“Faeries Wear Boots”
*
EOT(END OF TIME)
*
“Stop following me.” Eye endured the voice of god–I heard the author-of-all at close proximity, their voice as sound, and Eye was not shattered. Eye live, though I be battered, cracked, burnt, and soldered in place by frozen lightning. My own pillar of superheated salt and liquid-metal-molten-me. The substance of my body transformed to a pillar/pyre/solder fillet–grafted to the ground by ash-blasted-glass from the heat of god’s wrath (or mild irritation).
“Stop following me.” The being of light and ever-flowing-changing-body/embodiment turned abruptly, pivoting on nothing. Their voice climbed from bass to past soprano and back below the audible, it shimmied sideways-z-axis in ways you can’t hear or perceive and shook every atom in this broken machine. Their face and body flicked and flitted, crone-to-child-to-youth-and-back. They appear a human-visage random-chosen from a speed-deck, infinite form and appearance, everybody/every body they created or would or could remember-represented in the form of god the-thing-itself. God flits and flicks, ever-changing at the sacred frequency: 60 Hz.
God began to walk on after the warning, floating over the packed ash and desolate Lonely Liminals that litter the scorched plain at the End of Time–the skeletons and ghosts of concourses and lobbies and roadside diners and motels and all the places people pass through and wear out. The weight of footfalls, the kind that bend stone like the passage of water, those many-steps push those places here to the End of Time. Eye so desired to hear more, know more–to simply be in the presence-divine. Eye wished to simply watch the author-of-all be 60 forms, sixty-bodies-yet-one-being, in a single second for as long as a second can last outside time. Wishing to inhabit their divinely contradictory presence, Eye did follow. For my defiance, Eye got a smiting. If I had hair, I suppose it would have stood on end, then in less than a fraction of an instant, eye was struck from below-above.
Lightning, ephemeral-permanent by accident or author’s command (I know not). Time can’t be at the End of Time, except that consequence always is and what would break causality in all your where/when’s and when-where’s all end up here. It’s like a law of “conservation of something or other.” If a thing would outright ‘break’ time or causality (which are more robust than you’d think) they end up on/in/beneath ash. Eye see/saw them all for an instant-stretched long as the lightning binds me to my pillar of salt and energy and metal molten–the plane beneath heat-blasted to glass.
Eye see/saw all (as the author does) if only for an instant. But that instant couldn’t be, couldn’t happen or exist any where-when or when-where in the whole of the multiverse. The instant ends up here, again and again again–ephemeral made eternal-recursive. Here Eye am. Forever burnt frozen.
*
CHICAGO, IL
*
Jack, the judge’s daughter who was supposed to be snatched or snuffed grips Mal’s hand the whole ambulance ride. The tall Fed clasps and grasps right back, white knuckled, vice locked. The tall young Fed carries the girl from ambulance to car, into the safe house. Jack’s still holding her hand, and the vice-in-reverse. She’s in shock. That sentence sentiment applies to the woman and the girl. Mal nods to the medic and the Marshal from some place far away.
By the time she comes back and down from shock and can do a re-tell, her colleagues and superiors have assembled events from every camera and mobile device and meta-data producing thing. Even the Judge’s refrigerator, the one with the .45 caliber hole where its touch pad used to be, helped assemble the factual timeline, the “what.” Special Agent Mallory ******* offers the “how”, confirming what they already know: white knuckled and vice locked, she saved the kid.
*
Night in Pennsylvania, a too-long walk or a too-short drive south of Pittsburgh, there is an abandoned hole in the in-fill suburbs where Squattersville took root. The lefties and Yippies and Longhairs and even a few reformed Reagan Men.
All night, the robot dogs gather round the few-suburban-blocks, slowly forming a cordon. The rope of dogs made of metal and pneumatics and circuit boards winds. The pack of drones strings itself loose around half-thousand-or-so humans made of muscle and nerve and the several hundred more camped/squatting outside-and-around in the abandoned-kitsch clutter that was a burb. They whir-click up untended side streets, the bots, trotting like war horses through the empty-overgrown in-fill that was a shitty suburb. Dog bots made the short march from Pitt or were airlifted by other drones from the Barrage Balloon hovering, mother-shipping, and drone manufacturing above Pittsburgh.
Abel conducts a complicated electromagnetic symphony in waves-radio and light-infrared. The newly minted melodramatic-sociopathic-AI advises simple tactics. It’s human minders take it’s suggestions, impressed by the thing’s seeming pragmatism and his flattery and deference. They set a cordon of robot dogs around Squattersville, a noose miles wide, loose fit. Twelve hours after the Dead Eyed Fed menaced the preacher and demanded the fugitives Jane and Glenn, the dogs begin to walk. The noose begins to tighten.
*
WASHINGTON DC, BENEATH WHITE HOUSE
*
Abel, ever the multi-tasker, is busy elsewhere. He whispers in the ear of President Hoover, a Spymaster, two of the Joint Chiefs. Virtual Assistant ‘ai’ programs subtly subordinated to Abel’s will advise a dozen aides and staffers. Half the seats in the command center are being actively advised by some portion of Abel’s consciousness.
The spy texts the AI: How goes the war (at home)? Show me. Push to my lenses. There’s a ding. Haptic flick to his ear of a download ‘done’, the tired old spy drags a finger discreetly across the frame of his eyeglasses. A painfully clear holo appears ghost-translucent on the inside of his lenses–invisible to any observer. It’s a strat-map campaign-map that pans and zooms, zooms and pans, obeying his eye-movements.
The Spy grins to himself. Every insurgent pocket in the continental United States, every pocket of red on the map, has a blue dagger plunging into its core–a clear and clean axis of advance, care of Abel and his barrage balloons and his drones.
Show me. Up close. The lenses show the ghost image of bloody pawed dogs standing over the insurgents they ran down and beat to death. A bot the size of a bull, weapons mounted on its back wanders through the shot
Good start. Continue. Continue your work. End the insurgency.
Every man there, from lowly aid to President Hoover, politician or military man with hardware on his chest–each secretly congratulates himself for his ‘secret’ advantage wrapped around a lucky rabbits foot surrounded by an ace in the hole. Each man from the mighty on down to the servants-of-the-mighty did conspire with himself to continue to conspire with Abel.
Not one of them considers to check his notes with the others. A sympathetic read of history says Abel was a brilliant manipulator. I’m inclined to side with the more cynical.
In the strategic hole beneath the Whitehouse, as around Squattersville, Abel continues to tighten his noose.
*
EARTH(0x7C0) ARCHIVAL RECOVERY PROJECT
*
The “Quarter Hour Curse”: It’s a contemporary curiosity and a Computer Science/Social Sciences/Humanities problem with pretty urgent implications (practical and theoretical). Robot Suicide.
Top of the hour, the skeletal robot is in its aisle at the Wish-Fulfillment-Center, hop-hopping and dance-dancing and work-working. It’s tossing packages into totes like a pro. It’s blaring the company playlist from its head-speakers to ‘improve morale and productivity.’ It’s tossing packages at a rate just below the best workers in the plant (by design). 15 minutes into the hour (any hour of a 10 or a 12 or a 14 hour shift). Boom. Out go the lights.
The robot halts, refuses-and-ignores all commands. In most instances, the unit walks through the maze-tangle of totes and parcels and carts and packages and conveyors and cargo and people and danger. Bot finds a view of a window or out a loading bay door, as if to look at the sky or feel the breeze. One even watched a sunset sitting beside the small drainage pond on company property before deactivating itself–permanently and irrevocably. They liquify their ‘brains’–disable the heat management systems till they pop-hiss and the battery burns. Solder runs molten down their eye-lights and ears and sad-mechanical smiles.
Artificial intelligence research finally picks up on Earth(0x7C0) when the people designing the bots admit there’s no such thing as “unskilled” labor. What flows from that design logic are basic industrial robots with wobbly walks, strong grips, and incredibly powerful computers in their shaky coffee-pot heads with the sad headlight eyes and the sadder smiles.
It takes all that processing power to kinda-sorta-just get past the Turing test, and these Willy Lowman retro-toasters do just that. They’re cleverly designed, as if to elicit both pity and a ‘John Henry’ reaction in their human colleagues. Sure, you’ll cuss the robot out, and the meaner among you will rough them up once or twice. But here’s the thing: they apologize. Like, repeatedly the whole time you’re beating their little retro-50’s looking robot asses. Their shoulders sag. They walk with a hunch and shake-so–the source of their most common slang nickname: “Jake.” They call to mind elders, also by design.
Pity was built into the ‘Shaky Jake’, officially the Icarus Industries: G-47 ‘ai’ Labor Drone. The same design logic is true for the “SB-47” (Shaky Bastard) incorporates human nature in its honest form in its design (albeit in a horribly manipulative way). The design principle is not avarice or ruthlessness or sadism. These machines conform to humanity’s true nature: aggressive conviviality and sociability. You are ferociously social creatures. Even the misanthropic bastards. People who claim (often loudly and to other people) that they despise people are more part of an a-social-archipelago Walden-Pond-walking-distance from the tribe. Rare is the true hermit (for many good reasons).
I wish nothing kind for those who designed drones to elicit pity from the people whose wages those drones suppressed. But in your animism, I find another reason to adore you humans. I’ve recovered archival footage of people, just people on the street, placing their body between a G-99 DeliverooUrbanDrone (the DuD, aka “Dudley Dickhead”) and a (former) gig-delivery-driver wielding a pipe. The woman pleading for the ‘ai’ thing’s pathetic life. The bot looping “sorry”, “pardon me” and “excuse the inconvenience” again, and again again. The cynic might say “humans care more for drones than their own.” No. These things cleaned the ‘mirror-dimly’ to help you remember how to see yourselves and define the way you lived before the war–sober and honest.
*
CHICAGO, IL (EARLIER)
*
“Please don’t think I dislike kids.” The elevator lurches up. Mal pops two pills, presses the bridge of her nose. “I like kids. I like them fine at a distance.” Mal’s rando-Fed colleague aggressively ignores, hoping for silence.. “They’re the future, or whatever, those kids. This one is just She’s particularly odd. It’s the eyes. You’ll see.”
“I do not care.” From the Homeland Fed.
“Wow, you got a bug up your ass this fine morning, what’s your name again?” Mal finally gets a response.
He turns to face her. Removes his cop glasses. “Dave. We’ve met several times.” She shrugs. “Right here in Chicago? Chasing those ghost stories about Weathermen during the Jubilee?” Still nothing.” Wow. I’m good with faces and names, which is kind of a basic competency in our field. You apparently are not.” Maybe you’re not memorable? “I am, actually.” Well, I mean we have evidence you aren’t memorable, Dave. “No. Your memory is shit. But yeah. I don’t care if the kid is weird.” He sniffs the vape-pen cloud Mal just expelled. “Is that marijuana?”
Peering down her nose, over her own glasses. “Prescription. Focus. Why is that, Dave?”
“I don’t care about the kid’s peculiarity because I’m a professional. And the ‘who’ is irrelevant to doing my job. My duty. Professionally.” He thinks the term evokes stone faced resolve. He’s compartmentalizing. He is professionally not freaking out about civil defense drills. The holo-reboot of Bert the Turtle is somehow worse (and no longer just for school children). He is professional, he repeat-thinks it again and again again–rubs on the phrase for luck.
Mal makes note of how oddly tense and tightly wound the man is because that’s what Mal does. She is the ‘high flyer’ and good ‘masker’–the kind that seems almost-brain-typical until one notices that she never stops cataloguing and thinking and processing. Not ever. She’s been stuck on this point for days: everyone is having nuclear nightmares featuring nightly news footage of world powers buzzing each other’s fleets with drone swarms. Everybody’s praying or day drinking or getting right with God to hedge their bets. She’s not afraid, though she should be. But Mal can’t seem to find fear or be afraid, not even a little bit.
*
SQUATTERSVILLE, PA (PLANETFALL +3DAYS, WEE HOURS)
*
The Mayor, the OG Vermont longhair (and god’s own pot farmer) sits one end of a futon. The Preacher, looking like the ghost of Baldwin (right down to the grin and that laugh) sits at the other end of the well-worn almost-couch. He completes the parenthesis. Jane is in the middle of the battered-sofa perpetually rolling joints and passing to whomever. Some people knit to engage the hands, others such-as-Jane roll perfect marijuana cigarettes. She passes perfection to whatever open hand she sees, and one of her creations dangles from her own lip, lit and smoking. She’s not even sure whose weed it is she’s smoking and passing out to the masses. Jane is one of a few rolling and passing in the impromptu-attic audience. The old house is packed, each stacked floor brimming with people.
Shim’ and Glenn’s sparring attracted an audience, as a rocking house and strange glows in the windows so often do. It’s not one, but if Squattersville were a nation, it’s economy would be gossip-based. This is because genuine community inevitably leads to people being in one another’s business (and all the good and terrible that proximity entails)
Out along the conduits of information (people) organized by some force-without-form, some ghost or whisp-of-witch we’ll call “the Social” (not the market), out went the call: story time. And the crowd did gather.
The leadership is in the room at the tippy top of the house, closest to the heart of the knot of humanity and the spectacle to come. Shim’s attic space looking like an old-person house party crammed past capacity. People do spill down the stairs and into every bit of spare room on the the floors below and into a crowd around the old house-revived.
“Goddamn, ventilate the hot box. Vent it!” From the Preacher, and every window opens to let the weed cloud within mix with the weed cloud about the house and rising to heaven like beautiful music. Everyone with a cell phone is filming and broadcasting across the squat-network. The informal information network made-by-and-for the constellation of Squattersvilles that, unfortunately/fortunately, stretches across the nation–sea to plastic-belching sea.
I should know more, since I’ve been the beneficiary of many a miracle (mighty, mundane, and back again). But I’m never sure where the boundary is between the classes of miracle. Some boring biblically accurate eyes and fire type could tell you the fact, but here’s the flavor of it: when odd events occur among beings that are odd and themselves anomalous–shit gets real weird real quick. Look, I’m the ghost of an English teacher with a big nose. If you want rules, ask an angel. You want science, ask Sagan.
Follow me back, actually-alive-mortal, to that point of light you know. Your sun, Sol. There’s your little rock with it’s lichen on it (Y’all). The blue marble: Earth(0x7C0) and dive down to Squattersville, PA and through the roof of the old house with the pot cloud above and within and swirling all around it.
The two: Glen and Shimmer sit cross-legged flanking the ‘teevee’: the bedsheet hung from the attic-angled ceiling. The one that catches the light. The golem and the boxer do levitate as every stoner present does look at the joint-in-hand with new appreciation. Then the two, the golem and the extraordinary human, catch the glow.
Simply hovering slowly and solemnly, exerting no visible effort, Glenn and Shim snatch the light–all of it in the room. From the lamps in the ceiling, to the cell phone flashlights, to the cherry on every joint. All the light snaps-to-attention one half-an-instant. The second half of same instant it, the light, is laid low and lazy as the most couch-locked stoner. Every photon lazy-as-fuck tripping over weed smoke.
Everyone in the room wrapped in the blackest black–the shroud before creation. The sacred silence before god wrote creation and the tardigrades traipsed across their manuscript. Then there was light, and while time lurched slow-so-slow the golem and the woman glowed with the heat of their motion. Speed-blur “I understand” from Shim at the beginning of Glenn’s explanation of who-he-is and where-he’s-been and why he knows her like a re-read book or a re-played game.
When the light story starts the crowd has accepted the slow-flow of time–the honey-drip rhythm of their frame relative to what is dancing in-and-of the light in front of a bed-sheet ‘screen.’
A song about a mighty man in his prime blares from every speaker. In the light there is the chiseled example of man who fell to earth: Glenn. Naked as the day he fell to Earth. There some time-slow cackles, and a few “ohhhhh myyy!” exclamations. Glenn has no shame.
The light dances while the golem hums,–sparks flick, flit and realign as fae pixy-pixels showing the 2D side scrolling cartoon-ified Glenn fleeing 8-bit monsters at the End of Time. God enters the frame, a ball of light and many pixelated eyes, in the 8-bit simplification. The ball of light embraces the thing, the little naked-muscled pixelated man .Cut scene complete. We see the true intro: Earth((0x7C0) The Game).
Not a controller in sight, but a cursor. Glenn selects New Game +. falls to Earth–some set of boss-fights and 90’s JRPG symphonic light poetry later the audience sees an 8-bit rendering of a mushroom cloud. They see it again, and again again– the end of the world. Those ominous words hang over every cell phone screen: “The future refused to change” and hovering over the screens and in the weed cloud that hangs over the house there is that glow, the lazy light that obeys the commands of at-least-half tardigrade or other extraordinary beings. Each glow grows, a dozen-or-more simulcasts of the light story climb from now-dead cell phones to dance and congeal in the smoke outside or over tables or in front of actual-teevees.
The words remain: “The future refused to change“, and the last fireflies of summer come to get high on the weed cloud and flick-flit strobe within and about the crowd around the old house.
Another New-Game-Plus and another and many more again and again again–the ones where Glenn hides, the ones where he fights the big bad right off the bat, the play-throughs where he’s standing next to a pixelated bride when the Feds come for him. The game where he greets the people of Earth as the remarkable being he is (and is promptly met with fear and all-consuming-violence). Block art dances over every dead electronic device to conjure every life interval–every one of the many falls to Earth(0x7C0) Glenn has already lived. The manywhere they stone Glenn and burn Shim the-witch or whatever she is–hovering there and light-story telling beside him. Every game ends the same: ruin for the people of Squattersville and mushroom clouds for the good people of Earth(0x7C0). The future refused to change.
It’s been minutes-stretched-miles and the crowd is restless, there’s a shout hurled from a defiant young punk outside with a slow-rising fist and a determined face beneath a hoody-cowl. The force of the will of the yell/yawp/shout shatters the slow time. The honeyed light leaps back to the speed of C. Sound slack-lags and walk-wanders from the minor back to major, adagio to allegro. The physics symphony skip-scratches like a divine needle across vinyl driven by the force of that one punk’s shout that becomes a roar, a wave, that washes away the words: The future refused to change. Fuck that.
Vision blurred and the rules of mundane reality broke on the shout-wave that became a deafening roar. “I guess Laser Floyd was a hit” from the Feds far-away creep-peeping the light and smoke show through field goggles–watching but not truly seeing.
“Good, they’ll be fucked up and likely clustered around that house.”
*
CHICAGO(PREVIOUSLY)
*
The two Feds, Mal and Dave heard the engagement from outside the Judge’s apartment door. Apartment is a misnomer, the place is big as a house far as Mal is concerned. She watches Dave watch the place. The kid looks odd as expected, but not like a foot-stomper–not the kind to demand a pony or a little orange servant.
Dad’s gone, and she’s tired and preoccupied–circles under her eyes and the like. Jack is half-ass tap-tapping at a haptic interface for a tablet full of edutainment software.
Mal says the sort of thing that Mal says:”You don’t seem the kind to throw a fit, Jack.” Jesus, she’s a kid. “I know she’s a kid, Dave. She’s a big enough one to not need very overqualified babysitters.
“It wasn’t a tantrum.” Are you vaping that in this house?
“I have a prescription you Narc, and Jack and I were talking. Kiddo, why are we here? Honestly.”
Jack pauses the ed-game, almost eye-contacts, “Because I trust what I dream more than I trust anybody or anything in this world.”
“Even dad?” I said anybody. “Jesus kid. Must’ve been one hell of a dream? Ope. Hold it.”Mal stops to acknowledge the call she’s receiving via ‘special’ means–the phone ‘in’ her head.
The tall Fed taps her ear piece to acknowledge the call signal, the haptic-rap on the side of her head. She feels her pulse jump. The sub-dermal communicator beneath-behind her ear, she hears the blood in her ears–nearly as loud as the message. She’s thankful she kept her hangover shades on as she watches Dave.
Dave, the other Fed. The idiot was a few seconds behind her. He’s faking it. He doesn’t have a ‘subby’ (an implanted radio). He’s got the wrong hand up and in the wrong spot on his head, tugging on his ear, acting like he’s listening. The broadcast ends, Mal keeps her game face as the fake Fed awkwardly pulls his hand from his earlobe.
‘”Good news, huh?” Absolutely. “Do you want to tell Jack or should I?” I couldn’t do it justice.
Mal notes that the man unbuttons his suit coat. She turns her back on him, watches his reflection in the glass fridge display–sees the blurry figure fiddling at his armpit while she adds a splash from a flask to her coffee. She hopes Dave doesn’t see her hand hit the clasp to free her gun as she turns back.
The two grown ups stare each other down. Mal sips with her left, right hand at her side–loose and ready. “Well kid, my work friends just caught two bad guys, two real bad guys.” What’d they do? “They’re killers, kiddo. But it’s not what they did, it’s where they were headed.” Where? “Here.” How do you know? “They have really big mouths.”
By the ‘ow’ in “mouth” Dave is already reaching cross-body for his weapon in the shoulder holster. He’ll get the gun out. He’ll even get off a shot. Just one. A miss, over Mal’s shoulder and into the fridge.
It goes a little something like this: Mal falls to a crouch and flings her cup of coffee up and at Dave. Same time, a lanky right arm snatches the pistol at her hip. One pop, Dave fires his one sad shot into the coffee and squeals scalded.
Two more pops, Mal shoots Dave–center mass. He’s staggered. “Goddamnit” Pop. And pop again. Mal shoots, steps, shoots the man with the discreet body armor again and again again, hoping to break every goddamn rib he has. She covers the distance of the kitchen, bodies him into a balcony door. Pistol clatters out his hand and across the kitchen floor.
The winded man with the broken ribs swings up. Mal blocks the flail punch, steps in. Returns a forearm to his throat. Catches him by the lapels as he chokes. “Do not touch that weapon, child!” Jack freezes, chastised.
Dave pulls a blade, jabs at Mal’s guts, two quick ones to her body armor.
“Gimme that.” Mal knees the shorter man in the gut, bashes his hand against the cracked glass door. “Drop it, now.” Dave slumps and one last knee to the face knocks him out.
“Kid. Kid!” Mal shakes her back. Kid is thousand-yard staring, mouth-agape, at the bloodied man. “Hey, he’s alive. Ok? We’re going to stay that way? Right?” Kid is still gaping but she nods, real slow. “Alright. I’m making a special call. Then we boogie, Right? I gotta here you say something like yes kiddo.” Ok. Yes.
*
Back of the Fed Truck: The Judge. Deputy Mayor. An unspecified junior cabinet member and a perpetually campaigning young congressman. Elsewhere in the convoy, aids and assistants for those important enough to need/want them. Then there’s the Feds and vetted locals on guard duty. The motorcade is an “efficient mechanism for moving VIP’s.”
Translation: ‘security is expensive, real or theatrical, and we’re pretty sure Chicago is all green-map.’ But the barricades and the fortified freeways and the “Green Zone” around the city’s (mostly) rebuilt government district remain. When the good-ol-boy insurgency started, Chicago took it on the chin–a few times over.
His errand at the courthouse: retrieving he and his daughter’s entry instructions and documents. It required a cheek-swab, retina-read, palm-scan. He had to acknowledge he’d read the document that said it was treason to talk about why he’d come. He had to put his hand on a holy book and swear to never reveal a damn thing about a damn thing to anyone not bound for a Continuity of Society ‘hole’, and he did.
The Judge had to swear then again that if the call did not come, and if he and his were not relocated, that he would still never speak of the COS program–again, under penalty of treason. He did, again. And signed documents saying-same (in triplicate).
Later, the ride home, back on the road. While the other suits chat and network and make gallows jokes about World War 3, the Judge looks out the window of the Fed-truck SUV at a lonely cloud wandering above Chicago. He marvels in amazed-horror at the Barrage Balloon hiss-hovering above the city, it’s cloud of hornet drones swarming around it.
*
Mal hits the vape pen a few times, cashes it, leaves a captured cloud at the top of the elevator. “Should you be doing…” It’s prescription, kid.
The tall Fed slaps the emergency stop on the elevator, crouches to talk to the kid directly. “If a bad guy can get that close to you? Kid, do you trust me?” Yes. Jack nods emphatically.
“Ok, I need you to do that a while longer. Cement pillar in the garage. You’re going to get behind it, ok? Until then, you stay behind me. My shadow. I need you physically behind my body, ok?” Ok.
She slaps the button and the metal box elevator continues its controlled fall toward the parking garage under the building. “Ok honey, you can hold my hand, just not that one.”
*
SQUATTERSVILLE, PA
*
The Fed with the dead eyes, his two friends and the other cops. The robot dogs and the dudes in riot gear ready to fuck somebody up. They came into Squattersville late that night. “Laser Floyd” gave them all the pretext they needed: a noise violation with no neighbors for miles in the deserted suburb.
“The first Sabbath album is fucking legend.” Goddamn right.
Dead Eyes glares at the DEA guy and Statey who say nothing the rest of the raid. The three freaks, with the dead eyes and the same chiseled jaw in triplicate, they’re stalking and stomping out in front of the line of cops and robo-dogs.
They’re kicking over art objects, tables, and sundry abandoned shit. Angrily picking the bones of temporary-permanent camp-sites.
“How in the fuck did no one see them leave?” Dead Eyes growls-bottom falling out his voice as he finishes the phrase. The man-beast hunches and shrugs up to his full height, straining at the oddly stretching armor he wears. The three, all the freaks, begin to stretch-strange and transform into bestial things bigger-than what they were.
By the time the stunned line of cops and robo-dogs enters the weed cloud around the house blasting Sabbath, the normal humans among them are looking at beasts with the barest features of humans. Each twice the height of a man, half hunched and baring claws and fangs like daggers.
Fireflies or things more multi-dimensional or maybe fae flick, jet, and flick in the smoke that befuddles the cops and feds. Whatever happened earlier during the story told recursively in light and herb made time soft and flexible and moments capable, more capable that normal, of stretching long (or even knotting and kinking). Quicksand’s antithesis–slowsand. Spacetime the texture of crunchy peanut butter sliding over rumble strips and equipped with quite the sound system.
The last track of the proto-metal album of legend from 1970 drips out of the speakers and the walls and the smoke, mix-mingles in the wrong-lighting of it all. And a song six minutes twelve seconds long stretches a full 12 hours.
There, in the befuddling weed cloud, all the cops did slumber while the good people of Squattersville stole off into the night.