something shiny and polished, glinting in the desert sun…

***

There had always been slaves in Egypt, but never quite so many as now. The great Pyramid idea started off as a joke, an impossible-dream scenario for some future ruler, with sway over greater technologies and more warm bodies. It was the magician Lu - the Pharaoh’s miracle warrior - who’d laid the plans for a Pyramid to be built for this age, this King. The old ones had the Atrium and Commons at the Crystal, and the older had the Glass Palace itself. This God-King Pharaoh’s contribution to the legacy of Egypt’s great architects, a great platform, a monument and a path from the heavens for the great Sun God.

We will build you to the heavens Lord Pharaoh. We’ll build you to tread with Gods and men as you choose. An equal or a ruler. Your terms.

It was too tempting an idea for a man such as the God-king, who ruled by a mandate from the sun. The magician said there was a way to put him amongst the Gods, so the Pharaoh had no choice but to do what he could. He took council from Lu and his builders, and laid the plans and personnel requirements. He produced giant machines to move more rock and earth than any before. He blasted and cut stones of all shapes and one size: Immense. The Sun King had seen fifty-one summers in the desert, and Lu claimed the great Pyramid could be finished before he'd seen sixty-five, if he was given power to harvest and command more slaves. Before long there was more chattels in the Sun God’s lands then free men. Nobody noticed though, they were all at the building site, and never anywhere else.

Lu said, the best slaves came from the unexplored country to the south of the Sun Lands. A place as vast as ten Egypt’s. Africa was said to be teaming with giant black man-product that could lift and carry and read plans for days and weeks and years without succumbing to sickness, boredom, or the capacity for violence. Pharaoh sent Lu with ten battle rigs from the Sun Fleet. He put a skeleton crew on each - A captain, two mates, a navigator and twenty oars - and instructed them to fill to capacity and then half again. He wanted his bodies and his great Pyramid, did this Sun King, and he’d bathe in slave-blood to grant his own wish.

Bring them to me as you’d bring salt and spice…

Wailed the God-King, and added:

The ones that perish en route would have perished at my stones anyway. The voyage will cull the weak.

And he was right. By the end of the long sea journey, most of the human cargo left was honed and forged hard and sharp as steel. They left the boats weakened by the sea and the salt, but the Pharaoh feasted them for weeks at the barracks tables. They had lamb, rice, fowl, and game from every corner of the kingdom. Seven days and nights a week for a month they were allowed all the food and water they could eat and drink. They slept late, and went to bed early. They weren’t allowed any wine. Inside a months’ time, the new slaves had gained pounds of muscle and a new constitution hardened by all they’d eaten and drank. The Sun God’s servant Pharaoh would then ride among them, offering blessings and encouragement and praise. The slaves were now ready for the stones.

All of them, that is, save three. From each voyage, the Pharaoh himself would hand-pick three slaves from the teaming hundreds making ready for the stones. They were chosen by very careful criteria of height (never more than two cubits, never less than one point five), weight (never more than sixteen stone and never less than fourteen), and - the Sun King always said - Pick the ones who are almost warriors but not yet warriors. They will be my trainers, not my enemy.

Code, the armory commander Tox understood, for men his king could best without question and without any great effort. It would not do to have the God’s own Sun King struck down in combat by a slave. Tox chose carefully.

But with 300 new slaves coming into his barracks every week, the Sun King’s house was a busy one. As time went by and the great Pyramid grew even greater, Tox had little time to review slaves for the King to “train” with. He had enough on his plate seeing to his real troops and see to their training. In addition, the Sun King had charged Tox with the slaves at the stones. Work orders were to be given to him at the beginning of every week, to be completed and inspected at the end of the week by the Sun King’s only son, Moze-Wrock Ramses. If his lord wanted the work done and done right, he complained, he needed a bit less on his plate. That or more men.

Besides...

Tox told the Sun King, choosing his words as carefully as he chose his king’s “trainers.”

The slaves from the last few shipments had been gigantic and mean as asps. There wasn’t a man below eighteen stone in weight and two cubits in height. The new labor crews will be fast and tireless my gift of the Gods. But there are none among them who will do for training. Let us make do with blunted swords and sparring until we find boys more appropriate for the Sun King’s blades.

Pharaoh wouldn’t hear it. He killed three men every week, he roared at Tox and his men, and the Pyramid, the wedding, the slaves, and the desert itself could not keep him from that appointment.

Find me men to fight, soldier, or it’s your men I’ll turn to next. Your men, and when they run out…You.

Tox was vexed. The God-Kings thirst for blood had put him in a tough position, and with 300 new bodies a week joining the work at the stones, he didn’t have time to worry over the problem and carefully choose his course. Instead he sought an audience with the Pharaoh’s four deaths: The Blade, The Fire, The Touch, and The Blood. The four deadly wraiths were a special command only ever concerned with battle. Even as the slaves built and the castle staff readied the glass palace for the impending wedding, the God-King had the Four Deaths secreted away far under the sand, planning the next hundred years of conquest for the God on Earth. Nobody in the kingdom was supposed to know where they were, but Tox knew where they dwelt. In short order, he’d called a secret meeting on behalf of the great God on Earth, Pharaoh. He met the Deaths a mile below the sand at Death’s Deep - just he and they - and pled his case.

The next day the four deaths rode, each to a different direction in the realm. Promises had been made, first by Tox then by each of the four. The Sun King would have his trainers, and Tox would have to worry no more over their selection. The deaths had taken the problem out of his hands. In return, well, nobody knew what they’d been promised. Where the four deaths were concerned, it was always best to stay well clear of their business. Of course, there was no stopping the rumors of a black bargain between them and the old commander, but the particulars were unknown and thus subject to speculation and guesswork of increasingly wild sort:

Tox promised the Four Deaths each a child.

The Four Deaths would be given Tox’s body to feast upon after his natural death.

Tox had already been killed and the four deaths were guiding his undead body to serve their own black needs.

Each rumor more ridiculous than the last. Becoming more and more until the Deaths returned months later, each with prizes of flesh for the rangy old Armorer Tox. It was thus that Am’Ram came to the kingdom of the sun.

***

Sagneet…Sagneet…Sagneet

Just as the God King’s blade began its inexorable slash across the slaves’ throat, something happened. Many who were there claim they saw some magical flash of light, others say the Lord Pharaoh was distracted by some noise or shouting from the gathered soldiers. The exact events aren’t known but the outcome is: The slave eluded the king’s grasp and escaped the hold just before his throat was cut. There was grappling, and the king lost his blade. The slave - who’d chosen only a rusty axe for his weapon - was expert in his fighting; all who witnessed the scrap swear they’d never seen his equal. Before anybody knew what had happened, the outsider had the Sun King pinned by the throat beneath a massive, sun-weathered hand. He raised his axe, and a hundred spears were raised around the training floor. There were moments then, old the old stories say so, where not a single one of the hundred souls gathered so much as breathed or moved even an inch. Time stopped - it seemed - waiting on the rusty blade of a wretched slave’s rusty axe.

***

Am’Ram

Tox let the name drop off his tongue like he’d spit it into the sand. It was not a desert name, and so he didn’t trust it.

What have you brought us here? Treason masked as a mountain tribesman? The Sun God’s gift doesn’t train with savages. This man has seen battle.

And so it was true. The man, Am’Ram, was covered almost head to toe in ragged brown scars. His skin was light and almost red, shades lighter than the rich ebony of his captors. His face and neck were hardened and honed by sun and sand, and his eyes were old and lively and feral. He didn’t speak. Tox noticed his hands. The size of flour baskets and hard and brown like the earth itself. No, this man wouldn’t be taking the training floor with the Pharaoh. He instructed his men to hide the man away in the ranks and try to find which of the Pharaoh’s wraiths had brought him in. Tox would have some words with that Death later in the evening. He was away to the stones then, to crack the whip and execute the builder’s commands. The very next day, the King’s Son, Prince Wrock married his betrothed Isabella Atous under the sands in the great glass palace, and the feasting went from dawn to dawn.

They’d started when the sun first touched the sky of the new day. Cheers went up from every corner of the castle and the God King gathered thousands in his great hall, a glass amphitheater hundreds of feet deep in the shifting sands. He toasted the bride and groom, lead prayers to the great Sun and a host of lesser gods and goddesses’. Then he brought the mead and the party began. Great vats of berry flavored surfactant, strong and sweet, were wheeled into the glass hall. Music from an orchestra of hundreds echoed amongst the guests and food of every amount and description was wheeled out and served amongst the celebrants.

There were a thousand fatted calves and lambs soaked in honey and lemon. There were near-transparent slices of raw beef and fish. There were special preparations of fowl from beyond the desert where the land is green and watered. Each guest was given a golden goblet and served glass after glass of exotic, heady brews from places they’d never heard of. Hashish and Shisha smoke curled and vented through the glass byways of the underground palace as the court offered its finest and most potent intoxicants fresh and new after months of careful preparation. Everywhere for miles and miles under the sand the guests ate, drank, and smoked the health of the happy prince and princess. They went on like that for seven days and nights until finally, the God King led them all out into the air and down into another, even larger amphitheater among his stones and slaves. His son and his new bride were married then, under the noon-day sun of the desert, sealed and committed in front of the Gods and everyone for all time. There were toasts and joking and feats of strength. Slaves fought and died for the pleasure of the court. The Sun God looked on impassive and oozed across the sky, blessing the happy bride with a warm, cloudless night. Finally, after the day and the week had wound out to its final hours, the new couple wished thanks to their courtiers and moved to the bed. They’d stay there for three whole days, and return to a world forever changed. For it was just as they moved off that the God King Pharaoh, who’d himself been up for most of the previous seven days, decided to take his special “training.” He told Tox to ready a combatant and retired to his offices to prepare.

***

The God King looked up then, his eyes red, desperate, and lost. A word escaped his lips and the old axe fell. The word was “No,” and the axe was true. The God King died before hundreds, a rusty axe deposited smartly between his eyes. Even as his life’s blood escaped from the God King’s head, mouth, nose, and eyes, the slave Am’Ram was taken away to a hot cell near the God King’s quarry. A quick council was formed from the four deaths, Tox the Armorer, and the magician named Lu. The new King would emerge any minute from his wedding bed and seek to treat with his father. They needed a plan…

The Death called Touch, who - Tox realized - had been involved at practically every turn of the recent and terrible events, listened intently while the council argued back and forth in frustration. Finally, as the arguers finished up, he began to speak…

Strange Occurences in the Desert

The desert was singing and dancing for her. She sat resting in the shadow of the desert oak her father had planted when she was born thirty-two years ago, and watched it shimmer and writhe in the heat. Tall grass surrounded a glassine expanse for hundreds of yards before her. The grass moving to the breezes that swept the river, the river moving to the whim of the tides and the gods, the desert itself swaying in the distance to the rising, twisting thermals born inside it. For a while she joined in the dance herself, letting her mind drift like the lily pads guarding the river banks at Pharaoh’s reach. Her worries dwindled in her reveries but the time was - as always - short and she had plenty to worry after. This weekend would mark both a wedding and a birthday for her.

Two days from now, her father - High Council to the God-King - would give her away to her people’s gift from the Sun Gods themselves, would make her a gift to his best friend and Ruler Ramses. The great God-King would accept the gift, and the Prince would marry her, vouchsafing the safety and peace of the kingdom, and her own family, for many years to come. Her father’s plans with his friend, the great Pharaoh - many years in the making - would finally come to bear, and with them, peace and calm.

Peace and calm for everybody, that is, but she. Isabella Atues, princess to the Sun and maiden-queen to be knew no peace. Even sitting here melting into the languid scenery of a perfect summer’s day, her peace of mind felt desperate, forced, and temporary. Her problems and decisions kept redoubling and expanding in her head, stalling her enjoyment and turning all her thoughts black. Each imagined solution bringing with it a host of resultant entanglements, until she was literally paralyzed by worry. Before long the desert, long able to sooth even her darkest moods, disappeared around her, leaving only doubt, confusion, and fear. The desert and the dance: presents for some other, less tortured, soul.

She rose from her hideout near the Oak and started back toward the golden palace, toward her life and her torment. It was getting near noontime, and she knew Mysse would need her for most of the rest of the day. The crusty old crone was cutting her wedding gowns and that would be no short process. She turned about halfway back, stealing one more glance her magnificent green island. From this far up the bank she could see deep into the horizon. She imagined a sea out there somewhere, and a boat. A ship. One that would take her wherever she wanted. One that could help remove her from the desert and her family once and for all. Then she stole another glance, this way back towards the palace and beyond that, the great, half-finished pyramid that would become the crowning glory of the Sun-Kings long after the kingdom and the world had moved on.

It will reach to heaven…

Her father had told her when construction had started fourteen years ago. His face beamed and glowed when he spoke of his plans.

All the way to heaven so that the Sun Kings can come and go from there as they please, learning the secrets of the Sun, and the secrets of life and death themselves.

It was a lot to lay on a child of nine years old. When he spoke, though, his words seamed so sure and his resolve so iron, she’d never questioned the why of it. It was only later, when she could look upon the slave drivers directing the architect’s vision, hear the lash meeting flesh violently, and see the slaves bleeding and dying and burning in the sun that she’d realized what a folly the immense tomb really was. Whatever and whoever the Sun God may be, she felt sure he’d be appalled at the tortures of the labor and the disregard for lives he’d created. She felt sure that God hated her father.

And I as well old man…I as well.

She thought, and spat on the sandy ground, the ghost of a grimace steeling across her face. In its place she set a placid smile and rushed off to the rest of her day, putting the disgusted visage - and the thoughts and possibilities that went along with it - away for a while.

Pit Fight

He was dreaming and did not know it. Tom Speed spent the entire ride from the barracks cannonballing through a humid fever dream, forgetting where he was and what had become of him. What he hadn’t lost track of was the pain in his left arm where he’d been shot seven days ago. The bullet had passed through him just to the left of his heart. It was pulsing and swelling even through all his reveries. It stung like fire.

The van he was riding in was cruising down the Henry Hudson parkway on the west side of Manhattan, but Tom Speed was skimming, at speed, over an infinite grey sea. It was hot in his dream, and he could feel the saturated air coocooning around him like a warm blanket as he went. He was riding right on the deck, where he could reach down into the grey matrix. he dipped fingers and hands and toes, watching the goey trail they left in their wake.

He was flying still, but climbing now, away from the infinite grey sea at high speed. He watched it dropping away below him and noticed the sky was the same color. The gravity mushed his guts around inside him. His shoulder was itching and he couldn’t scratch, couldn't reach the spot. Then he was spinning and falling, the G's stacking up, and pushing his skin taught on his body, until A blazing white glow washed out the entire scene like a CGI effect. There was blackness then, and quiet.

He found himself in the kitchen of his childhood, one he’d not seen - or even thought -of for at least 20 years. Starving, he went raiding through the cabinets he’d known so well. There was peanut butter, jelly, Wonder bread, but his arm stopped working. He couldn't reach the treats. He stared a long time, eye-fucking the useless limb and cursing it. His friends’ wife, What’s her name? She’s massaging his arm and now she’s stripping off layers of clothing, and Tom could see she hadn’t far to go until she’d run out of shit to take off. He could see her tits already. Speed laughed as he moved in and said “I’ll fuck you. And then maybe that other thing?”.

Other thing?

His arm was on fire now, actually engulfed in flame. He still watched it, not trusting. Even so, he felt it. Holy shit - how he felt it. Not just on the shoulder either, his entire arm and his entire left side: Burning. The pain woke him up and the bus hit a bump and his head slammed into the glass.

He barked:

Fuck! Fuck!

And somebody was whispering in his ear. Jedra. Alive still:

SPEED! TOM! WAKE UP TOM WAKE…

The voice is cracked and hoarse from abuse. His arm stings like fuck but he’s getting a handle on it, feeling around. It’s dark. The bus he’s riding is blasting and smashing potholes and traffic on the west side of Manhattan, bouncing the cargo around like zero-gravity.

TOM! Tom Speed…

Then she hit him on the shoulder and he was awake and confused:

FUCK! What!? Sleeping…

You’re not. You’re fucking on drugs ‘cause you got shot. You don’t remember getting fucking grabbed? Tom please…

Then he noticed how loudly she was yelling and how loud the background noise from …From what? So dark…He saw no streetlights in the NYC night.

You gotta wake up, big guy. I dunno what he’s got going on. They shot me up when they shot you up. Both of us were out…Some kind of sedative.

He remembered. He’d been shot but it hadn’t hurt. But then it had started to hurt just after…

Twinze. Twinze said to meet. He’d planned with the twins for tonight. He had to get word to them. How?

***

They never took the black sack off his head. The bus reached a destination, slowed and stopped, and was greeted by a roar of approval that rang from one river to the other. The noise when they’d walked off the bus was ear-splitting, like to cause permanent damage. His arm was raging now too as they led him off. She wasn’t making any sound but Tom Speed thought he heard Jedra was walking somewhere ahead. He could smell her, and - of course - hear her:

Fuck you asshole…Don’t fuckin…DON”T TOUCH ME ASSHOLE…FUCKIN DICK!

Her complaints were the bane of his existence, but amidst the horrible din of the angry crowd he found a weird sort of comfort in them. “If she’s still bitching,” he thought, smiling under his cowl, “then she’s still got some fight left.” Everything else was loudness and chaos and random touching. They were still being escorted but to what? Was it just a show of force? A power move to show the citizenry what they were prepared to do? A perp-walk, then. To shame them. In front of who?

The walk took a few minutes, it seemed, though in reality it lasted only thirty-eight seconds. Somebody put a hand on his, lead him, ducking, into What? A ring? A boxing ring? An Octogon?

The crowd was roaring in full throat now, and he couldn’t think for all the noise. It’s totality and volume were unlike anything he’d ever heard. It was terrifying. He heard a series of taps, a mic-check in stereo exploding around them like thunder. A voice, feeble under the din, squeaked out a greeting. Nobody heard. The voice - a reedy, male tenor - tried again: nothing. Then a whistle, trebley and piercing-sharp and amplified, finally commanded the desired attention. The crowd hushed.

Welcome to the Friday night fights everybody. I’m your host Carl Braun.

The crowd exploded again at the mans’ name. Speed was puzzled “They all know him,” he thought. Around him he heard swooning and cheering. A few minutes passed and Braun spoke again.

Greetings! We’ve got a great match for you folks tonight and I’d like to get right to it. Before we start - of course - I need to familiarize you all with the brave souls assembled here. Before I unmask the criminals, let me introduce my child warriors.

The crinkle and snap of a paper note rung out. Braun read a list of names. A woman in the crowd shouted

Fuck Yeah, CARL!!!!

There were six names in all and Tom recognized not a one. Braun changed his tone a little. The reserved yet confident air of the voice turned menacing as he hissed:

And they will face these two: Tom Speed and Jedra Moss. Their lists of offenses is long and storied, but in this town even murdering scum have their day in court. Suffice to say we won’t be missing much after the hunter/killers flambé these two later on tonight. The best part of them will make a fine breakfast for my hounds.

HUGE crowd pop then, followed by more scraping and swooning from the crowd. The din was growing once again. Soon intrapersonal communication would become impossible, squished like a childhood dream. After that, the only thing left was the blood. Lots of blood.

***

They removed the hood and the light - dim and distant though it was - burned and tunneled into his eyes. Around him, and stretching back in four directions from the spot where he was standing, Stump saw nothing but crowd. An angry, jumpy sea of arms making a thunderous ruckus. He was rubbing and tearing and Braun was still speaking and the girl in his ear still yelling. His arm hurt. Could it be infected? The crowd was too loud for him to think so he stopped. Braun was still blabbering about something. Elmer turned around and saw Jade. Her face was wet like she’d just been swimming and there was a brand new gash at her forehead. He said:

Fuck it’s hot.

She replied:

They have the same hammers as us?

He wiped at his eyes, trying to unburden them in all the light and noise. It was then that he looked across and saw his opponents. There were six of them, all about three and a half feet tall, and all staring daggers at them from under what looked like black hockey-helmets with lightly tinted plexiglass eye-guards. They were wearing black pajamas that reminded Elmer of scrubs. They were all holding hammers in their right hands. He noticed that he, himself was also carrying a hammer. He read across the black handle: SKIL. Jade said

Fuck me…

And then Braun belted out the words:

So FIGHT MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS!!!

Tom Speed passed out again.

***

Tom hadn’t always been so prone to fainting. Just these last few days he’d probably passed out about as many times as he had in ALL the previous years of his life. It had just been that kind of year. Speed himself was acutely aware of his sudden slumbers, but he couldn’t do anything about them. His blood-loss had been profound after the shooting and the wound had never been dressed properly. He was exhausted and depleted and it was hot as fuck in the city, so he forced optimism: trying desperately to believe that dying in the throws of a sound sleep was preferable to whatever agonizing alternative awaited him. He stopped dreading the sleep-attacks and basically started going in search of them. On his person or in his car at all times were a sleeping bag, a tarp, a tent, and a soft pad. Then he got to waiting. And he waited and waited and waited some more for a slumber that never came.

In a previous life - one in which he’d had children, a wife and a job - sleep had been one of his very favorite pastimes. Afternoons, early morning, brunch. He spent more time sleeping then doing anything else. He liked it dark and quiet with the windows blacked on a sunny day. You could see the light trying to flood, feel it’s heat, but still float, dreaming and snoring safe from the light of day and all its intrigues. He’d been taken prisoner on his way to Providence, and his captors had allowed him almost no rest at all. What’s more they were lax in dealing with his wound. It smelled funny. Nobody was listening to him about that. The results were awful and dramatic: Now his body simply chose to shut down and rest no matter what the situation. He’d fallen asleep during his interrogation, and fallen asleep in the middle of important conversations. He fainted while eating, and while running. He’d passed out just before the blind van ride, and - most terrifying of all - DURING a brutal scrap with the folks who’d taken them. Even now, as they wriggled on through the rocking, enraged throng, he felt the dream state calling to him. “If this happens anytime soon,” he was thinking “it will mean my death.”

Then he was back in the present, and the children were closing in with hammers brandished. Tom was trying to stall and feint, wondering, was he was expected to actually kill these Child Warriors? They were too young to know the causes and concerns behind the combat. They were innocent. Could he really defend himself against them?

Then one of them - a wiry boy with a shaved head wearing all black leather - got inside his defenses and drove a hammer-claw into his upper thigh. Tom surprised himself with his screaming. He’d been losing himself to the dream-world again, seeing angels, shooting stars, and light-trails instead of blood, flying steel, and rent flesh. Somewhere, though, in the back of his overtaxed mind, he knew that to allow himself anymore sleep would almost certainly spell his doom. He feinted to his right to avoid a swinging hammer, then brought his own weapon down on the head of another child who’d gotten too close. He screamed as he swung down, and the kids helmet and head cracked and collapsed, turning the ground beneath them blood red and slick with fluids. Speed, revolted by his own deed and terrified, let his own hammer slip to the ground then, and gave in once again to the dark void of unconsciousness. The last thing he saw before he fell were the child-warriors rushing in at them. His shoulder wound still hurt him more than anything else. What if one of these hammers were to find it?

When the kid hammered his leg the crowd whooped like they’d been shown a magic trick. Tom went down immediately, clutching at his thigh and they fell on him. Hammers were pumping and Speed was covering up but still getting tagged. He saw a taller little boy snarling in his face from above. The kid was foaming and growling like a boar as he raised his hammer. Tom tried to roll away but his arms were pinned. He looked up to face his fate, but saw instead another, friendlier hammer take his assailant at the temple. It looked like the hammer head went inside the kid's head. Blood like hot rain across Speed’s face as the kid fell twitching. Speed sat up and deflected hammer blows from three other sources. He waited a beat and then bolted one arm in front of his face and swung the SKIL hammer as hard as he could. He felt it ripping flesh and saw it come to rest inside a little girls’ neck. The little princesses eyes rolled to white as the curtain of red escaped her throat. Jade screamed:



DOWN SPEED!!



But it was too late. He was tagged, but good, in the cheek. He hit the deck again, and his mouth felt like full of warm fluid and metal parts. He spit a tooth-and-blood gruel on the ground and tried to find his feet. Another blow - this one to his side - laid him out on the hot tarmac. He started to hear the crowd again. Chanting? He couldn’t make it out. Loud was all he heard. Then a scream from behind him: JADE!

He rolled over to see the cause and he saw the end of the swing that saved his life. Jade had the hammer-claw embedded in the skull of the largest of the boys. She raked it back and spilled the insides out onto the floor. There was a smell like rot. The boy was twitching on the ground and going:



Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya….



And he was coughing up a ton of blood and gore. Tears were streaming down his face.



Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya Ya….



Jade was kneeling to help when the last girl rose from where she’d been doubled over. Tom Speed meant to shout a warning but he was too busy holding off the last boy standing. The boy was swinging, enraged, and Tom was getting too tired to dodge him much longer. Not more than eleven years old if he was a day, the feral child sensed his quarry’s weakness and ratcheted up the violence. He rushed Speed, screaming and laughing as he hacked away, looking to pound through any defense with raw force and momentum. Tom had blocked what felt like hundreds of blows with nothing but his arm between the lethal hammer-swings. He felt it burn and sting, could feel it turning to pulp under the attack. The kid wound up then, and the next hammer-slash broke Speed’s arm below he elbow. He screamed involuntarily as the bone shot through his skin in a rancid explosion of blood and tissue. He tried to look around for his own hammer as the new agony wracked his body, but the pain was too much and felt he himself slipping towards a peaceful darkness. The girl Jade had put down at the start of the brawl had risen. Tom saw her stalking in from behind Jedra with a bright steel blade in her hand.

He tried to shout to his friend that the girl was coming but he couldn’t talk and block the boy’s blows at the same time. All that came out was a “Look!” that did more harm than good. Instead of turning to face the girl attacking, Jade looked at him who called her. Then her head jerked back on her neck and Tom saw a black-clad hand, miniature and soft, rake across Jade’s neck. A flood of purple-crimson burst from her throat and she fell, gurgling and convulsing in a stinking blood-puddle. Her assailant stepped forward over the still-jerking corpse and faced Speed, still reeling and on his knees. Speed, triangulated now between the last two children and still unarmed, backed up and put his arms up. They’d kill him now, he knew. The best he could do was to take one of them to hell with him.

***

The two child-assassins closed. Speed passed out again. Instantly he was under the sea. Miles under the sea - he knew - because it was pitch dark and cold. Very, very cold. The last thing he saw though, as he fell, was a puzzling image of his two child-assailants being grabbed from behind by two great black arms and thrown in the air. Beneath them, with fire burning and jetting from his mouth, was a massive black spider with what looked like the head of a man. Tom Speed didn’t have time to be amazed before giving himself over to the frozen depths of his dreams.