I pinched the miniature lemon from in-between his chubby fingers, and took a closer look. The surface was yellow and waxy, with tiny dimples evenly spaced across the surface. “It looks too good to be real. Is it candy?”

“Jeez Louise.” He rolled his eyes for effect, sending his salt and pepper eyebrows on a roller coaster ride. “No it ain’t candy. I know you don’t like candy.” He shook his head. “Jeez.”

I squeezed it and a clear mist squirted out, It tickled my nose with a scent of sunshine and happy secrets that made my eyes water. “That’s wonderful.”

Louie nodded his round little head vigorously and pointed at his mouth. “So go ahead. Eat it.”

“Should I peel it first?”

“Peel it?” he said, in a way that suggested he was offended that I would even ask. “No way! Just eat the whole thing.”

I brought it closer to my lips and Louie’s eyes followed the whole motion. I could guess his thoughts—and they were as dirty as that little fruit was pure. He’d had a crush on me ever since I’d started buying from him—maybe before.

He was, I realized, pretty close to lemon shaped himself—squat and round. His skin was barely contained by his clothes, as if he was under pressure and trying to escape; a portly satyr tightly wrapped up in a threadbare business suit. Still, Louie wouldn’t have been the ugliest guy I ever spent time with.

There was an aura of strength around him as well. Louie could push, harder and harder, until he either got what he wanted, or something snapped under the pressure. It was kind of attractive in its own way. But my friends had warned me about Louie’s perversions. He needed things that made it sound like it wasn’t too pleasant to be his girl, so I stayed away. “Go ahead. It’s not going to hurt you.”

I studied the fruit again. “It seems sad to eat such a defenseless little thing.”

His smile dropped just a bit—a tightening of the lips, but I could see it. “It’s fruit, not a puppy. Just eat it.” There was a little bit more emphasis in his voice this time, “Go ahead.”

I inhaled again and the scent overwhelmed me. I had to know if it tasted as good as it smelled.

I dropped the little lemon onto my tongue, letting it roll across the inside of my mouth. It felt cool and firm, leaving a tart trail until I bit down. It disintegrated underneath my teeth with a single bite, collapsing into mouthful of pulp and juice. I closed my eyes, as if my brain needed to shut off my other senses simply so that I could focus on the flavor. It was sour and sweet all at once, and burned perfectly as it traveled down my throat.

When I opened my eyes I saw Louie leering at me, a wolf-grin on his face. “Ain’t you as pretty as picture?” said Louie, obviously enjoying seeing me in a state that had previously only existed in his dreams.

I swallowed a second time and it was all gone. “Delicious,” I said. “Like nothing I’ve ever tasted before.” My words came out in a breathy whisper, like one of those seductive, husky-voiced “dames” from nineteen forties movie. I swallowed again, trying to clear the sexy from my throat. “What are they called?”

Louie pulled a little bag out his pocket. The brown paper was soft and tattered, as if he’d been carrying it around for days. He reached in and pulled out another one, as perfect as the first. “Some guy from upstate grows ‘em. They ain’t got a real name, so I call ‘em Louie’s Little Lemons.” He lifted it and I leaned forward.

“I want another one…” I said, surprising myself with the sound of lust in my voice. That isn’t me, it’s the lemon talking. “I’ll take all you’ve got.”

I could only imagine how my customers might react once I put them out: NPR housewives suddenly overwhelmed in a citrus frenzy—grabbing them by the handful and shoveling them straight into their mouths. I’d definitely need to keep them behind the counter.

“These ain’t for sale by the bushel Margie. I’m just giving them away to my most-favorite customers.”

“Am I one of your favorites?” Was I flirting with him?

Louie, took a step towards me, bringing us inappropriately close. His face barely rose past my chest, and I saw his eyes flicker downward for an instant before they leapt back up to meet mine. “You, sweetheart?” He held up the lemon in-between us. “You’re my favoritest favorite.” The impish grin on his face grew wider and wider. He danced the fruit just a little bit from side to side, and my eyes followed the motion. “Don’t you want it?”

The memory of the first taste was fading away so quickly that all that remained was a longing for more. My fingers reached out for it until I looked at Louie one more time.

There was a clanging sound, like a broken bell, and for an instant I saw a devil standing behind the little man; the kind of creature that would try and seduce a middle-aged green-grocer with something as small as a perfect piece of miniature fruit. “I don’t know Louie…”

He didn’t say anything, and I let my hand hover there, trying to decide what really mattered most. What was I was willing to sacrifice to taste it again? Maybe, if I tried it a second time, I could hold onto that memory and never forget.

Jennifer took a step back to give the outfit a more thorough examination. The majority of it was made from a thick, almost puffy, rough yellow silk that made it drape down in stiff lines, obliterating the shape of the man underneath. The long sleeves opened wide at the arms, with each cuff almost two feet long. There was a wide sash, belted loosely at the waist, and a thick hem at the bottom less than two inches shy of making contact with the floor, but covered with all manner of stains anyway.  Etched across the entire surface in sparkling metallic embroidery were a dozen colorful birds of all varieties, their wings shining out in silvery purples and reds, each one of them perched at the end of a golden branch.

It seemed almost comically ancient, like something from a incredibly boring documentary, or an etching from a thick college textbook on ancient cultures. It didn’t cover Keith as much as it smothered him, and Jennifer hated it. “It makes you look like a New Age hippy perv.”

“Thanks.” He put his hands on his hips, amplifying the ridiculousness of the costume. “I’m one fourth Persian, on my dad’s side.”

She rolled her eyes. “So this is an ethnic pride thing? Are we going to be eating Baba Ganoush and Falafel from now on?”

Jennifer stared straight into Keith’s eyes. She had to admit he was kind of cute, in his own sad puppy-dog way. “Have you ever heard of Karma?”

“I’m not stupid.” It was odd to the point of annoyance to see him acting so confident when he looked so utterly ridiculous. “If you do bad stuff, then bad stuff happens back. Right?”If he’d told her that he was a transvestite it would have been more satisfying. She’d dealt with kinky boys before. This was just dumb.

“Mostly like that, although you only pay for stuff when you reincarnate.“

“I don’t believe in that.”

He took a step forward and closed the space between them. “So what are you worried about?” The swaying of the fabric made the images on the outfit almost seem to come to life, birds and branches flashing as Keith moved. The cloth swished around his legs with a sound eerily reminiscent of wind rustling through branches. Jennifer gasped in spite of herself.

“You’re being weird Keith. That dress is kind of freaking me out.”

“Kaftan.”

“Whatever.”

“Anyway, all the bad things you do all build up over your life.” Keith swirled his hands through the air to punctuate his point. “And that’s weighed against all the good things that you did. So you’re supposed to try and build up the good stuff, or you end up getting screwed when you come back, and become a fly, or a worm, or something like that.”

“Sounds like a pain in the ass.” Now Jennifer was getting a headache, which was remarkably like the feeling of being totally pissed off. She’d come here to hang out with Keith and maybe figure out where they were at after three months of dating. He’d been fun up to now—mostly. But honestly, she needed a whole lot more or a whole lot less. “And what’s that got to do with me, or us, or your stupid Kaftar?”

“Kaftan.” He held up one of the drooping sleeves, revealing it to be even longer and more ridiculous than it had first appeared. “It’s a family heirloom called Karmic armor. Whatever you do when you’re wearing it, matter how bad it is, doesn’t count against you.”

Jennifer’s mind made a few quick calculations, “So what are you going to do, stab me?”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s not cop-proof. I’m dumping you Jennifer.”

She blinked from shock, then let out a snort of laughter. “The hell? If anyone is getting dumped it’s you.”

“Why, because you’re too hot for me?”

The word maybe jumped out of her mouth before she could stop it.

“I swear to God, you’re one of the most conceited girls I’ve ever met.”

She felt a tightness in her eyes that meant if she didn’t get a lot angrier very quickly she was going to cry. “Listen to yourself, frat boy.” She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing tears. “Don’t b a jerk.”

He smiled. “But I’ve got the Kaftan.”

“Screw you and your stupid magic dress.” She grabbed her coat and headed for the door. “I’m out.”

“I just want to tell you one more thing Jennifer,” Keith said, yelling loud enough for hear him clearly as she tottered into the hallway on a pair of strappy high-heels that had seemed awesome when she put them on. “It wasn’t me, it was you!”

She turned around and opened her mouth to tell him about all the bad things that were going to happen to him for being such an asshole and how breaking up with her was the biggest mistake he’d ever make, and how he’d spend the rest of his life regretting it—and then she heard a sound. It was a high pitched chirp. One, at first, and then a chorus, as if all little birds on his dress were talking to her, laughing at her while her suddenly ex-boyfriend stood there with his arms crossed and a shit-eating grin on his face. “C’mon Jen. Let me have it. Tell me alllll about it.”

“Go to hell. I hope you come back as a slug.”

She slammed the door behind her, but she could still hear his muffled words through the door, “I thought you said you didn’t believe in Karma.”

But that was all just the form of the thing. Its function was far, far worse. The engine would take fifteen minutes to warm up on anything but the hottest days. Even after it got going it would lose power at seemingly random moments, inevitable shutting off entirely at a random intersection, rolling to a dead stop and blocking traffic in all directions while Jake struggled to throw it quickly back into park so he could start it up again. While it idled it leaked smoke in a slim white plume that occasionally would get some unwanted police attention, and yet it always seemed to manage to barely pass inspection.

He’d owned the hunk of junk for five years, long past the point where he should have purchased another car. He had suffered with the terrible machine’s unacceptable behavior for all that time in spite of the fact that he could now easily afford something new.

The original Craigslist ad had described it as “well used”, but the truth was “used up” would have been far more accurate. He had gone out to meet the owner on a cold winter Sunday in an empty bank parking lot. The guy arrived late, but he arrived with a smile and a quick apology. The car seemed to run well, and Jake suffered through the man’s barely believable story about how the car had only been used for occasional sales trips up and down the peninsula. “It still runs like a top”, he told him, and when Jake took it out for a spin that seemed to be true. And at two thousand dollars the thing was cheap.

The deal itself had gone down without a hitch, and he drove away excited and satisfied. The car was his now. For the first ninety days everything was great, other than a few ominous moans and groans, and a busted speaker that sizzled on the highs and popped on the lows. Then the car lost power on the freeway, moaning for power, and jerking forward in spastic fits until it just gave up. He let his momentum roll the car toward the side of the road. The long blast of and eighteen wheeler’s horn as it barely managed to weave around him was one of the most terrifying moments of his entire life. It had been the water pump: $500.

A week later the timing belt broke free: $300. His mechanic, covered with grease and faded tattoos, patiently explained to Jake that while replacing it he had taken a good look at the carburetor, “These old Accords have a bad habit of sucking up goo from the bottom of the gas tank and choking on it.” He called the condition “The Black Death” and told Jake he’d need to replace the clogged part right away: $800 plus labor. Jake paid it.

The box of paperwork that the previous owner had handed over to him was comprehensive. There was a receipt for every bit of work that had been done on the car in its long life span, including all three owners before him. Each one had all taken immaculate care of the vehicle, eventually going so far as to replace the suspension and rebuild the engine. It was hard to feel ripped off, exactly—the car had been 17 years old when he got it—but he figured it would be worth a call to the previous owner to asking him whether he’d consider taking it back at half the price.

The phone rang twice before the disconnect message came on.  Jake looked up the man’s name on Google and found the obituary notice on the second page of the search. The story of his death was unnerving. He had been driving his brand new BMW when a head on collision with a 1987 Honda Accord—a car of the same make, model, and year as the car that he had purchased—had obliterated both vehicles. A moment of random panic made Jake look out his window. The car was still parked in the driveway.

He pulled up the fate of the second owner by adding the word “obituary” and “crash” to the name he found on the paperwork. A week after selling the car she had been killed in a head on collision with another 87 Honda Accord.

Finding out about the first owner had taken more work. There hadn’t been much internet to speak of 1993. Scanning through scanned editions of the local paper allowed him to uncover her untimely demise in a “tragic head-on car crash.” Those were no more details, but he could imagine that the rest of it would involve a car of a very particular model, color, and year.

Jake was both terrified and embarrassed to be terrified. He had always been a rationalist to the core of his bones—the kind of man who believed that science was ultimately the solution to all the mysteries that mankind faced. But this was something that he couldn’t even begin to understand. He felt as if the floor had opened underneath him and he was suspended in air, his life maintained only by his continued ownership of rapidly disintegrating car.

In the four years since he had discovered the curse, the car’s insatiable appetite for repair had only grown. His original tattooed mechanic had long since given up any responsibility for the vehicle after referring to it as the “Black Hole” and offering Jake $500 to “take it off his hands for parts.” He found someone willing to keep the terrible machine running, no matter what the price.

Meanwhile, he spent his days trying to imagine the exact shape of the curse. Was it only selling the car that would doom him? Could he let it rust away under a tarp while he purchased and drove a new one, or would the murderous jealousy extend to any replacement? Perhaps it was all just proof that even the most rational human could become a superstitious idiot after being mugged by absurd coincidence.

As he pulled into the driveway Jake heard a loud bang from the engine, followed by a cloud of steam rising out from under the hood.

This was the last straw. He’d have his answers soon enough.

Patterns on paper absorbing and reflecting light. Unreal images perceived as if they were true, tricking the mind, engaging the imagination in vicarious perception. The images lock into Ike’s brain, connecting with the human mind’s relentless need to parse, perceive, and resolve everything it sees. His hunger for understanding will overwhelm his senses and create a vision inside his thoughts. It is an ancient survival mechanism—a way to play out life and death without the consequences. He can imagine the possibilities, risk fee, and take his chances when he needs to.

Ike dips the brush into one of the bottles in front of him. The translucent liquid wicks up the bristles. He pulls it up, out, lets it drip, then presses it down onto the white board, and the bristles almost sigh as they spread apart.  Getting a little capillary action, he thinks to himself.

He leaves one long, curving swipe across the page, and then drops his head down onto the desk to view the pigment from a new perspective. The medium vaporizes—a chemical reaction that leaves a colored stain on the white cardboard the can never be undone. An irrevocable act that he’s committed a thousand times before.  Each time is harder than the last.

Ike tries to pull his head back up, but for a moment it is stuck to the table. He cannot fight it, overcome by intensity, trapped by gravity, and his own weakness. He is paralyzed only for a moment, and then his nervous system engages. The muscles in his neck and back twitch and contract, lifting him up above the page.

He sees the mark that he has left there, and tries to not let the mark become something, yet. Just let it be… abstract… a ribbon of magenta and nothing more.  He dips another brush—yellow. He pulls it across, leaving blood where it crosses over other line.

He shakes his head and he laughs at his little joke. It always starts out with blood, but rarely ends that way. He spatters on some cyan with a dirty brush and lets it expand. The vision is resolving against his will. He can see the future rushing up to meet him. Ike can smell it in the air, the tangy, almost musty, odor of the ink flowing with possibility.

Ike tips the bottle of black against his thumb, leaving a wet circle. He lets a single drop fall from his hand and explode across the board, then uses all his fingers to smear it as far as it will go. There is less abstraction in every moment. And against his better judgment—every damn time —he opens up the last bottle, cyan, and tips it onto the board. The sapphire tears roll downward, streaking through the other colors as it goes.

He sets the bottle down, and makes a futile gesture to clean his stained, shaking hands by rubbing them against a rough, dry cloth. But it doesn’t matter. The image is complete.

Ike just needs to open his eyes and he will see the future. It will leap off the page, and overtake his thoughts, wiping any other possibility. What it will be. And like all of the futures that he has ever seen, it will be unstoppable. Another death, another victory, another secret that he can, and will, exploit to make his life just that much better. But it isn’t about the payoff.

For Ike the future is just an itch that needs to be scratched.—a chemical dependency every bit as pathetic as any other addiction. In a second he will open the wild staring eyes of a junkie, satisfying the feeling of need, of release, of false power in an instant. And like any other drug, it will give Ike what he most desires, and then fade away. And he’ll chase it again and again, until the day that it reveals his own death, unstoppable, and inevitable.

The handles were squeezed tight around his arm, and the beige wedge of the bag stuck straight out from his back like a pathetic, featherless wing. It’s badly tarnished faux-brass buckles glinted dully in the blue-gray fluorescent mall lights.

Harry marched forward with a steady trot, his eyes pointed straight ahead, determined to avoid catching the gaze of any of his fellow shoppers, no matter how intensely they might be staring at him.

Something shifted inside the bag, and with a reflexive twitch, Harry squeezed his arm tight against his side. He grunted loudly as he did so, covering up a high-pitched squeal that emanated from the purse. “Settle down in there,” he said in a low grumble.

He had almost crossed the food court without incident when a pre-teen girl dressed in a pink fairy costume ran giggling and squealing across his path. He stopped short and stared at her. She opened her mouth to yell out hello, then went quiet when she saw the handbag, a look of puzzled curiosity in her eyes.

A second later she turned and ran back the way she came, ending up with her arms wrapped around her mother’s leg. The stocky blond woman was, thankfully, too engaged with her cellphone to pay any attention to a fat old man carrying a purse, no matter how urgently her daughter tugged at the sleeve of her blouse.

Even without her mother’s attention, the little girl continued to stare. He knew what she was feeling. “Gender confusion,” was how his granddaughter had referred to it the first she’d seen his curse. “That’s what college gets ya,” he’d told her. But he hadn’ forgotten the term.

The store labeled “Candle s ‘n Scents” in a somewhat tasteful scripted font marked the transition point from food court back to non-consumable items with an ironically strong scent of vanilla and cinnamon. Harry stomped past it, and went another 20 yards until he reached his destination: “Luggage and Things”.

On either side of the entryway suitcases had been bolted together with wire to form two towers that seemed to teeter with the weight of the signs promising great deals inside. Passing through them Harry had expected to see more variety inside, but once he passed through the portal all he saw was more luggage and a few backpacks that might, technically, qualify as “and Things.”

Winding his way through a jungle of unwieldy merchandise, Harry reached the high counter. Sitting behind it, oblivious to his lone customer, was an obviously bored young man, with a moussed-up haircut that gave Harry some “gender confusion” of his own.

“What’s the strongest bag ya got?” Harry asked him.

The clerk jumped slightly and looked up from the screen of the smart phone in his hand, peering a him through his unnecessarily thick black frames. “What?”

Harry scowled and spoke more slowly, “Your… strongest… bag… What… is… it?

The clerk gave him a frown in return for his sarcasm. “Well, we have bags that are reinforced in a variety of ways. What did you need it for?”

“Jeez Louise.” Harry rolled his eyes. “If I knew I was gonna get interrogated I woulda bought one offa the Internet.” He paused a moment, then tried again with a bit more enthusiasm, “Maybe one a them gorilla-proof bags, like in the commercials.”

“You mean a Samsonite?” The clerk replied. He pointed over to a badly faded cardboard cutout of a gorilla standing a suitcase. It had been firmly glued to the wall, and a few letters of the word Samsonite had survived the test of time, but not many.

Harry checked out the image and nodded in recognition. “Yeah, okay.”

“We don’t carry Samsonite anymore.”

Harry threw up his arms,” I couldn’t give a ding dong damn who makes it. Just so it’s tough.”

The clerk stood up, finally convinced that Harry was a serious enough customer that he would need to come down from his perch. “Do you want wheels?”

“I’ll take ‘em if you got ‘em.”

15 minutes later Harry stepped out of the mall, his new purchase rolling noisily behind him—a medium sized piece of black, hard-shelled luggage. It was fairly stylish, if nondescript. Being dragged across the mall parking lot on a snowy winter night it seemed only slightly less out of place than the purse had, but at least Harry was no longer wearing the handbag.

After every few steps the luggage would suddenly jump, followed by an unintelligible stream of muffled, angry, gibberish that sounded a great deal like swearing.

By the time Harry reached the car the bag was careening wildly with every step. Harry had become exhausted with the struggle. Placing his hand on the hard surface to contain it he leaned down and spoke to it quietly, but sternly, “Chill the eff out or I’ll chuck you in the river.”

A high-pitched voice rose up from inside. “I’ll always come back.”

Harry’s voice went up an octave as he tried to plead with it, “Can’t you, you know, just stay in there and shut up?”

There was a moment of silence and after a few seconds Harry took his hand away and stepped back. The squeaky voice somehow managed to sound very serious, “You know what you did.”

Harry opened the trunk, and then picked up his new piece of luggage and flung it in, letting it land with a dead-cat bounce. He regretted it almost instantly when he saw that the brand new locks were already beginning to break loose. They wouldn’t last long. Maybe he could use some duct tape when he got home, or maybe he’d be wearing the handbag again tomorrow.

He slammed the trunk shut and rolled himself into the car with a loud old-man groan. He could already hear the trapped creature rattling the luggage around in the trunk behind him.

Harry held up the empty ring finger of his left hand and scratched it gently with his thumb, “Yeah, I guess I do know.”

Removes, restores, revitalizes, moisturizes, lifts, refreshes, soothes, relieves, whitens, darkens, lengthens, and lasts all day with a single application.

They are slippery and smooth, and we smear them across every exposable surface of ourselves in a desperate hope that we can be fixed from the outside in without having to mess with any of the messy mysteries that lie under our skin. They are a balm for our restless thoughts and gauzy fears.

And that’s why I should have known better. I should have trusted that drowning feeling I get when I’m in way over my head. But back then I didn’t believe in faeries, or magic, or any of that shit. Even though everyone was talking about them, and Maury – Goddamn Maury, told me that he’d run into some honest-to-god trolls hanging around a bar in the meat-packing district. And if you knew Maury you’d know he barely believes the sun is coming up tomorrow. So when he goes on to tell you that the dude in the sharkskin suit with the ten million dollar smile is an elf, it probably… no… it definitely behooves you to take it at face value.

But I figured I could handle an uppity guy who called himself “The Prince” who thought he was all that. And no one, not especially some pretty-boy who looked like his entire body was made out of cheekbone, was going to pull one over on a kid from Queens.

Not that I was anyone who should have even been anywhere near a fancy club like that, you understand. But Philip, the owner, and I had been friends when we was kids, and I’d been spending a lot of my over there since I got back from… that thing. And man, it’s fun to rub shoulders with movie-stars and the like. It helped me forget.

But The Prince—he was a different story. The guy was there every night, surrounded by his little pack of boy-girls who always hung around him, and on him. I never liked the look of him, or the sound of him, or the smell of him, so I did my best to keep out of his way. But the guy noticed me anyway. Maybe it was  because I was so obviously punching above my weight. But Philip let me hang around because I could tell a damn entertaining story and make people laugh.

And I was doing just that. Talking up this beautiful LA chick who plays the main girl in that series—you know the one—about the doctor who is also a superspy. And it looked like she was starting to give me the good news smile when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, and smiling down at me with a grin that had never touched shit was The Prince, but I couldn’t hear him over the music. Then he leaned down and whispered his words in my ear in some weird-ass fairy way that made everything else in the world go quiet. “You like to talk a lot, don’t you?” was what he said.

“Yeah well,” I replied, “and most people like to listen.”

He made a thoughtful frown and nodded his head. “Well now I have something for you—an offer of sorts,” he said.

“One I can’t refuse, no doubt.” But by the time I’d said actually said that, he’d already walked away.

Sue me, I like mystery, so I followed him over to his corner of the room and took the seat right across from him, trying to ignore the superior looks from his oh-so-adorable little misfit crew.

“What would you give me for your deepest darkest secret?” he asked me.

“Nothing.” I said, leaning back into the sofa. “I’m pretty sure I already know that one.”

I’d never heard a totally sarcastic chuckle before, but this was one of those.  “I don’t want to give it to you Greg, I’m going to take it away.”

“Make all my troubles go away? Sure. And then what am I going to do for you?”

“Not all of them. Just this one.” He leaned toward me and smiled in a way that looked like someone splitting open a ripe melon. “And all I want is for you to tell the world your story.”

And I guess he kind of had me with that, because glamour or no glamour, it seemed like a good deal. And then he leaned in and sucked my little secret straight out of my right ear. And for a minute it felt like I could fly. I’d been holding that bad memory inside of me for too damn long, and suddenly it was gone.

And when I finished he smiled even wider, which I didn’t think was possible, and said “Now here’s your punishment.”

And ever since then… Yeah, yeah, I am getting to the point! And ever since then, once I open my mouth to start talking to someone I gotta keep talking. I gotta keep talking until I either tell them my secret, or they tell me to shut the hell up, whichever comes first. And that’s where we’re at now.

And just so you understand how it works, it ain’t just me who’s stuck now. Because, if you try to get up you’re gonna find you can’t get out of that chair until we end this, and I’m here to tell ya… Well, I’m here to tell you a lot of things, but the most important thing of all is that I’m going to talk a long, long time before I’m going to tell anyone my secret. Because if you find out then so do I.

The quantum steam that boils off the edge of the event horizon of a black hole holds the potential for everything that ever was or ever will be.

Our ship slides past the infinite monkey that would have written Shakespeare. He is dead, his hands frozen into position above the keyboard of a battered Royal typewriter, eternally prepared to write Hamlet.

We have uncovered strangeness beyond imagination, collected things of impossible value, and run screaming from elder gods born by accident into the endless void. But the only thing we truly wanted was immortality, and today we have found it.

He sees a solider in a nearby yard, the pink hands and head poking out of the drab green fatigues. The enemy runs when he sees him, and Freddy chases after him, crashing through the door of a modest house, and skidding across the polished wooden floor of what had once been a large living room.

The soldier is out of sight, and Freddy shrugs. The motion activates the holster, causing his Spitgun to slide over his shoulder and into his hands. He presses the trigger and holds it down. The weapon breathes out with a spat, and in with a clatch. “Spat-clatch, spat-clatch,” over and over and over again, ripping, rending, routing everything it points at, uncaring whether it is furniture, drywall, or human flesh.

Freddy lets out a scream as the slugs fly. It’s a primal wave of purest joy rushing in to fill the hole left behind where his survival instinct once was. He bellows and whoops as the smell of gun smoke fills his nostrils. Once, not so long ago, before they put a chip in his head, he would have been terrified by the smell. Now he loves it. It makes his mouth water, like fresh, ripe fruit.

Something impacts hard against the mesh of Freddy’s armor, and he stumbles backwards, the heavy gun slipping out of his hands and dangling from his harness. His feet start sliding out from under him, and he crashes backwards into a table. The air is gone from his lungs. He feels like he is choking, or drowning, but he literally can’t panic. Time slows down as the chip tries to compensate. One of his long arms reaches out, grasping for the doorway, but it is too far away. He falls downwards to the floor, but Freddy is still rational and focused as the enemy soldier races towards him, a gun in his hands. He growls with anger.

The chip in his head, his digital conscience, gives him a taste of terror. For a moment his fear flares, then flickers and fades. It puts him back on track, on target, on point, on mission. It gives him the will to survive and Freddy twists just enough to let the enemy’s bullets whiz by his head. One grazes him, burning hair, and leaving a raw crease across his gray skin.

Rolling forward, and up onto his feet, he charges the enemy. They both grunt with the collision, then grapple and grope. The chip fires adrenaline into his system, but he barely needs it. He’s naturally stronger than the pink solider, and he slowly twists back the enemy’s hands until he hears something snap once, then twice. He wraps his arm around the enemy’s throat and uses the other to pound his face with a fist until his own flesh becomes bloody and bruised. The only sounds that come out of the enemy’s now are short, ignorable mewling, like those of a baby.

Dropping the solider to the floor, he picks up his Spitgun, taking his time to check it before he shoots again. The first slug ends the enemy’s muffled crying.
He bursts out through the back door, the gun still coughing. A grenade lands at his feet and he screams with delight as he kicks it away. It explodes in the air, a fragment of it bouncing off his armor. His muscles flinch from the impact, but his eyes are still wide, white, and unblinking.

Out on the street Freddy Forty-Four joins his brothers as they route the enemy, chasing them down into a cul-de-sac. When the hairless creatures have nowhere left to run to the Freddys raise their long black arms into the air and bare their fangs at the survivors. Some of the hairless are soldiers, and they rip away their weapons, then slap them to the ground.

The Freddys beat at their chests with black hairy arms, and their armor rattles like thunder. The enemies cry and scream, terrified by the shaggy monsters that surround them. Their terror is useless, undirected, and impure.

When the retreat is called the chip in his head switches from flight to flight. Fear burns through every fiber of his body until he can think only of escape. He isn’t alone: all the Freddys turn as one, racing back to the safety of the handlers and their cages. The feeling is so complete that it is almost a new emotion, and Forty-Four can barely feel his bruised knuckles pounding against the ground as he runs home towards the hairless man that he calls friend

He saw the Deathodactyls flying overhead and let out a friendly roar. He knew that the three of them were supposed to be devastating dinosaurs of destruction, but for some reason he could never take them seriously. They were once parrots, but mega-radiation had caused them to grow hundreds of times their original size. They were prehistoric killing machines, but to him they always looked like a trio of plucked chickens.

Not that he was one to talk. A few months after the accident he had finally managed to see himself reflected in the mirrored windows of a skyscraper in downtown New York. He may have been the lizard that walked like a man, but he looked more like a turtle crossed with duck. It had been at that exact moment of dawning self-awareness that the army chose to unleash the neurotoxin bomb. At least no one saw him crying as he collapsed into unconsciousness, taking the building with him in a futile gesture against his own image.

Having reached his destination Utoth sat back on his haunches. The northern side of the volcano was where he was supposed to meet Gargelon, but he wasn’t there yet. Watches didn’t come in giant monster size, and it was hard to make plans. Roaring wasn’t the most effective means of getting your point across. But when it’s all you have, you make do.

After they had captured him the government really hadn’t know what to do with him. There had been a token effort to reverse engineer the “miracle cancer cure” that had turned him from a Nobel winning scientist into a rampaging lizard-man of destruction, but nothing they tried had done much good. Meanwhile they kept him locked him up in an aircraft hanger, keeping Becky around to make sure he behaved. It was a cheap trick, using the woman he had once loved as a way to soothe the savage beast. But he had to admit that having her there made his head clearer somehow, and he felt a bit more human when he looked into her tiny blue eyes.

Once the couldn’t save him the army had planned to destroy him. He had killed thousands of people after all, and done billions of dollars of damage to New York, and there wasn’t much chance they could put him in jail. And when the Japanese had first offered to let him join the population on Creature Island the US government had originally turned him down, until Seargent Carter (now Becky’s fiancé) had come up with a plan – turn Utoth into a spy. The US wanted to know what was going on at Creature Island, and he was big enough that no one could find the spy cameras, and dangerous enough that they couldn’t look to closely.

Gargelon finally arrived, making a spectacular entrance as he ripped through the jungle canopy. Utoth hated to admit it, but he was damn handsome for a monster – certainly far cooler than a mutated man-turtle. 250 feet tall and brick red, the space dinosaur’s craggy eyes literally smoldered from the nuclear furnace that burned inside of him. His claws were like obsidian daggers, and inside his mouth were, inexplicably, rows of giant diamond shark’s teeth that glimmered every time he let out a bellow.

Besides being the best looking monster, Gargelon was also the brightest and the toughest. He had animal cunning, but was also capable of planning and plotting when necessary. And he seemed to be invulnerable to almost everything from poison gas to tank-mounted high-powered lasers. The humans had only caught him by using a sonic resonance cannon recovered from the same ten million year old alien spacecraft where they had found the monster in stasis. Utoth had read about it when he was still human. There had, in fact, been stolen sample of the monster’s alien DNA in his anti-cancer formula. Besides testing it on himself, that was probably his biggest mistake.

Utoth and Gargelon roared hello at each other for a bit. He wasn’t sure exactly what the monster was telling him, but they’d “spoken” enough to know that Gargelon wasn’t at all happy about being trapped on Creature Island. He was planning a break, and soon. And the big red guy was willing to bring along any monster who was intelligent enough to tell him that they wanted to join him.

The US government voices in Utoth’s head had told him that they wanted him to join along so that he could let them in on the plans for the escape. But even if he could tell them exactly what the giant red terror was up to, things were still complicated. After all, the Americans couldn’t tell the Japanese where they’d gotten the information without blowing his cover as a spy on Creature Island.

But the main problem was that he liked Gorgelan. When he’d first been put here he’d been the new monster on the bloc, and Apetor had been constantly picking on him – shooting knives at him from his nipples, which was almost as disturbing as it was painful. But all that had stopped once Gargelon had torn the big gorilla’s arms off. Sure, they grew back, but it was good to know that he had someone watching his back.

And even if Gargelon did escape, there was no way the human world could let him live. He was kind of alright if you were another monster, but the big red alien dinosaur had a hard-on for human flesh that made Slayaxe the Thirster’s taste for blood seem tame by comparison.

But there was nothing he could do. How do you tell an alien monster that he needs to do something he doesn’t want to do through a series of groans and roars?

Utoth was trapped in the middle and lying to everyone. Whatever happened, it wasn’t going to end well.