Sure Fire

Sure Fire

Jason Micheal Dunn

Copyright 2011 Jason Micheal Dunn

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Jason Micheal Dunn coming soon to Smashwords.com:

Poems by Metazoan

Jason and the Golden Thesis

Philosophy for Depressives Against Empirical Vampires

Dirty Pure

Something I Wrote the Other Day

Straits of Lightness

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Soul is the inside story

body is just folded soul

incarcerated to the cubby-holes

sandwiched with the other clothes

in our languid languages

Chapter 1: The Victims

Dreaming again. Terrified. In the darkness he feels them surging impossibly up the rock slide. They hate him. They are going to rend his limbs from his body with their powerful arms and ravage his torso with their human teeth.

But it is their eyes that strike him with morbid paralysis. He can feel their eyes before he sees them. Their silently laughing faces are a hideous shock with gaping black eye sockets where reality has failed to assure us that Hell does not exist. Where the eyes should have been a sense of falling sucks at his guts.

He sees them manifest, shadows multiplying in the moonlight, racing in hideously inhuman leaps up the shattered slope. Their grotesque grins, trained on him like identical masks, insult any vestiges of courage that may have remained to him, rooting him in utter pitiable hopelessness.

Then he snaps.

As if some mountainous dynamo has roared into life, tonnes upon tonnes of mass pour into his body, a horrendous wail of weight mounts unbearably, trapped by the insane pressure, a tectonic scream locks his body in a rictus more profound than terror. The pent up agony of the weight of the Earth should have detonated his body like an obscene effigy, released firing pins in his optic nerves to shotgun volcanic gore from his excruciated face, exploding his lungs with the kindness of cataclysmic, fatal expression. But instead his pent fury drove his mind before a deafening crescendo of titanic power into the last corner of his limitations.

Then there was pristine tranquillity as suddenly immanent and unquestionable as tonnages of blue ice, expanses piled neatly inside him as if it were the most natural occurrence.

He was looking at the stars, but they were metaphysically altered. He could not help thinking that the vast firmament looked like a wondrously smeared windscreen, lambent arcs of white force speeding ponderously, as he knew they must. The heavens held velocities and distances that made the heart race with jubilation, even now he felt an elevation of his heart’s colossal pressure. Except that his heart was now a slow storm, a rumbling punctuated just like a super slow motion V8, but deeper still, and far more numerously superimposed with impossible horsepower.

He had forgotten the monsters! They must be all but on top of him!

Attempting to look down revealed the syrupy viscosity of inertia with which his body was super-impacted. Looking down his face took too much time and he obliquely noticed that there was no longer any hint of midnight breezes, though a sensation of tenuous cotton sheets wrapped his body without impeding it.

At the very bottom of his curved field of vision he espied an astonishing spectacle. It appeared that time too had become an amber honey and the nightmarish horde had been trapped in its viscous ubiquity. Those sickening things were somehow before and after themselves all at once, streaks of Chinese calligraphy jumping off ancient sandstone parchment. His terror was astoundingly replaced with complete numinous astonishment.

He so slowly gathered himself and leapt down the escarpment of his dream toward the leading creep-show. As he fell through the almost tangible sheets of delicately rupturing air he allowed himself to be entranced by just the one scary face.

As a side thought, he wondered why his perception was as it was a blend of future and past made visible in the present. It was baffling in the most curious fashion, a tantalizing mystery that he savoured in spite of the macabre horrors and due to a sense of peace that can only come from absolute security.

They could not hurt him. He was intoxicated with physical and mental power.

Still he fell and he focused his attention on the manlike being. It was masticating something he was sure of it, working its jaw in almost imperceptible frequencies. Its whole body was a demented chimera of the ordinary though beneath its human surface was a ravening hunger in the process of digesting… it was feeding on his fear! The residual fear from a moment ago was funnelling into its ocular funnels, and that residue had just run out!

Before bewilderment could even register inside its malevolent intelligence he was levelling the structured tidal wave that was his advancing arm. Like a fluid hammer of meteoric velocity driven home by the inexorable inertia of his super dense body. The edge of his palm drove in an exciting arc straight into its hideous face.

Connect.

White light ruptured from the cracked porcelain mask as the hand, arm, and body followed entirely through the length of the rank shade. A dull crack reached his ears and light buffeted his body and vision as the two halves were cast aside by the epic concussion of his first blow against the seething hordes of his nightmares.

He landed on the precipice previously occupied by his enemy and he felt a fierce pride well up from the depths of his being to shout soundlessly into the far reaches of the ionosphere. A relentless conviction swore bloody murder into the depths of himself as the precipice shattered timelessly beneath his grey leather sneakers: he would destroy the civilization that masked the enslavement of man to this race of gaolers, thereby starving those empirical vampires of their complacent despicable gorging, and cut a swath of ending through their fetid ranks all the damn way to their regent here on Earth and smash its reign over us out of all possible existence, obliterate every last mote of its manifestation on every discernible plane of existence.

Wrecker had never dreamed so powerfully in all his life and he had dreamed as lucidly as the human heart can stand, breaking him with nightmares and visions night after night, as he suspected all people had suffered growing up. At least his sister and brothers had fared no better than him, this much he knew. Though most people never remembered their dreams, nor did he most of the time. Most of the time - but sometimes even as an adult he remembered or swore that movie horrors had crossed over into reality, if only for a moment.

Adults could not recall the fact of the matter. In the true sense of the word, this fact was insidious - an evil comfort that only hid the truth that the ugliness of this sick and twisted world festered beneath the glamour of true human values. Imponderable monsters feasted on human valour while they slept and it had been this way for millennia. He looked down from his furious reverie.

He saw their grinning masks had begun to change by degrees to a dismay that fed him instead. Their anti-empathy reflected in the glorious mirror of his puissant being and they all seemed to quail and cringe, frozen in the contradiction of their existence, caught begging for the mercy they would never grant by vice of their horrid being. It was Wrecker’s turn to grin maniacally at the dismay of his prey. It was Wrecker’s turn to bask in the terror of those who had hurt his family and his people.

For the almost innumerable generations since this twisted race had first beached themselves on the plentiful shores of our atmosphere and taken residence in our dreams, transmogrifying dreamscapes into hellish blue prints for the very real nightmare they had us visit upon ourselves in our waking lives, usurping our grand designers to ensure self-destructive ends, apartment blocks arrayed in matrices that crushed our natural ability to harmonize, societies that consumed each other with atomic pyres in honour of these self-made Gods.

The super-dense gravity of his certitude suddenly blazed as if with a billion lumens of triumphal emotion fusing the horde’s craven numbers from the inside out, range mattered nothing. In slow motion, exaggerated phosphorous flashes seemed to take his picture like some obscene press conference, their cavalcade of slow turning light flares abruptly charged, leaping with unexpected acceleration straight at him, startling his perspective.

The inrush of hexagonal spinning iridescences slammed into his chest, infusing senselessly hilarious gyres of energy to his exalted consciousness. He erupted with hysterical laughter. Phosphors pressed his tearing eyes shut while his massive body quaked with his blasting cachinnation.

He was only dimly aware of the ticklish flinders through which he fell, falling through the broken face of the cliff, oblivious to all but his own roaring, world-shaking laughter.

*

Another day of sunlight. Wrecker wakes and remembers nothing. The curtains slowly stir, like a fleeing wedding train glimpsed at the edges of a dream. The sun winks through the split, like a glorious garter belt.

In the dark pit of his gut a confusing ball of electric anxiety threatens like secret Tesla coils.

Is he hungry?

Deep down, the anxious lightning coughs, splutters, and putts out. Who can be bothered with anxiety anymore? Lots of people he supposes. But not him. Not anymore. Its’ cold and pain are welcome resources now, necessary in fact, like super-cooled rocket fuel or something, anti-matter maybe. Sadness is, in his case, a vast reservoir of power at his disposal.

So he tells himself.

When he needs it he just puts on his hideous, samurai face mask and detonates his suffering with righteous anxiety, and triumph roars out of his Klein bottle, terrible and furious and certain.

He smiles like honey at the golden window and the stirring curtains, his tummy dawning with a sunrise of its own.

Let's eat, he winks back at the world, and gathers himself to leap out of bed.

Chapter 2: The Defeated

The woman's sardonic face said it all, Why did your parents call you 'Wrecker'? They weren't hippies were they? I thought hippies were meant to name their progeny after celestial phenomena or enchanted creatures or some such nonsense.

He could not believe what he was hearing. He thought he had heard it all, he had for the most part, but it was not the Moonbeam call, or the Unicorn dig, it was her choice of the word, 'progeny.' Now that was insulting. That just plain pissed him off. So he was taken by surprise. His ire warred with his decency precluding immediate speech. Only royalty bore 'progeny' and her implication, borne by the lowest form of wit, that his family, his people, were the opposite of regal on the sliding scale designed by monarchs themselves. And by his people, he meant good people, where ever you find them.

She thought she was some kind of princess or something, the stupid old bitch. Well, she can’t possibly be queen, not behind that desk. This is bloody social welfare for Christ sakes. Then Wrecker smiled.

The corner of her mouth had been curled up ever so slightly, now it suddenly flattened out and the glint in her eye was extinguished just as suddenly.

Beginning to speak Wrecker shifted slightly, leaning back, opened up his wide shallow chest and spoke earnestly, My mother had no desire to give me a Maori name. My mother told me she had no desire to visit upon me the scorn she had won all her life with her Maori name, scorn from Pakeha and Maori alike. My mother told me she hoped I would grow to be mischief and play rugby well and people would know who I am because when all my friends cheered my uniquely, apt name, it was not 'John,' or 'Peter.' My mother is dead.

The old bitch behind her plastic desk nearly died herself!

Well... she quailed, I mean, I didn't mean to be rude, but it must have made life difficult as well. Other children must have teased you relentlessly. She was slowly recovering that illusion of composure by degrees. In fits and starts she furrowed her pencilled brow and seemed to want to say more but resorted to the comfort of her daily routine. How can I help you today?

I just got back to NZ a few weeks back and though I‘ve been job searching it is tough as you know with the world economic crisis as it is so I didn’t want to take any chances with rent to pay and needing to eat and things like that so I‘m here to hedge my bets and apply for the benefit just in case, though I really don’t plan on ever receiving the benefit as I am hopeful that I will have employment before two weeks are up. Is that okay?

How long were you overseas? Where did you go? She seemed genuinely intrigued and seemed to be looking him up and down as if seeing him for the first time. It's not like