First Flash Prompt of 2011

[grainnerhuad]

Of all the unexpected sounds

[neonorth]

After a few months of poetic constipation, the flash was like an enema, sorry for having to make it a two parter, I hope there's some Charmin around cuz I made a big mess...

The struts on the light blue 2008 Escalade jostled and shuffled unwillingly as it drove down the heavily rutted from the spring run off service road, tossing its lone occupant, Nikki Colter, side to side and up then down as she attempted to keep the illusion it was she not the ruts that were maneuvering the vehicle. Nikki was thankful for the artificial voice of her GPS gently reminding her that she only had three kilometers until her destination, ordinarily the voice irritated her, but out in the boonies that ran along the base of the Rocky Mountains of Alberta otherwise she would have believed herself to be a lunatic for running a fool’s errand in road conditions such as this just to fulfill the selfish need of canine companionship. She imagined that this trip would not had been half as harrowing as it was if she was a local in the area, but she had moved to Canmore only a month before from the decidedly farm crop locked city of Red Deer. At twenty nine, Nikki had felt that she could accomplish all that she could being just one of the many clerks in the mall, so when she saw the ad for a small apparel Shoppe manager in Canmore, she felt it was the only logical step to take. Small was definitely the proper description for the Shoppe, with Nikki being hired it made an employee count of one plus the owner, a woman who health had taken a downturn which left Nikki alone with the exception of the odd quarter day when the owner felt good enough to come in for a few hours. Nikki didn’t mind; it was the type of responsibility she was looking for – being accountable for the look and what went where as well as client service.
What she had not accounted for in her move was that Canmore was more of a way station for those looking to hike or ski in the national park so the majority of her social interactions were temporary but draining to the point that by the end of the day all she wanted to do was to curl up with her lap top and read a hackneyed horror story like “Lac La Biche” rather than go out for drinks at one of the lounges to meet some locals. It had not helped matters that she was more self conscious about the plumpness that encircled her five foot two frame though she had been told often that the light red hue of her hair high lighted how pretty her face was, which Nikki took with a grain of salt as the person speaking usually was focused primarily on her as plump breasts – just before some anorexic woman walked by and the speaker of the compliment’s eyes wandered away with the ass-less stick figure of a woman. Nikki had mentioned her itch of loneliness to the owner one morning and the owner suggested that Nikki look for a dog – a small dog – for companionship. She was more than welcome to bring the dog – small dog – to work; in fact, did Nikki notice the ten by fifteen fenced off patch in the Shoppe’s back area? It used to be a dog run for when she first had moved to town and had felt the same pang. To Nikki it was a sign from God that night in the paper there would be an ad for a Pomeranian/Shih Tzu crossed with an unknown sire to give away. She called the number and talked to a Jason Gardner, who confirmed that he did have a puppy to give away. She felt embarrassed after he had given her the range road to follow for asking, hastily explaining that she was from Red Deer and didn’t know the area well enough, but the man laughed it off with a deep rumble and asked her politely if she had a GPS. She did. He gave her the coordinates that he said that his daughter assured him were the correct one. The next morning she plugged the coordinates she had been given into her GPS and was on her way.
Nikki cursed the service road as it snaked up and down steeply at times the side of the mountain. It had been unseasonably warm so the bottom of the service road had been reasonable, but after several kilometers of an incline upward, the puddles had turned to ruts crusted with the remnants of the winter’s snow fall. The gentleman who was giving the puppy away had assured her it was less than a half an hour away, but Nikki had come to the conclusion that was an estimate for someone who had spent their lives along what passed for roads outside of the main highway. After two hours Nikki finally reached a crudely written sign hung on a tree branch with the words “the puppy is here”.
If the drive hadn’t been so harrowing, Nikki was sure that she would have considered the small log cabin nestled partially into the side of the mountain with a wide oak veranda highlighting the front of the cabin as quaint with the back drop of mountains on all sides of it save for the half acre front lawn that was almost like a crescent moon abutting the cabin, but with the driving conditionings being as they were, she thought more it looked like one of those camp cabins from the “Friday the 13th” movies she had scared herself with as a teenager. The older tall and husky gentleman clad in well worn overalls and a “Budweiser” cap with shaggy grey hair blooming from around its brim sitting in an equally old looking rocking chair on the veranda did not help quell those thoughts.
“Mr. Gardner?” Nikki called out as she stepped out of the Escalade.
“That’s me,” the old man called back, “And I’m supposing that you would be Mizz Colter.”
Before Nikki could answer, what at first looked like a motorized mop ran from its hiding place behind Mr. Gardner’s legs and launched itself at her kneecaps, quickly followed by a smaller mop that mimicked the larger of the two. Nikki laughed as the larger of the mop let out a series of excited yips.
“I take it this is momma?” She said, bending down to pet the black and white mop whose height did not quite reach up half her lower leg; the smaller one, just above ankle heighth, was quiet and held back out of her reach. Mr. Gardner smiled as he stood up.
“Yeah-up, that would be Mizz Damsel,” he confirmed as he loped over to Nikki, bending down to add his hand to the gross motor pampering. “As I said in the ad, she’s a Pom and Shitz cross.” Nikki was surprised that a grizzled looking man with such callous hardened hands would be so gentle with the dog.
“Mizz Damsel certainly is a beautiful dog,” Nikki commented as her hand slid across the thick long fur across the dog’s back. “She seems so dainty to be way out here in the mountains!” Nikki added, giggling as the dog’s pink tongue flicked in and out, grazing her forearm with each of Nikki’s strokes.
“That was a concern I had when I bought the place after my wife passed on,” Gardner admitted, “But except for some deer and the occasional rabbit, I haven’t really seen any predators skulking about except for once. Personally, I think it’s those radio towers that keep the animals away, sometimes I think it even bothers me.” Nikki looked around, she hadn’t noticed it at first, but to the north, west and east of the mini valley up the sides of the mountains were three microwave towers. “But as long as I get Mansbridge at ten and Don Cherry on Saturday nights, I guess I’m at peace with those things standing watch.” Mizz Damsel gave a small snort at attention being diverted from her; Nikki increased her pets to the dogs back.
“The father?” Nikki asked.
“Darned if I know, never saw the bugger,” Gardner admitted, “I don’t ever recall even seeing a stray dog up this far. I figure that a couple of hikers had a dog with ‘em when they were hiking the trails over yonder and the stud just sorta stopped by for a little….” Gardner had about to say something a little guttural, Nikki supposed and had stopped himself before he could think of a more refined word. She could see it in his eyes that he was still struggling, so she assured him that she got the picture.
“I knowd who the pappy is,” said a little voice from the door of the cabin. Gardner smiled and explained that his grand daughter was staying with him for the weekend while her mother was off shopping in Calgary.
“And just who is the little moppet’s pappy, sweetie,” Gardner cooed, once again surprising Nikki with the depth of kindness that oozed from the harsh lined mouth of the gentleman. The little girl, dressed in overalls in much the same condition as Gardner’s skipped over to the two adults, her tightly braided blonde double pony tails bounding back and forth on her head.
“Its pappy is a Takitawah,” the little girl said with the face of a wizened scholar etched on her young face. Nikki could not help but notice that even though the smaller dog was trying to capture the little girl’s eye, she blatantly ignored it for its mother.
“Takitawah?” Nikki asked Gardner, who shrugged.
“It’s an old Native legend of a pack of wolves that have voices so powerful that they can cause a mountain to shake.”
“What on earth for?”
“To make the snow go boom,” the little girl answered before her grandfather could. “There very nasty creatures, those Takitawah are. Soon as they open those big ugly mouths of theirs, BOOM and the snow just comes all down. They’s supposed to be good for the, the, ennnnnvirocement – but they are just mean, that’s all they are, just mean.”
She thought the little girl had an unusual way of petting Mizz Damsel, a sort of just dragging her fingers limply through the dog’s thick coat. When the dog began nibbling on the little girl’s fingers, she was such it was a precursor to either a scream or at least an angry word, but it was if the little girl felt nothing. It was when Nikki paid attention to the little girl’s hand that she noticed it had a rubbery texture to it: it was a prosthetic arm. Gardner noticed that Nikki’s eyes had moved from Mizz Damsel to the little girl’s hand.
“Sweetie, could you go back into the cabin and make grandpa a nice chocolate milk” Gardner asked softly. The little girl eagerly answered yes and after giving her grandfather a quick peck on his three day old bearded cheek, bounded back up into the cabin. Once the cabin door closed, Gardner whispered his apologies for the girl and her wild tales of the Takitawah.
His granddaughter had probably seen a wolf or two on the many visits up to the cabin and assumed that it would have been a wolf that got to Mizz Damsel. Gardner’s face flushed red as he leaned slightly closer to Nikki and with a conspiratory wink opined that he didn’t think it was likely a wolf would have impregnated Mizz Damsel - after all, you can’t fit a nine volt into a triple “A” slot. Nikki laughed.
“She used to love wolves,” he murmured.
“It doesn’t sound like she does anymore,” Nikki commented.
The twinkle in Gardner’s soft blue eyes disappeared as he checked to see if the little girl had come back out.
“It’s my fault,” he said softly. Any semblance of ferocity that Nikki may have felt about Mr. Gardner disappeared as his strong shoulders sagged. He gave Nikki a sad smile. “Damn old fool that I am, I filled her head about the legend and stories of the Takitawah – but when she and her mother and her father first came up for a visit, she heard a wolf howling and it scared her. I figured if she knew that wolves weren’t some sort of monster, she’d be more at peace comin’ around here.” Gardner’s hand rested on Mizz Damsel’s side, as if the dog was the only thing that kept him from slinking to the ground. Nikki’s followed Gardner’s as his stare went above and to the south of his little cabin.
“Last spring I caught sight of a wolf, a female wolf, prowling around,” Gardner said, his voice barely above a whisper, as if he had forgotten that Nikki sat on her knees beside him. “Never seen one that came this close to here before. Of course, when her parents and her came up that weekend, I had to open my mouth and tell her about the wolf.”
Gardner gave a snort.
“With some fine-tuning of the sighting, of course. She was already half way up the butte over there before I even had one of my boots on. I tried to sort of calm her down a bit, telling her that it was days ago, sure to shootin’, that wolf ain’t going to be anywheres near here, but Mizz Lisa’s like her mother…like her grandmother…once there’s an idea in that head, there ain’t no how of stopping her.”
Gardner stopped for a moment, a small smile crossing his pursed thin lips as he recalled the three biggest loves of his life and their tenacity. He cleared his throat and continued.
“After about two hours of walking, and her folks and I having finally convinced her that we weren’t going to see any wolves, if I wouldn’t be damned that the next bit of shrub that just barely let us sneak by without falling down into Hawk’s Egg Ravine we pushed through was the wolf I had seen, and she was in the middle of birthin’ to boot. I told Mizz Lisa to hush up and just watch the miracle of life – and what a miracle, watching that little white pup come out like it was a slip of butter on a hot pancake.” Gardner’s eyes left the mountains for the briefest of moments to look at Nikki. “But I think little girls have this natural instinct to squeal like hungry piglets when they’re happy.” His eyes went back to the mountains.
“I don’t know who was more scared, the wolf or me, but she wasn’t at happy at having an audience.” Gardner’s eyes seem to mist as the memories began to crackle vividly to the forefront of his mind. “ I could see that she had another pup on the way….it’s head was half out…but, that wolf…wanted her privacy. There was at least a hundred feet between us and her but it didn’t take her long to make that we were damn near noses to nose, and even though that little thing was just out of his mama’s womb, it was keeping right up to her…”
Gardner’s hand dropped limply from Mizz Damsel’s fur to his side.
“Shamed to admit it now, but back then, I wasn’t none too pleased that my little girl had married a police officer. I thought Rob was a bit full of himself, the way he always used to bring the family out for a visit in his little marked R.C.M.P. four by four with those damn stupid lights on top – always figured it was sort of slap to the face…having the loggers and hikers coming down that service road and seeing that thing in front of my cabin, making them think that ‘oh, look, there must be some weird mountain man getting himself into a world of trouble’. Didn’t like that he’d come up in uniform either…in a family no one’s more important than the next, you don’t wear some uniform with your gun to make yourself stick out like you’re some sort of slick shit….pardon my language…but now, you know, I don’t think he meant disrespect doing it, I think he was looking to show me that he was trying to earn to take my place as my family’s protector…that he was worthy.”
Gardner began to rub his large palms up and down the front part of his calves.
“He was worthy, by Jesus, was he worthy. Didn’t think nothing of himself, he pushed Mizz Lisa there into Jennelle’s arms and told her and I to get running. I thought he’d be right behind us, but he didn’t. I didn’t even take me more than a couple of winks to realize that Rob wasn’t following. I gave my head a turn and sure enough, there was Rob still where we had been standing, almost off balance but refusing to let that she wolf by no matter how hard she was rising up on her hinds and bashing him with those front claws of hers. I saw that he was trying to reach for his gun. Jennelle had stopped too, I told her to keep on running, that I would get Rob and meet up with she and Mizz Lisa back home. Rob got his gun out and took a shot, a wild shot, that knocked him more off his steady…I tried to jump to grab him, but with the weight of the wolf on him, she had a mouthful of shoulder and that little pup, right on Rob’s pants cuff….I failed to keep my word to the most important people in the world. Like I said, Mizz Lisa, once she’s got her mind to something, there ain’t no changing it. She squirmed out of her mama’s arms and came running back….funny how screams all sound the same, ain’t it? Sometimes you can’t tell if their happy ones or painful ones, whether it’s a man or a little girl or both.”
Gardner’s hands stopped moving, Nikki could see the flesh of his hands turn white from the pressure of squeezing his fingers into his calf. Gardner cleared his throat once more.
“The coroner gentleman told me that he wasn’t certain what had caused Rob more damage, that wolf and its pup or the fall down the ravine. I know he was still alive right to the end, so was that wolf, you could have heard them for miles, I imagine.”
Nikki wasn’t sure what to do, what to say; it was beyond her comprehension to emphasize with what the old man and his granddaughter would have seen, would have been experiencing. Gardner seemed to emerge from reliving his son-in-law’s fall down the ravine.
“I didn’t know that Mizz Lisa was standing there behind me until I heard an ‘aw, how cute’ right beside me and before I could even turn my head to make sure she was alright, there was a squeaky yip and she let out one hell of a wail. The first thing I saw was a small grey wolf pup and Mizz Lisa standing there with blood running from her elbow down. Her mama had caught up just then, and seeing her child bleeding like that, and me laying on the ground facing into the ravine, well you can understand that it was a little too much for Jennelle to handle. It took her awhile to get her mind back to what we had to do, but she knew that we had to get Mizz Lisa to a doctor.”
Gardner released his hold on his calves and swung his hand absent mindedly back to Mizz Damsel’s side and more twiddled his fingers in her fur than petted. Nikki could almost see Gardner inflate with pride as he continued.
“What a little trooper Mizz Lisa was, and even when the doctor told us that he couldn’t save her arm, there was too much damage…well, that little girl in that cabin over yonder there didn’t cry or anything. Could never figure out what had cut through her arm like that. When I took the investigators up to Hawk’s Egg to bring back Rob, I looked around for wire, something that could cut Mizz Lisa’s arm almost clean off, but couldn’t find anything though. Mizz Lisa swears that little grey pup was a Takitawah and that it shot out a chunk of ice as big as a dinner plate and thin as paper out of its mouth when she tried to pet it. If I would have kept my fool mouth shut…” Gardner’s voice faded away. He took a deep breath.
“But I got do what that little girl is doing, going forward, not living in the past so let’s get back to business, so what do you figure, Mizz Colter?”
Nikki held out her hand, palm open to the smaller version of Mizz Damsel.
“Does she…”
“He,” Gardner corrected Nikki, “And he’s a friendly bugger, just the odd thing is that he’s not a yapper like his momma. Quiet as a church mouse, than one, is.”
The neighbors will love that, Nikki thought to herself as the small white and black mass of fur tentatively came closer to her outstretched fingers. It was hard for Nikki to conceptualize that the little ball of white and black fur that had chosen to bravely set itself in her open palm would grow up to be the size of a large cat, but the moment that she spotted a single just a hint of a small brown eye, she was hooked.
“Well, guess that settles that,” Gardner said through a large smile, “You’re a mama, now.”
Nikki’s smile was almost as wide as Gardner’s, “I suppose I am.”
If Nikki had thought the drive to Gardner’s cabin had been far too long of a drive, the drive home was by far even more torturous. Afraid to further scare the small shivering wad of fur swaddled in an extra sweater Nikki had in the back on the passenger seat she drove even slower down the rutted service roads back, taking almost four hours to reach her apartment complex. Once she had parked, she gingerly picked up the puppy, still not having found a name that seemed to fit the puppy, and carried him into the front foyer where she met one of her neighbors from up stairs, a man who was a maitre de at one of the more pricier restaurants that she couldn’t afford on her salary, and the way the man carried himself, he knew it. He looked at the small dog with polite smile though disdain was shining through his overly showing teeth. Out of politeness, he asked where Nikki had gotten such an adorable creature. Nikki was only too happy to share the story of Gardner and the tale his granddaughter had told of the puppy’s father.
The man’s eyebrow arched up then with a airy tone he remarked, “Takitawah? More like tacky, if you want my opinion” before he had decided the proper amount of time of presumed sociability had expired.
Tacky.
Nikki liked that. She lifted the small puppy on the sweater up to her eyes and cooed softly, “Nice to meet you Tacky.”
**
Half way up the still snow blanketed mountain top on the warm still day of spring stood a wolf in the middle of a frozen tarn looking up at the sky expectantly. The calmness was broken only a meter ahead of the wolf by a forceful wind that blew from nowhere downward into the ice crusted snow blanket. The wind was strong, stray wisps of it cut through the thick grey coat of the year old wolf, chilling its flesh. A fine spray of sharp ice crystals attacked its nostrils, slightly muffling the almost alien scent of human that began to emerge from the wind shaft’s center. The wolf’s instincts were to run from the offensive odor, but it remained stationary, only narrowing its eyelids to partially shield its eyes from the mini-storm’s fury. It had to remind itself that it was the one who called upon the goddess for assistance.
The small ice storm ended moments after it had begun, leaving only a meter in diameter mound of snow topped with a gray Stetson with its center bulging outward. The wolf’s ears prickled back ever so slightly when a human voice, muffled but still quite gruff, came from the Stetson.
“Well, are ya gonna just stand there or are ya going to friggin’ dig me outta this shit before it crushes both me and my friggin’ balls?”
The wolf gave a nod to the snow mound and started to dig around the Stetson with its large grey paws. It was a little concerned that it had understood the voice, the rare encounters it had previously with humans they had only spoken with sharp intonations of gibberish – but this one eerily made sense. The wolf was precise with its pulls on the snow, keeping away from the grayish fabric that was appearing with each pawful of snow being removed from the area around the Stetson. Snow crumbled into the pawed divots, slowly revealing that it was a human underneath the Stetson. The rounded face was ruddy from the cool snow that had surrounded it, with short brown bristles with splotches of white covering most of the lower part of it face - the wolf did not see the sparseness of fur as being very utile in the weather. The more snow the wolf removed, the more of the face under the Stetson appeared; an almost bulbous nose then a set of eyes as dark brown as the wolf’s own with long strands of brown stringy hair along the back and sides that had streaks of white that ran liberally through it.
Once the wolf had dug deep enough around the human to uncover his shoulders, the man began to shimmy around; loosening the snow iron maiden the wind courier had placed him in. It took ten more minutes of the man’s movements and the wolf’s powerful paws to allow the man to move more than a millimeter in any direction. The wolf, both tired from the digging and sensing a quicker extraction method, clamped the collar of the man’s grey duster in its jaws and pulled. The wolf could feel the man pushing against the snow to help ease the wolf’s onus of his weight and momentarily the man laid breathing heavily on top of the snow free of the hole his entrance had created. The wolf released the collar, quickly biting into the snow to wash its tongue from the noxious flavors the duster had left on it before it sat down and patiently waited for the human to sufficiently recuperate.
The man reached into his pocket, taking out a mostly crushed pack of cigarettes, flicking open the package and extracting one, using his forefinger and thumb to partially straighten out the cigarette as he brought it up to his mouth. He put the pack back in his pocket, brushing out some of the snow that had packed itself into it, searching for his lighter. Having found the lighter, he brought it out, banged it on the side of his forehead to knock out a stray chunk of snow from the flint case and lit the cigarette. He took a long draw. He closed his eyes as the smoke slowly curled from his nostrils; the wolf sneezed.
The man’s eyes shot open, as if he had forgotten that the huge grey wolf was even there. He winced slightly as he lifted his back off the snow, then tumbled from his buttocks to his knees then rose erect. He knocked clumps of snow from his duster and pants, wiped the sweat from his Stetson’s brim then went back to ignoring the wolf, concentrating on the billowy wisps of cigarette smoke instead.
The wolf regarded the goddess’s answer to its plea; the man was not as tall as it had thought humans it supposed humans were, it could put it paws on the man’s shoulders without stretching to look the man square in the eyes. The human’s body was not a lithe as the wolf imagined the goddess’s champion would have, it reminded the wolf of a beaver. The wolf was having difficulty understanding its naturalized uneasiness around such a pathetic creature like a human –until it looked at the man’s eyes. The eyes were that of a different kind of predator than the wolf was who killed to live; this man killed for the enjoyment of another’s death. If this man was what a human was close up, then the wolf’s instincts were correct in fearing him.
“Friggin’ great, my first animal case, and I get a friggin’ the beastly version of a drama queen,” the man said gruffly to himself, startling the wolf who realized the human had interpreted its thoughts. The man took a last drag off his cigarette, pinching off the red cherry with his fingers and put the butt into his pocket.
“The name’s Jared Club,” the man introduced himself to the wolf as he got down on one knee so that he could be eye level with the wolf. “And yes, I can sorta sense what you’re thinking, so considering what that yap of yours is capable of doin’, don’t bother openin’ it, kapeesh?”
The wolf nodded.
“Good,” Club said, refraining from smiling lest the wolf would consider the bounty hunter’s expression of relief as a challenge. “So what’s up your ass?”
The wolf’s eyes widened slightly, one of its ears folded halfway down as it turned to look at its tail, sniffing loudly in order to determine what the object was the human was referring to.
Club flicked the tip of his Stetson up to his thinning hairline, cursing himself for his use of casual speak than formal. He rubbed the flesh between his eyes, and then took a deep breath.
“Not literally,” he said with a slight apologetic tone, “look, I’ve got a slug thingie in my head that allows me to understand you and you for to understand me. Unfortunately it has a bit of an issue with the vernacular. What I mean to say is that I understand that you have a problem that requires a more than lupine touch to solve.”
The wolf, gave a wary look at its backside, then turned its head back to the human and nodded. It stood up, motioned for the man to follow it and began to walk down the far side of the mountain tarn. The two walked for almost half a day, down one side of a mountain, half way up and around another; all the while the bounty hunter grumbled that the wolf could have set a meeting place a little closer to the area of concern. The time did allow Club to give a rambling monologue in lieu of a written resume on his qualifications, none of which the wolf seemed particularly interested in. In return though, the wolf let escape from its mind little glints of information that provided Club with the background information: half blind emerging from a dark but warm place, the hazy image of another grey cub, the sound of a deep human male voice, the pain of its head being thrown around as its vessel began to run towards to danger to its survival; the unceremonious expulsion onto the ground as the vessel it was in leapt up at the threat then disappearing, leaving it alone with a smaller version of the threat. There had been a large booming sound, the cry of a dying wolf, the sound of a tiny growl, the pain and fright of feelings something welling within its lungs, the belief that it was about to die as it felt something large formed in its mouth, the expelling of that something, a frightened human cry. More human shouting then the sound of feet running quickly away. Club could see a descent down a steep, rocky crevice, the unmoving bodies of what he assumed would have been the wolf’s mother and its sibling, and a large yellow stain between two ruts just a meter ahead of the dead family in the soft spring run off water’s mud.
Club could feel the sorrow, anger and hunger that flooded the wolf as it started with its new eyes upon the blood soaked human crawling, whimpering, calling out some alien language. He could almost taste the juiciness and satisfaction of the wolf cub’s first meal on the flesh and bone of the one that took its family away. He saw other images, ones of the wolf’s first kill, a lame snow hare, but most of the images were of just mountain and snow, with no other wolves in sight. A log cabin almost half buried into the side of a valley with bright lights that almost called to the wolf, the sound of a canine bark that made it seek a closer investigation.
Club followed the grey wolf to the edge of the snow capped butte that overlooked a modest looking cabin down below. Club had just seen the cabin in the wolf’s mind, something had happened when it had gone in for a closer look. The wolf stared down intently as it sat down roughly on his hind quarters while leaving his two forelegs stiff. Club plopped down just as unceremoniously as the wolf, casually dangling his legs over the steep ledge. There were no humans around, but as Club squinted he could make the figure of a small dog chained beside the front veranda.
“So the dog’s owner may seem a little mean because of the chain,” Club said with a hint of annoyance, “But that looks like a mighty small dog and its probably for its own safety. You know, to keep it from being killed by bears, badgers, or hungry wolves. This isn’t what I would consider a situation in need of divine intervention.”
The wolf flattened its ears and shot the human a dirty look. Club was silent for a moment, his eye brows furrowing as he tried to sort out the images the wolf’s mind was transmitting. They relaxed once he thought he had gotten the gist of the situation.
“So you got a little frisky, did ya?” the bounty hunter asked with a slight grin on his face.
The wolf flipped his snout up and down, his eyes doleful.
Club took out a set of miniature binoculars to get a closer look at the wolf’s love interest; his eye brows shot up for a moment as he looked away from the lenses to the wolf.
“A friggin’ Shih Tzu?” Club said with a hint of incredulous. He turned back to the small dog in his binocular sights for a second look, just in case he had been mistaken. Nope. He turned back to the wolf. “The big bad wolf that can damn near slice and dice friggin’ mountain tops and you choose to get it on with a friggin’ Shih Tzu?”
The wolf let out a tiny sigh.
Jared’s mind began to whirl, what would possess a wild creature such as this wolf to accost such a domesticated breed? He thought of what he knew about the Takitawah. Ordinarily the bitch would give birth to three, two males, an alpha and an omega, and one female pup. The trio’s first meal would be that of their mother, not just her milk, but her flesh as well, ingesting the power mystical power of wind that flowed through her veins. The female pup would grow to take the place of the mother while the alpha male would grow developing a set of powerful lungs capable of harnessing the capabilities of moving great amounts of snow. The omega pup would grow and develop the ability to focus the energy though it did not possess the powerful lungs. The forces of nature that the wolves possessed were far greater than a single pup could endure and live, therefore nature chose to split the power so that the species would continue to thrive. After a year, when both the alpha and omega were mature, the alpha would slay the omega, the focusing ability being infused through the meat of the omega into the lungs of the alpha. The newly ingrained alpha would then carry on the tradition of keeping the balance of nature intact by carefully choosing unstable snow masses then baying a thin sonic boom like call towards the snow, causing an avalanche and saving the area from the possibility of a much larger avalanche in the future that could severely damage the natural order of the mountain. The process was quite an expansion of energy, afterwards it was the job of the female to guard the alpha as it rested to recuperate, as well as five years later her duty would be to further propagate the survival of the species. The question was that since obviously this was not the female pup, which of the male pups this wolf was. Not being able to come up with any other option, Club decided that civilized manners be damned. He leaned forward slightly then took a quick look between the wolf’s two forelegs. He straightened back up.
“Guess you’re the omega,” Jared said staring straight out at the snow drizzled sides of the hill across from the butte.
The tip of the wolf’s ears turned limp as the animal hung its head down, which the bounty hunter to as a silent affirmation of his assumption.
While a blow to the wolf’s self-esteem, the visual evidence of being the omega wolf helped Club see the big picture: there had been a hiccup in the natural ecological cycle which could negatively affect the artificial sense of reality that the Celestial Republic of Gods, Goddesses and Mythical Creatures and Beings had so diligently sought to protect. A lone alpha Takitawah among humans wasn’t that big of a deal, as it grew it would certainly generate some huge ass dust devils, but the damage would be minimal, almost benign. A lone omega Takitawah however, it was like letting a five year old go out with a multi arrowed crossbow without a safety on. The omega couldn’t take out a mountain but Club knew from experience that paper cuts were often far more painful than a deep serrated gash. If the wolf had bred with that Shih Tzu , then there was a good possibility that it passed its ability on down the genetic y chromosome – the wolf knew this and had called for reinforcements. Good for him, Club thought, too bad the fucker couldn’t have kept it in his fur in the first place though. Club told the wolf to go back to wherever its den was; he would handle it from here on. The wolf nodded, stood up and then stuck it’s head straight out but did not move looking ahead at the mountains on the other side of the little valley.
Balance, there must be balance, the wolf kept on repeating in its mind, freely admitting Club to view. Club gave a cruel grin.
“You knew this was the way it was going to end all along, didn’t you?” the man asked the wolf. The wolf did not take its eyes off the other side of the mountains. Club stood up and looked at the wolf. “You knew, yet you still did it.” No response. “Well, lets get this over with.”
Club lifted his left arm up to shoulder height, curling his fingers half way towards his palm. A moment later a broad sword with a blade almost two and a half feet long, six inches wide with a gold gilded hilt with a large single jade oval placed in the center phased into his grip. He brought the sword to the front of his body, bringing his right hand to join his left and unceremoniously let the blade fall, severing the wolf’s head and half its neck from its body. The thick padding of snow was soft enough that the wolf’s head did not roll but simply stuck out from the snout up for a moment before both the head and body turned to salt. Jared watched as the frozen surroundings reacted with the salt, both being dissolved until nothing was left until there was nothing more than a wolf shaped puddle of water resting atop the base layer of ice. Club wondered if he should admire the wolf’s bravery in facing the consequences of his actions or feel disdain for the wolf’s cowardice at forsaking its privilege to fight for its life. Before he could decide which, he felt as if he was being watched.
“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” Club said before he released his grip on the broadsword that then disappeared before it would have hit the ground and turned to face his watcher.
“And what is it you purport to be sorry for, my child,” the squat porcupine that sat on its haunches behind the bounty hunter asked, “For in your heart you are very the opposite of so.”
Club’s cheeks flushed; this could get dicey. He tried to always use terms of familiarity when he had to deal with a god or goddess, be it uncle, mother, father, or in this case, grandmother, for two reasons. Firstly, a sign of respect for something that was light years more powerful than he was always appropriate, and secondly, in hopes that that slightest of hesitation in that being on determining their relationship to the bounty hunter he could haul ass if he had to in order to avoid being roasted, frozen, having his flesh torn off piece by piece or worse of the worse, lectured. The goddess obviously wasn’t into playing the game though she was the one who called him into it.
“Figured it was the proper thing to say,” Club mumbled.
The whiskers of the porcupine spread upwards as a smile crossed its muzzle.
“That’s why I chose you, Jared,” the porcupine said gently, “Humans have such a delightfully macabre way of masking their actions under the umbrella of propriety.”
“Am I human?” Club responded back sharply, “Cuz I don’t feel I am…not anymore.”
The porcupine closed its dark eyes, Club could sense an intangible warmth enveloping him then dissipating. The porcupine’s eyes opened.
“You are as human as you wish to be, Jared,” it answered with a slight hint of chidiness to its tone. “Until your soul no longer resists the temptations that you face with our kind, you will be human – no matter what physical changes you have experienced with us. I called upon you because of your humanity; any other hunter wouldn’t have seen a simple solution as you did to the problem of an unwhole Takitawah. Any other hunter would have tried to see the options, to judge the consequences of his life or his death as it pertained to the cosmic plane.”
Club nodded, understanding.
“So I was your own personal cleaning crew, huh? So why didn’t you…” Club stopped his question before he finished asking something he already knew the answer to: the prime directive of the Celestial Republic, no direct interference in the activities of mortals. Takitawahs, while certainly being mystical, lived, ate, drank, shit, bred and died – that was the definition of mortal, though Club had made the very human mistake of forgetting that humanity were not the only mortals that occupied the Earth. He changed gears instead of facing a lecture on the prime directive.
“Did you know about the Takitawah breeding with a domestic dog?”
The porcupine shook its head.
“Unfortunately, this area is almost in the centre of three microwave towers.”
Club accidentally let a smile cross his lips. Blame it on his warped sense of humor, but he found it almost ludicrous – beings with almost total omnipotence being thwarted by an invention of the very beings that looked to them for all the answers. He wasn’t too sure exactly on the theory of why microwaves interfered so much with the telekinetic powers of the population of the Celestial Republic; whether it was because the frequency was similar so it was a disruptive influence or that it acted as an unintentional shield. Whatever the case, in a world more and more each day crying to the Heavens for answers, the more and more technology was muting those pleas.
The porcupine and the bounty hunter looked down the butte when they heard the sound of a large wooden door creak open. A large man came out of the cabin, walked over to the dog that was on the tether, sat down beside it and began petting it.
“Now the question is whether or not the Takitawah pup survived the cross species birth,” the porcupine stated.
Club rubbed the four day old growth along his chin.
“It’s not like I can just walk down there and knock on the door either,” he said aloud. The porcupine looked at him and asked why he couldn’t. The bounty hunter explained that he wasn’t dressed in a manner that would seem normal, particularly his well worn looking snakeskin boots were not customary hiking apparel, and without a vehicle, or some kind of look like a logger, the man in the cabin would be quick to become suspicious and attempt to detain him for some mortal authorities or perhaps take things into his own hands.
“I think I have a solution to your problem, Jared,” the porcupine said evenly.
“What’s that?”
“Run.”
“Run?”
“Run,” the porcupine repeated, the large smile returning to its face. “Real fast.”
“How‘s running supposed to…”
Club never finished his question. The porcupine was expanding, getting larger…and larger…with some very particularly nasty looking fangs out sizing the small incisors the porcupine had just moments before.
Jason Gardner loved his cabin in the middle of nowhere, he had spent the majority of his life working for Canada Post’s main depot in Calgary but after his daughter had grown up, his wife had passed on and he had reached the day he could retire, he had enough of the hustle and bustle of city life – plus he didn’t miss all the weirdoes that walked the streets of the big city. It was so quiet, so calm, so what the hell? Gardner heard the screaming coming from the butte beside his cabin for a second sooner than his eyes focused on the purveyor of the voice: it was a man, half falling, half running down the butte with the largest black bear Gardner had ever seen damn near nipping at the man’s heels, which seemed to almost be knocking at the top of the man’s cowboy boots from time to time. It wasn’t until the man had almost reached Gardner’s veranda that he could discern that the man had not been screaming like a lunatic but was screaming actual words.
“Get-in-the-house-get-in-the-house!”
Gardner decided, at the sight of the bear’s fangs and clawed paws almost the size of his own head, that whoever the man was, he wasn’t going to argue with him on what the best course of action was for a situation such as this. He grabbed Mizz Damsel, jerking the catch on the tether leash off and carrying her like a football, headed back into the cabin with the stranger right behind him.
The man pushed Gardner hard enough that Gardner tumbled clumsily headfirst into his overstuffed easy chair, turning around just in time to see the man throwing himself back first into the door, banging hard into the black furred foreleg of the black bear that was intruding into the cabin. The man and the door bounced twice before the door successfully shut the bear out.
Club quickly scanned the inside of the cabin for firepower. He thanked the stars that the man lived simply; the living room contained a wood stove to the left of the door, a couch, an easy chair, three sets of bookshelves and a 27 inch television. The walls were lined with pictures of an older woman, Club presumed to be the man’s wife, along with pictures of a family with a little girl from baby up to about six years old. He saw no rifles or shotguns handy. Club gave a small sigh of relief that he shouldn’t have to contend with the uncomfortable situation of a goddess being upset that her fur coat had a bullet hole in it.
“I don’t know buddy, got any ideas?” Club said desperately as he braced his back against the door. “I’d sure hate to see that little dog of yours become a chicken wing appetizer!” To emphasize the possibility, he let out a “ooph” as the door buckled from the power of the bear butting into it. Then the man said the strangest thing, Gardner would later recall, “There ain’t anymore of those things kicking about to make it a plateful now, would there?”
Despite the sheer bizarreness of the question at a time like this, Gardner surprised himself by shaking his head and offering, “Nope, just Mizz Damsel – had a pup but gave her to some woman two days back.”
The door buckled inward again, almost throwing the man forward.
“Oh? How interesting,” Club said as he rammed his back against the door. “A woman from around these parts?”
Gardner wasn’t too sure whether this was the appropriate time for small talk, but answered anyway.
“I-I seem to recall that Mizz Colter saying something that she came up from Red Deer.”
“Red Deer?” The stranger repeated back to Gardner in a voice that sounded a lot like disbelief. “Some chick drove all the way out here…for a dog? From Red Deer?”
Gardner held Mizz Damsel closer to his body as the man pushed himself off the door and threw up his hands, letting out a hail storm of curses, seemingly forgetting about the large black bear on the other side of the door. He pulled his dog even closer to his chest, almost squashing her against him when the man threw open the door where the bear stood on its hind legs, its huge maw wide open giving a horrendous roar with its left paw at the ready to bring those sharpened claws deep into the cabin door’s wood.
“He gave the fucking dog to a chick from Red Deer!” Club growled at the bear.
Gardner, ready to say final rights, blanched as the bear dropped to all fours, its forehead, just a moment before crunched tightly to its eyes in rage arched in the opposite direction.
“Red Deer?” the bear said in a voice that Gardner thought sounded as beautifully lilty as a songbird, “Isn’t that where?”
“Yeah, where you picked me up in your little cyclone!” the man stated angrily. Both men and the bear were quiet, though Gardner was not thinking along the same lines as Club, he was more concerned with not wetting himself.
“Well, at least you won’t have to pay for lodgings on your search,” the bear said thoughtfully. The man mumbled something that sounded rather unkindly, walked purposefully up to Gardner and Mizz Damsel.
“Red Deer!” Club said through gritted teeth as he tugged loose a single hair from Mizz Damsel before walking back to the door. Both the man and the bear then disappeared from Gardner’s sight, though to be fair, Gardner didn’t budge from his chair until he could no longer hear the man’s voice growling out Red Deer. Positive that the man and the bear was a trick of the mind, Gardner spent the next week thoroughly inspecting the timber of the log cabin for the deposit of black mould.
Club walked the trails of the dog park once he had gotten back to Red Deer, searching for a puppy that resembled either the grey wolf or the breathing version of Tina Turner’s hair if it had been dyed to be the bride of Frankenstein that the man on the mountain had tucked tightly in his arms. It turned out to be fruitless, with the exception of some close calls with the local authorities over some very over protective dog owners. Not knowing what else to do, Club put the single hair he had taken from Mizz Damsel into an incense bowl and burnt it, saying an incantation as it crackled and shriveled to ash. It was a faint trail at best, even Club would admit, but he had nothing else. The incantation set a mystical web that encircled the entire province, if a mystical energy signature was begun by anything with at least a quarter of Mizz Damsel’s genetic markers, the sprites that monitor the mystical emissions would let him know. A week went by, then a month, soon six months had past, Club had all but forgotten that there was a little rogue Takitawah growing up quickly without a mentor to rein in the storm within that was growing as well.

[neonorth]

Part II

“Tacky! Take it easy, will ya?” Nikki Colter pleaded as the dog noisily panted, straining against his collar that had a ten foot leash which was being held by her, “You’re going to choke yourself!”
Though the last warm days of Fall had just fallen behind her for the cool musings of winter, Nikki’s face was flush and sweaty. Most days she didn’t mind the constant jerking of her arm out of her socket by the twenty five pound ball of energy, but today had been more wearing on her than most. On days like this not only did Nikki regretted her decision to take a health-wise approach in walking the four block distance to and from work, but wished that sometimes she could leave Tacky at home, just using her lunch hour to let him out then back in again. She had tried that once last month though to disastrous results. When she had gotten home at lunch to let the dog out, she had found that to show his disapproval, her couch and chair had long slashes across the bottom front of their cushions, as well as being soaked. That night she spent eighty dollars renting a rug and upholstery cleaner even though when she was up close scrubbing the moist fabric it did not reek like urine, she could think of nothing else it could be – Tacky didn’t drool that much. Even the rips in the fabric didn’t seem right; they didn’t look like teeth or claws had been dragged through. Tacky did not spend the day convalescing at home again.
Tacky had grown quickly in the six months since Nikki had picked him up at Gardner’s place in the mountains; from just over the size of her palm to stand almost half way up her lower leg with patches of black hair with white that flowed down from his back to the floor. Tacky hadn’t lost any of his puppy energy despite the drastic size change; he still pounced and bounced from the moment he awoke in the morning until night when he finally ceded to the routine of sleep. Nikki had his fur trimmed at the beginning of summer but it grew back to floor length in the space of three weeks, Nikki’s budget could not afford the eighty dollar hit every three weeks so she opted for letting the hair grow and hoping that the apartment’s air conditioning would be satisfactory enough to keep Tacky comfortable. Tacky was the quintessential stereotype of a playful puppy, nipping, chasing, fetching, with one exception: Nikki had never heard a sound from him. Tacky had never once yipped, barked, or growled, not awake nor when his little paws were thrashing about in what Nikki assumed was a chasing dream. Josh claimed that Tacky had growled at him and bit him, but with a hint of bitterness to her thoughts, Nikki’s opinion of Josh’s reliability was questionable.
Nikki had met Josh almost three months before, a chance meeting outside the Shoppe – Josh worked for the town and was the maintenance worker for the trees along the street the Shoppe was on. Nikki had watched him for weeks, his slender build bending over, and picking out the snippets of weeds around the tree that lay surrounded by a grate at the edge of the sidewalk. One day, when it had been particularly hot, Nikki took a deep breath and boldly stepped outside with a cold bottle of water and offered it to him. From that day on, until they stopped talking to each other, he would stop into the Shoppe with a coffee for the two of them and they would spend almost an hour talking. Nikki decided after two months of playing passively to make a bold step: she asked Josh if he would like to come over to her apartment for dinner. To her delight, he smiled and heartily accepted.
That night Josh arrived, flowers, candy and coffee in hand. Nikki was surprised at how relaxed she felt around the man as they talked in the living room after a spaghetti and meatball dinner that went off without a hitch; there were no uncomfortable silences, no jitters, it felt right – until Tacky came out of the bedroom, the room that he would disappear to often when the two would arrive home for an after work nap, saw Josh and gave a mucus filled snort as he jumped up and put himself directly between the two humans on the couch. Nikki realized at that moment that Josh and Tacky had never met; every day Josh came into the store, Nikki had put Tacky outside in the dog run out back of the Shoppe to give she and Josh privacy. She introduced the two and excused herself to make the two an after dinner coffee, leaving the man and the dog to get used to each other, failing to notice the thick air of animosity that churled between the two “men” that would hopefully be a part of her life.
Josh watched as Nikki disappeared around the apartment’s living room and kitchen dividing wall. He leaned close to Tacky.
“Listen, mutt,” Josh said quietly through gritted teeth, “I’m gonna bag me that pussy tonight –and I don’t need a fucking wing man like you screwing up my play.”
Tacky looked closely at Josh’s face. In the back of his mind, his instincts were calling out to him, there was a challenge to be met. Tacky did not move, but stared at Josh.
Josh picked the dog off the couch and plopped it down onto the wood floor. “Now piss off,” the man hissed, using his foot to push Tacky further away from the couch. Tacky skirted around the man’s foot and went to jump back onto the center cushion of the couch.
“Uh uh, mutt,” Josh said as he put his hand across the middle cushion, causing Tacky to hit his forearm and bounce hard back onto the floor. Josh smiled, his white teeth throwing a mental slap to the side of Tacky’s face. Tacky understood the gauntlet had been thrown down, it was up to him to respond appropriately.
Nikki hummed to herself as she made up the two coffees, complete with whipped cream and began grating the bar of chocolate over the two generous mounds of frothy wispy sinfulness. She felt her cheeks go hot as she wondered what Josh would do if she reentered the living room with nothing but whipped cream over her breasts with chocolate gratings. She was pulled from her fantasy by a fury of curses that made the whipped cream wobble and fall towards her. Nikki hurried into the living room to find Josh standing up, swearing at Tacky who was cowering and shivering underneath the coffee table. She asked what had happened.
“What do you think happened?” Josh snarled, pointing down at the hems of his jeans, a long slash across both legs whose edges were quickly darkening from the blood of the paper cut thin slashes that accompanied the slash in the denim. “Fucking bastard bit me!”
Nikki lookedat the damaged jeans.
“Tacky bit you?”
Josh’s eyes rolled.
“Duh!”
Nikki’s eyes darkened as she noticed that jack knife sheath on Josh’s belt. The ‘dog bite’ was a clean cut, more like that of a knife than punctures then pull as if a tooth had snagged and torn itself an opening. Nikki wondered why Josh would do something like that to himself and then blame a little puppy. If it was some play for sympathy, it sure was fucked up and was doing exactly the opposite. Nikki told Josh that, and any fantasy of making love that night, or any night, with Josh ended. Josh never brought another coffee to the Shoppe after that night. It was a week later and it still played on Nikki’s mind why Josh had pulled that shit on her – was it just a cowardly way to make a clean break with her before anything really begun? Her thoughts were draining her energy more than the day had.
Only a half hour before she closed she had to assertively ask five teenage boys to leave the Shoppe after one legitimate shopper had complained the boy’s crude language and suggestive immoral behavior had upset her. While four of the boys had been fairly easy, the fifth had not been as compliant. He was taller than she was, but with the boy’s dyed black hair, long face and buck teeth mounted on a gangly thin frame made more surreal by the boy’s choice of wearing clothes a size larger than he should be wearing, he reminded Nikki more of a character from “A Nightmare Before Christmas” than a touch kid. The teen had tried to use the six inch height difference between th two of them as sort of a power position, looking down as he argued that it was a free country. Nikki finally reached the point where she felt as if she was simply talking in circles and put and end to the mock debate by telling the teen that she would call the police if he did not leave the Shoppe. He and his buddies did, but the experience had worn Nikki down. All she wanted to do was make something quick up to eat and then lie down and hopefully fall into a sleep where knights wore shining armor and didn’t cut themselves in order to try to get a pity fuck from a fair maiden.
Nikki released her hold of the leash and bent over undid the clasp that was attached to the waiting dog’s collar. Tacky scooped up his stuffed weasel toy that lay in the middle of the living room floor and made a mad dash to the bedroom where he could maul the toy in privacy. Nikki rubbed her shoulder and closed the apartment’s screen door absent mindedly. In her weariness she forgot to ensure the screen had closed all the way and forgotten entirely to close the glass door and lock it before heading to the kitchen to make her and Tacky some dinner.
**
Though Ty Morland thought he was popular, the truth was it was his willingness to be incredibly stupid was his main appeal to his ‘friends’ – and that his father was an addict so Ty had access to an array of highs. After he and his crew had been kicked out of the store, they had gone down the side alley two stores down of the shop and ingested Ty’s latest offering: horse tranquilizers. As the five of the teenagers waited for the effects of the drugs to take hold, Ty laughed off the woman in the store as getting off lucky; she didn’t know how bad-assed he was. The four others gave snorted laughs.
“You bad ass? The only way a pussy like you could be bad assed is if you forgot to wipe,” one said through a sneer.
“Hey, I do all sorts of crazy shit,” Ty said in his defense, listing off all the stunts he had done. The others mocked him more for his descriptions, insisting that being a poor man’s “Jackass” wasn’t being bad assed, it was just being a goof. If he was so bad ass, how come the only way he got laid was if the chick was so fucked up she couldn’t move? Being a bad ass was hurting someone else, not himself by doing stupid shit. Ty’s face went red.
“Fuck you all,” he cried, extending both hands out with his middle finger out, “Fuck you.” He turned and stomped out of the alley, wanting to get as far away from those assholes before the tears he felt welling would make an appearance on the outside of his face. He turned around at the alley entrance, and just as the first wave of euphoria hit him, slurred out, “I’ll show you bad ass!” His friends laughed and walked out of the alley in the opposite direction, one mocking Ty’s statement by repeating it in a high pitched voice.
Ty stood there looking at the deserted alley, his head light while the lump in his throat bobbed like a pine cone at the edge of a pond being lapped against the edge as the waves were slowly dissolving into the dirt and grass. Ty would have probably stood there until the horse tranquilizer’s effects had worn off if there hadn’t been a familiar voice to break him from the beguiling accusations of being a pseudo-bad ass his friends had made.
“Let’s go home, Tacky,” the woman from the store’s voice said. Ty spun his head around, his body beginning to feel the sluggishness of the drugs, almost shuffling sideways onto the street in an effort to keep straight with his eyes. That bitch, Ty thought. Ty followed the woman and the dog, keeping a distance of a half a block between them. He watched them go around the front of an apartment complex to the back and observed the woman pulling out the screen door putting a key into the third unit’s over glass door. He watched her and the dog enter. He smiled when he noticed that she hadn’t closed the glass door and hadn’t fully closed the screen door.
Ty focused all of his attention, probably for the first time in his seventeen years, on what he was doing. It was frustrating him, it was not as if he hadn’t set his camera phone to video a hundred times before, filming stupid puissant stunts like jumping of the roof of the school or over back flipping over five people, but the drugs flowing through his system were taking their toll. Once he had succeeded in setting the phone, he set the phone on the closest post of the fence that surrounded the back of the apartment complex. Ty took four steps back.
“So listen up, mother fucks, you wanna see bad ass, I’ll show you bad ass,” he hissed at the phone.
Ty walked back, picked the phone up and held it in front of him as he walked towards the slightly ajar screen door of Nikki Colter’s apartment. At the screen door, Ty hesitated for the briefest of moments, what would be a ‘bigger’ video – beating the fuck out of the woman as she pleaded for mercy or ripping her clothes off and forcing her to suck him while looked down on her with a smile? He decided blood was better than a cum shot; besides, he didn’t want to get a rep for digging fat chicks. He didn’t like the look of the living room; too dark, a single lamp that wasn’t turned on was the sole light source for the room which had a torn couch, a torn matching chair with a cheap looking wood coffee table in front on once side while against the other wall was a 27 inch television and stereo system with two wicker shelving units that held movies and CD’s. The light coming from the other room though was bright, much better lighting for the show. He slid the door open and stepped in.
He could hear the woman in the next room off to the left of the living room humming to herself as pots banged around, she must be getting ready to cook; Ty smiled as his mind thought how apropos that she would be in the kitchen as he was pretty well cooked. He stood still for a moment staring straight down the hallway to ensure that there wasn’t anyone else in the apartment before he took a deep breath and walked briskly to the kitchen. The woman’s back was to him when he entered medium sized room that had a stand alone counter in the center of it along with the counter space that formed an “L” with the refrigerator capping one end while the stove the other; the woman was standing in front of the L’s bend, washing vegetables in the single sink. Ty put the phone down, lens facing the woman.
“So what’s for supper, honey?” he hissed.
Nikki jumped and turned, her face ashen. Ty smiled; what a perfect shot!
At the sight of the teenager, Nikki went through a range of emotions quickly; surprise, confusion and anger.
“Who are you? What are you doing here? Get the fuck out of here!” she demanded, her back becoming soaked as the water from the tap hit the edge of the pot she had been slicing carrots into. She could feel her legs becoming weak but she forced herself to walk forward, waving her arms, “Get out of here before I call the cops!”
Ty didn’t move, just continued to smile. He still just smiled when the woman gave him a rough push as if the spurn him to leave – which wasn’t going to happen, the fun was just about to begin. He could see the anger in her eyes turn to fear. They stood there staring at each other, one second passing to the next. Ty’s excitement was cresting; the combination of the drugs and hurting this bitch was pushing his heart beat into overdrive. Nikki ended the silence.
“Get the fuck out of here I said!” She ordered.
Ty’s arm shot out, his hand grabbing a fistful of hair on top of Nikki’s head. He brought his arm and the woman back, releasing his grip to send the woman’s face to meet the corner of the dividing wall violently. Her head bounced back with a crack, blood careening from her nose. She fell to the floor with a satisfying thud.
Ty turned the camera phone around.
The woman was struggling to get up, rolling over and getting on her hands and knees. Ty casually walked the three steps and brought his knee into the side of her head, sending her body to move sideways into the living room. She didn’t fall back to the ground, to Ty’s disappointment. Nikki managed to keep some of her balance and started to crawl towards the screen door.
Ty couldn’t have that; she was getting out of camera range! He reached Nikki just as she had gotten her hands on the coffee table, pulling herself up. He brought his foot up and drove it between her shoulder blades. The faux wood coffee table broke under the combined weight of Nikki and the force of Ty’s leg. Nikki let out a series of yelps as the sharp pieces of the table stuck into her arms and forehead. By the time her body and the table underneath settled on the floor, she was unconscious. Ty gave the still woman a kick in the shin; there was a moan but she did not get up. He didn’t want to drag her back to the kitchen, he was strong but he didn’t want to waste dragging the heavier woman that could be used better, such as punching. Ty walked back into the kitchen to retrieve his phone; it was time for a scene change. He didn’t notice the set of eyes watching him that had come from the bedroom down the hallway at the sound of the coffee table breaking.
Ty was mad as he stood at the middle counter island in front where his phone was positioned. This was the perfect setting, there was ample light from the umbrella shaped florescent light directly above, the free wall on the other side of the dividing wall which had a microwave on a cart and a oak hutch had endless possibilities to add suspense to his piece, but the fucking woman didn’t cooperate. Ty was taken out his moping by a sharp sting on the back of his right leg just above the ankle. He looked down and laughed! The dog! He had forgotten about the dog! Well, Ty thought, maybe he could get some more footage from the kitchen yet.
Ty brought his foot forward, the dog with a firm grip on his pants, slid along with it almost until Ty’s leg was even with his crotch but then let go. Ty smiled as the dog did a lazy arc and banged into the glass window of the stove, plopping down on its side. Ty was overjoyed that the dog had spunk, it got up immediately and went after his leg again. Hoping to get a better shot for the camera, he shot his foot forward with as much force as he could to bring it to bear on the dog’s chest.
As reward for his effort, Ty threw himself off balance and he fell to the floor, his head striking the countertop on the way down. A thick wet warmth oozed from the back of his head, wetting his hair as he tried to get his eyes from rolling around wildly in their sockets. Ty’s interest in Nikki disappeared, he no longer cared if he was a bad-assed mother fucker; he just wanted to go home. Just relax, he told himself, the room will stop spinning pretty soon, then just get up and walk out the screen door. He closed his eyes in hopes that with nothing to try to focus on his eyes would stop trying to determine which of the multiple images he saw the true one was.
Ty let out a large forced expulsion of air as Tacky, having recovered from Ty’s assault, pounced onto his chest, his snout millimetres from Ty’s nose, the sides curled up in a growl that exposed Tacky’s two rows of teeth. Once Ty opened his eyes, they quickly latched onto the nearest object and steadied themselves to it: Tacky’s deep brown eyes. Ty brought his right hand up with the intention to bash that fucking mutt’s brain case right into the floor.
Nikki managed to pull herself off the smashed coffee table and propped herself up against the corner of the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. Her head hurt, her eye sight was partially blurred by the shards of the table’s wood veneer that stuck to her forehead, the blood from the large gash acting like glue. The strength in her neck gave out and her tilted until her chin almost touched her shoulder. She saw Tacky on the man’s chest, growling, she saw the man’s hand, curled tightly into a fist coming towards Tacky’s head. She was about to scream at the man to stop but her throat clammed up at what she heard. Of all the unexpected sounds, this one sliced Nikki to the bones: it was if a thousand voices were chanting as one while a herd of elephants stampeded in a field of bubble wrap – and it was coming from Tacky.
Ty’s hand stopped just before it was about to make its assuredly fatal blow to the dog; something wasn’t right, and he had to figure what was wrong before he continued. The boy’s and the dog’s eyes were locked on the other. Ty realized that something had changed; weren’t the mutt’s eyes brown just a second ago? What was that sound?
As Tacky’s growl intensified, the brownness of his eyes faded to a dull matte silver, with swirls of quick silver hued tendrils spiralling outward from the very center of his pupils. The angry froth that had amassed along his snout had stopped its bubbling, sounding as if it were crackling like an eaves trough icicle on a warm winter’s day.
Ty’s mind raced at the visual information that it was being sent, being further confused by the new sensory information coming in from his skin that stretched from the tip of his nose to his lips: cold. Through the drug induced haze, Ty was sure that the last time a dog breathed on him, even though it was in fun, it was a hot, vile smelling breeze that assailed his nostrils. This dog’s breath was like that first intake of air when you step out of the house after a fierce snow storm had raged over night, covering the aromas and stench of civility for something far more ancient, in a cleansing sort of way. It was to be Ty Morland’s last thought.
**
The past couple of years had been rough for Club, he had seen all of his favourite dives being torn down or converted to special housing units run by religious organizations in order to help those who would have frequented the bars they had once been, and now to save his ears from the assault of either dance music or country music, or cutesy lounges that catered to some stereotype of what English pubs are supposed to be, he drank at the only place that had the character of the old places, the lounge in the downtown “Albert’s”. He had been enjoying a rare week off of chasing after rogue mythological creatures or overzealous celestial beings by firmly planting his butt on one of the stools at the lounge in his more comfortable of outer wear, a pale blue fedora and tan trench coat, when a familiar face had come in and sat beside him. There had been the usual small talk and shallow banter as drinks were drunk, but for some reason that Club would never figure out, his cheeriness drained and a darkness settled over him even in the giddy lightness that surrounded him.
“I don’t know, doc, usually I can shake things like this off, but lately I can’t help feelin’ like shit,” Club said as he peered intently at the sliver of scotch left in the short squat glass he held partially tilted in his hand.
His companion, who sat on the stool to Club’s right at the long chipped mahogany bar in the sparsely populated lounge, grunted. Club shot an annoyed look at the taller of the two. Doctor Phal, Jared knew, was one who was always slow to respond, weighing his thoughts carefully, but he wasn’t looking for a professional answer from the five foot five phallic shaped psychologist, just a reassuring, “shut up and drink”. Dr Phal took a long sip of his triple Alabama Slammer and set it back down on the top of the bar. He straightened out the narrow black leather tie he wore with his stubby four fingers then flattened out his favourite bright yellow long sleeved shirt so that the creases ran straight into the belted one legged denim pants custom made to fit snug yet with some breathing room for the large scrotum that doubled has his legs and feet. He thought that he may have to order another pair of “Dr. Scholl’s”- his balls were getting a might sore, though it could be that they had not jettisoned their production quota in a while and may have built up a slight reserve, which the doctor thought could be a reasonable the usual black tinge to the soles had taken a decidedly blue hue.
Club had met the doctor only a few months before, the doctor seeking out his aid for a mental health case with a supernatural angle he was working on, but they had found they had something in common that bonded them in friendship: forced twenty first century social normalcy. The very nature of Club’s work with beings that were based on belief and legend meant that in being truthful, he was seen as someone who was “special” and therefore humoured. Whatever rehabilitation clinic or detox centre he had wandered away from, it would not be long before his “buddy” would find Club and take him back for a intense and deep group therapy session where he would receive a thorough talking to about leaving the premises without his medication. Club had found it odd; his job was to protect mortals from discovering the truth about the Heavens and Hells and he was able to do so by being truthful about their existence.
Doctor Phal, the only known mutant penis with independence in thought, spirit and physicality, was accepted by mainstream society because society had deemed that a five foot something talking penis with two arms, two large semi-ovular eyes and a wide mouth below those eyes instead of on the very tip of the penile head was a trick of an overworked mind. What the doctor was, since obviously one could carry on a conversation with him, was just a poor man who had overcome some genetic dysfunction, like Elephantitis that gave the man the appearance of being a talking penis. Of course, society wouldn’t say that he looked like a penis because it would reflect poorly on society’s state of mind – or where it mind was. It was a win-win situation for the doctor; men wouldn’t say anything about his appearance in fear of being seen as a homosexual in denial on the verge of coming out which was manifesting itself in seeing a giant cock that he found interesting and women wouldn’t say anything in fear of being seen as a nymphomaniac with cock on the brain. The result, though a walking penis, others suspended their own belief in what visual information they were receiving and altered it to allow the doctor to walk down the street, shop, eat, or drink in relative anonymity. Both men realized that they were victims of good timing: if they had been out in public being who they were fifty, hell, both realized, even twenty five years prior, they would have at best been beaten or institutionalized, or at worse murdered by government scientists to be studied through autopsies. Not that Club would admit he felt a kinship with the doctor, if pushed he would say he hung around the doctor because he knew a cash mook when he saw one. While doctor Phal loved to play poker, he was a poor card player – every time the doctor had a good hand, he would leak precum down his head. Club could simply fold or go all in and come out of the game ahead.
“Jared, it is perfectly acceptable to feel like that,” the doctor finally answered, his large semi ovular eyes taking the professional look of half closed eyelids to give the impression of semi-indifference as if this was the last appointment before a two o’clock tee time. A slight tinge of purple coloured the edges of the doctor’s head as he was slightly excited over being asked something actually substantive by the man who claimed to work as a bounty hunter for the gods.
“Yeah?”
Doctor Phal took another drink before he continued on, his throat parched by the prospect that the conversation for once was not just a volley back and forth of penis jokes.
“Look, you’ve been thrown into tar, burning off the majority of your body, and then buried half-alive in the grounds of Eden that then fused with the charred and no doubt oozing ends of the damaged parts,” the psychologist answered flatly. “It’s only reasonable to assume that Eden, being eons old, that the animal residents would have to defecate at some point, quite often in fact, and it is highly likely that the ground you were entombed within would have the remnants or at least the by-product of natural composting, of that fecal matter ingrained into the soil. Therefore it is only logical to assume that it was not only the soil but the by-processes of biological functions that are trapped within your healed skin, bone, muscle and other tissues.”
“Huh?”
“You feel like a piece of shit because there’s a good chance that you have animal poop running amok in your body,” Dr. Phal answered with a disappointed tone in having to redirect his answer. Club shot back the remains of his scotch.
“I think you’re the one full of shit,” Club retorted in a snarl. Doctor Phal was nonplussed, quite used to the bounty hunter’s demeanour, shrugged his foreskin. Disappointed that he didn’t get some sort of barb aimed right back at him, Club mused aloud, “What gets me is why the hell Lucifer would try to make me immortal? From what I sense, the dude doesn’t even like me.”
“Perhaps that’s it – self preservation,” the doctor answered as he motioned for another round to be brought for the two. “The Big Bad has tried to off you, what, three times?”
Club nodded.
“The guy has failed every time, obviously, unless I’m drinking with a ghost, so it would make only sense that if he can’t kill you, he might as rein you in by keeping you alive – as insurance for his continued survival.” Club did not look convinced, so the doctor continued his explanation. “If the Devil wants you dead, he must think that you somehow have the power to kill, or at least usurp him. By imbuing you with the associated properties of the earth of Eden as propagated by Genesis, you have become a symbol of the eternalistic ideal of Eden, thereby pulling you into the mythos of the story of Genesis. As Lucifer is an integral part of the Genesis myth, you cannot kill him without annulling the credibility of Genesis, which then would make you vulnerable as you are part of Genesis.”
Club stared at the garishly clad penis blankly. The doctor sighed, took a long sip of the new drink before him.
“Think of it in political terms,” Phal advised Club. “What’s the best way to keep a member of parliament quiet about questionable policies – make him a cabinet minister. Not that it matters – If I recall correctly, didn’t some sort of goddess tell you that you’d be human until your soul decided you weren’t human anymore?”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it then, or now, for that matter,” Club admitted.
“Think of it this way, Jared – Just north of town two years ago you couldn’t shoot a coyote or face a heavy fine from Fish and Wildlife, this year you can shoot as many coyotes as you please, and get compensation for it if you bring in its paws, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Why the change of heart by Fish and Wildlife?”
“There’s concern that they’re starting to hunt around the new area that’s being developed for about 350 single family housing units. From what I’ve read some of them have really manged coats and are quite skinny. I suppose Fish and Wildlife are concerned about the diseased coyotes infecting the healthy ones”
“So the ecological system isn’t able to support the coyote population anymore. Two years ago that area was what?”
“Farm land and marsh.”
“Did the coyotes decide en masse to dramatically alter their lifestyle?”
“Get serious, doc.” Club admonished, “Coyotes do what coyotes do, and they don’t suddenly choose to do something else.”
“I am being serious, Jared,” Phal insisted. “If they coyotes didn’t change, what changed their environment?”
Club shrugged his shoulders, and then said cautiously, “The land developers?” Phal nodded.
“So the developers clear fall and level the area, taking away the food sources for the coyotes, who in turn then begin to get sick. In order to protect coyotes that are still healthy, Fish and Wildlife opts to thin the line out a bit.”
“Sounds right,” Club agreed.
It would seem that the problem of the health of those coyotes began with the eradication of their natural ecosystem,” the doctor hypothesized, “So if the ecosystem had been kept intact, there should not be any health issues now, would there.” Club agreed. “If the concern is for the health of the coyote population, why not simply execute x amount of men, women and children that would reside in the development, thereby annulling the need to infringe on the coyote’s ecosystem?”
Club stared at the doctor for a moment before he answered.
“Uh, because that would be wrong.”
“Okay, so why not let the coyotes go about their business in the residential area, then?”
“Are you nuts, doc? They’d most certainly kill any dog or cat, or at least pass on the mange to those animals, and worse case scenario, they may get desperate to attack someone.”
“So?”
Club was taken aback.
“So, you just can’t let people live in fear, you gotta make sure their safe, right?”
The doctor smiled.
“To be human, Jared, is to see a coyote with a broken leg on the side of the road and take it to a rehabilitation centre so it can be healed, but then if you see a coyote off in the distance, you get out your rifle and shoot it. To be human is to rationalize what should be over what simply is.”
“And you’re so better, doc?” Club sneered at his friend.
“Humanity has a wise adage: a cock has no memory- or conscience,” the doctor commented as he shrugged his foreskin. “The only difference between you and I is that when I blow my load, I don’t pretend that I did it for no other purpose because I wanted to.”
Club began to ponder what the doctor had said when he was distracted by an insect sized bright yellow glow that zipped and hovered momentarily over the bridge of his nose before shooting off. Club’s eyes followed the yellow light as it sped across the bar and out the lounge’s single door.
He stood up, throwing three twenties onto the bar.
“Gotta go, doc, thanks keeping in character and being just a friggin’ total prick and giving advice that really didn’t do shit for me.”
“No problem, Jared,” the doctor replied, lifting his glass. “What’s up?”
“Dunno,” Club said with a shrug, “A little fairy apparently wants a word with me.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“Here I thought that guy in the corner was making “come hither” eyes at me,” Doctor Phal answered.
“Doc, there’s only one asshole big enough to accommodate you,” Club answered coyly, “But the Prime Minister is a married man.”
“So’s Travolta, but according to the rags, that hasn’t stopped him,” Phal retorted.
“Maybe you shouldn’t get such a swelled head, you ain’t that impressive. Catch ya on the flip side, doc,” Club said with a smile as he walked towards the door. He didn’t feel too bad about ditching the doctor, the guy had a way of not being alone for too long. Club hadn’t even made it two steps away when he heard a feminine voice ask if Phal knew her, he seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite place him.
“Honey, from the looks of you, I hardly think that you were that inexperienced not to know where to place me,” the doctor’s voice answered. The woman must have decided not to contemplate the meaning, Club decided as she continued talking to the giant penis.
“Do you come here often?”
“Nah, I’m more of a Southern boy at heart, around the vagina way.”
“Virginia?”
“Babe, buy me a drink and we can play “Swedish sex teacher and the inexperienced student” all you want”….
Yep, the doctor wasn’t the type to be the wall flower, Club thought with a smile. He was tempted to sit back down but a sprite taking the chance to fly in a public area meant that whatever it wanted, it wasn’t something to be ignored. Once out into the darkness, it was easy to spot where the sprite hovered, bobbing and weaving with an air of impatience.
“Could you be any slower?” a feminine voice that seemed liltily cute even in its harshness. “The tag on the errant Takitawah just went nuclear.”
“Takitawah?” Club said with more than a hint of confusion.
“Oh, you men – you just make me – ohhh,” the fairy fumed, her entire naked body shaking violently. “You issued a request to watch for a Takitawah power surge in an urban area a while back – it’s happened, so your request has been honored, so now are you going to do something about it or was it just something to do until something better came along?”
Club’s brain was sifting through memories that corresponded with the word “Takitawah”; the several glasses of scotch was not aiding in the fleetness of mental foot. The fairy mistook Club’s silence for disinterest.
“You men are all such ass wipes, you know that?” she huffed. There was a small explosion of pixie dust over the bounty hunter’s head as the blonde haired gave him the middle finger salute.
“Nice attitude!” Club snarled loudly into the sky though he could understand the fairy’s general disdain for him – after all, he was just another man. She hadn’t always been spite filled sprite; but she had fallen in love with a boy who had refused to grow up. She and him had spent many a platonic day and night together, with the fairy hoping that one day the boy would grow up just enough to appreciate her for more than just a buddy. Unfortunately though through the years while the boy did eventually learn to appreciate the opposite sex, he had turned his attention to mortal girl who he would go visit for a single night once a year. Running around a magical land filled with pirates, pixies and fairies with a bunch of other boys that refused to grow up did not do much for the boy’s social maturation around girls who would then grow to be women – and that’s just what happened. The girl he visited turned into a woman and on the last night the sprite would see the object of her affections, the girl who became a woman had also developed a smoking habit, which she wished to desperately break. Turns out it wasn’t the nicotine that the woman craved as much as it was a latent oral fixation. To make matters worse, the woman detested the habit of chewing gum, and to be fair, the name Peter is sexually suggestive when one is in the right frame of mind. The boy who didn’t want to grow up suddenly, well, a part of him, grew and he decided that maybe being a grown up wasn’t so bad after all.
Club was about to walk back into the lounge and apologize to the doctor for the false alarm when his memory bank made a withdrawal of the information filed under “Takitawah”. Club’s heart raced, the puppy – it would be almost full grown by now; the power of its sonic voice would have at least quadrupled with that maturation! He looked around frantically, but was unable to spot a mouse or even a stray cat in the alley behind the restaurant and lounge. He looked around once more; double checking to ensure there were no crack-heads partially aware of their surroundings curled up against the dumpsters for warmth then flicked his left wrist back sharply. There was a faint click and a dagger shot from its hidden sheath into his hand.
One of the down sides of being employed by the dark forces of the Celestial Republic was that the modern age of pagers and cell phones had not impacted the Heaven’s society as it had the mortal realm. If Club’s mind had been less damaged by years of hedonistic indulgences, he may had been able to have the option of being given the power of telepathy for conversing with the bureaucracy, but as it was, he had to do it old school: blood sacrifice. The existence of the Celestial Republic was based on the mortal schemata of faith. Faith is formed by synaptic electrical impulses in the brain. A percentage of that charge is imbued into the blood that circulates in the brain, which then makes its way back to the heart to be discharged throughout other parts of the body. All beings have faith, though man only attributes their ‘higher’ functioning to call it that; for all other beasts on the Earth, scientists have termed it “survival instincts”, but is not taking a specific action in hopes of living to see the moment after the next the very essence of faith? In the case of blood sacrifices, the naturally created faith that flows throughout a creature’s body is circumvented by a mystical instrument that creates a bypass for the wielder of the mystical instrument to exert their faith in connecting to the Heavens with the already open line that the sacrifice unconsciously always has on line. The wielder of the mystical instrument then can communicate with the being of his or her choosing, and depending if that being is not screening their calls, for as long as the blood flows from the beating heart of the sacrifice; once the heart stops, the flow of faith from the synaptic nerve cells stops and the call ends.
Club, with no other options available, drove the dagger into his leg. He bit his bottom lip to stop himself from screaming and waited for his blood to begin to well and flow around the hilt of the dagger. It did not take long, he had sank it deep enough into the side of his calf that he had cut through several veins; less than five seconds had passed when the hilt began to glow: a connection had been made. Through gritted teeth he summoned the information spirits to send him a vision of the location of the errant Takitawah. Once he saw the Takitawah sitting on the chest of a black haired young man, the image pulled back to show the apartment complex, then farther back and zoomed around until it came to a large sign with “Welcome to Canmore” on it.
Gotcha, Club thought as he smiled and then he pulled the dagger out of his leg, severing the connections with the Heavens. He quickly took out a roll of electrical tape he had in his grey duster and wrapped it around the entry point and put away his dagger. If he had felt happy about locating the Takitawah, it quickly left him. How the hell was he supposed to get from Red Deer to Canmore quick enough? In a car it would take a good two hours, more than enough time for the Takitawah to change location and be lost once more and perhaps to gain even more power than what Club estimated he already had. Then he remembered: when the fairy had shot off in a huff, she had sprayed a good portion of pixie dust over him: he could fly there! Problem solved…with a new problem presenting itself, how did he get the pixie dust to work? He tried to recall the only time he had seen any information on the usage of pixie dust, a movie based on the actual events of the fairy that that delivered the message – the early years, of course.
Happy thoughts! Club patted himself on the back for the recall. All he had to do was think happy thoughts and off into the wild blue yonder he would go. He closed his eyes and began to visualize what would make him happy.
“Come on Jann, oh yeah, Jann, come to me, baby,” Jared mumbled as he imagined Jann Arden in fishnet stockings, black leather crotchless panties, and a bra made of peanut butter holding in one hand a bottle of scotch and the other a pack of cigarettes as she blew kisses at him. He opened one eye slightly, trying to displace his happy vision as little as possible, and then frowned. While it appeared that one part of his body had risen, his feet were still quite firmly on the ground. It wasn’t working; he needed to think of something else. Club rolled his eyes as his mind kept up coming up with a single option. He took a deep breath and flicked his left wrist back sharply. He drove the dagger deep into his other leg.
“Jared Club requesting an emergency teleportation,” Club cried up to the swirling dark clouds above. There was a twinkle in the cloud directly above him that turned into a shaft of light that rushed down upon the bounty hunter. Ten seconds later a cloud formed over the apartment complex that Nikki Colter lived in though she didn’t see it, nor did she see a shaft of light fire down from the middle of the cloud and deposit a man in a fedora and duster with a dagger sticking out of his leg right outside her screen door though if she had been looking up instead at Tacky and the dead teen she would have thought that the sight was downright odd.
Club did not bother to sheath the dagger when he pulled it out but ran directly to the shut glass door, punching the dagger’s blade where he estimated the lock mechanism was. There was a click, and Club was in the living room of Nikki Colter’s apartment five seconds after he had been brought. He did a quick visual of the layout of the room; he couldn’t identify the sound he heard that was quickly rising in volume but he sensed it was not the cast of “Glee” doing an ode to African tribal song. He did see a woman, who he assumed was the Takitawah’s unknowing owner, sitting against the wide part of a dividing wall looking into another room cut off from Club’s view.
“T-tacky?” the woman, with large gashes on her forearms, forehead and breasts said with uncertainty.
Tacky? Close enough to Takitawah. Club sped past the woman into the kitchen – he’d check on her in a moment, but right now his main concern was getting the Takitawah to cease its sonic howl before it did some serious damage. He was too late.
Club spotted a small lap dog atop a teen, a thin crescent of cold blue two inches wide protruding from the dog’s lips but before he could take two steps away from the woman, the dog released the crescent shaped disk as if it was a slingshot. There was a series of loud cracking sounds as the semi-disc sliced through the boy’s face just under his nostrils, and then the sound of dead weight hitting the floor as the boy’s body convulsed once then laid still.
“Shit!” Club growled, which as soon as he had said it, rued his instinct to swear.
The dog swivelled, a second crescent shape d plate of ice was forming rapidly along the bottom ridge of its mouth, the tumultuous storm of quicksilver in the dog’s eyes adding a sharper glint to the expanding edges. Club turned his back to the beast, crouching in front of the woman to shield her sight from witnessing the feral-ness unleashed. He grabbed the top of his fedora, swung it off and held it behind him, the head hole outwards covering his actions by asking the woman if she was alright.
As the woman stuttered and stammered an answer, Club could feel the bottom of the fedora expanding, keeping its almost ovular shape until it was almost the same height as Club. He hoped the hat woven by Arachne with materials forged into fabric by Hephaestus would do as the god had promised. When Hephaestus had presented the fedora that was an exact copy of the one the bounty hunter had lost during a case, or more to the point, had been subjected to the action meant for Club’s head: being severed in two and torn apart by the Hounds of Hell. Hephaestus told Club that not only were the fibres almost indestructible but infused with various charms that in combination when called upon would open a gate to a deep dark hole that Club could then use against the danger which would be swallowed deep within. The God of the Forge however cautioned that Club himself should never enter the hole, for it was a place no man should go lest he be forever lost within. Club tried to push for a specific answer, but Hephaestus would not tell him what the charm opened up to. Considering Club knew how the god felt about his ex wife, Aphrodite, he wouldn’t be surprised if the next time he saw the goddess she would be walking sort of bow legged.
Wave after wave of frigid air washed around him as the power within the dog built up. There was the tsunami of sound when the dog released the ice blade from its jaws. Club’s hand felt the impact as the ice pushed against the fabric of the fedora, but he was whole. The chill in the air faded, Club heard the sound of fleshy thump, and the dog had tired itself out. The fedora’s charmed engorgement disengaged and returned the hat to its normal size just as the woman had weakly asked where her dog was, was he okay?
The bounty hunter put the fedora back on his head, taking a quick peek from the corner of his eye; the dog was staggering slightly as it left the chest of the corpse, its eyes no longer shone as they were chromed hub caps, though he could only see bits and pieces of the dog’s brown pupils through the thick bangs that hung over like ivied walls. His body tensed as the dog weakly limped towards the woman and he, but relaxed when the dog ignored him and gently put its paws on the woman’s stomach. Club watched as the dog’s tongue flicked quickly in and out all over Nikki’s face. She playfully told the dog to settle down, but he noticed she did nothing to discourage the behaviour. Tacky rolled over onto his back and spread out his legs. Club stood up and backed over to the boy’s body.
He surveyed what the dog had done: the crescent had sliced cleanly through the boys skull, its intense cold freezing the gore on contact; once it thawed, there would be mucus, saliva, and blood, but it would drip like an icicle into a pool – a far easier cleaning job than if it had splattered everywhere. He could see the disc lodged in the laminate flooring; the force was strong enough to go through flesh and bone but the resistance it met had slowed its velocity significantly to not cause any…difficulties…with the basement apartment residents aside from a leaky roof and perhaps a small shower of plaster. He looked over at Nikki, her eyes still unfocused, had her attention on the dog.
Club willed his broadsword, quickly making a cut across the glass umbrella shaped shade that hung just slightly over the corpse at a slight angle so that the blade’s tip would put an equally as sharp edge on the crescent shaped piece of glass. The sword disappeared just as the glass piece began to fell, Club caught the glass and slid the piece, the newly created sharp end downward into the trail the dog’s ice scythe had made. He hoped that the local police would concentrate on the assault of the woman rather than the actual death of the teenager, chalking it up to a chain of unfortunate events.
“Who’s a good doggy? Who’s a good doggy?”Nikki cooed as she rubbed his stomach. “Who loves their mommy?” Tacky rolled his head and peered intently at the bounty hunter who hadn’t moved from beside the body of the partially headless teen. Club stared back at the dog with likewise interest, not so much the dog’s tongue lolling out of its mock smiling mouth but what had caught his attention in the first place, Tacky’s eyes. To be more precise, the colouration of the pupils held a certain fascination for the hunter. If a person were just walking by and were to take a quick peek, they would see nothing but a dog being overly praised with big brown eyes partially hidden by a thick mop of white and black fur akin to a grown out Beatles mop top. What Club saw though was of deep concern; within the depths of the brownness were several streams of quicksilver slicing minute trails throughout. Club channeled his thoughts towards the dog, muting out the woman’s constant stream of “who loves their mommy”.
He broke off the connection just as he had seen what was sifting atop the dog’s consciousness; Tacky had recognized what the bounty hunter was doing and wasn’t too happy about though it never changed its facial expressions or body language that Nikki would have noticed – only Club saw the tiny streams of quicksilver that began to widen. Once Tacky didn’t sense Club prodding, the brownness that surrounded the much lighter hue swallowed some of its thickness.
Club thought that maybe the best course of action would be to leave things as they were and simply walk away. What did he have to justify any other action? All he had were the random images from a spoilt puppy…a powerful and lethal spoilt puppy…powerful…without the onus of the tradition and custom of what the power signified…damn, Club thought to himself, he had just talked himself out of walking away.
Images of practice flashed to Club’s mind from Tacky’s: guilty accidental releases when he had been mad one time against the furniture, timid minute releases of power against men who had gotten to close, and then the revelation of the meaning of the power based on its own selfishness. The boy’s death had not been a mistake, an accident of a simplistic mutt that didn’t know any better about the power it contained within; the dog had known what it was doing, it knew of the power that had been its birthright. Club had seen that much as well as one more of the canine’s sentiments: While the woman cooed “Mommy”, the dog thought of the woman much differently; she was his bitch and he would kill anyone who tried to get close to her. Club broke the dog and his owner’s celebration of survival.
“Well, that was certainly a close one for you two,” he said through a forced smile.
Nikki was startled from the sound of the man’s voice; she had forgotten about the stranger that had burst into her room. She stood up, Tacky rolled back to his stomach reluctantly.
“Thank you for coming to the rescue,” Nikki said, extending her blood splotched hand to Club. She looked at the unmoving body of the teenager, Club moved slightly over to block Nikki from seeing the boy’s head resembling a freshly cut cantaloupe. For the moment she thought the boy had been knocked unconscious.
“I was just passing by and thought it looked like you were in a bit of a pickle,” Club said, taking her hand in his lightly. He let Nikki follow his gaze and smile down to Tacky who had gotten to his feet and stood at Nikki’s side, looking darkly back up at the man who knew who it could do. “Good thing you had such a good protector, though.”
Nikki smiled down at Tacky.
“He’s my best friend.”
Tacky’s eyes began to lighten.
Club could see the edges of the dog’s fur lined lips frosting up. He bent down on one knee and made it look as if he was about to give Tacky a good hearty pat on the head.
Tacky growled a warning.
“Tacky!” Nikki said in mock sternness but a hint of surprised wonder that the dog could even growl, she had thought that maybe Tacky had been born with no voice box. “Be nice to the man, he just wants to pet such a good little doggy like you!”
“You know,” Club commented, “They say once an animal gets a taste for human blood, it thirsts for it.”
“Why would you say something like that?” Nikki asked, her voice shaking with uncertainty.
Tacky’s eyes flickered from Club’s hand to Nikki for the slightest of moments , confused by the sudden change in Nikki’s voice, but that was enough time for what Club meant to do.
Club’s hand went from flat to fist. He drove his hand down with as much force as his body could channel into his arm muscles.
The blood that circulated in Nikki’s cheeks fled from her face; for the second time that night fate would decree that she hear a sound least expected: the dull crackle of a skull being shattered. She had no will to contain the bile that filled her throat and nasal passages; they sprayed out, covering anything in their large arc as they obeyed the laws of gravity. She went to hold Tacky close to her, to tell him what a good dog he was, but the moment her fingers grazed the top of his lifeless body she found her arms passing through a cascade of salt grains that scattered around her.
“You fucking bastard!” Nikki screamed as the pain of loss quickly changed to rage as the palms that had intended to hold her saviour in his last breaths balled into fists and bashed into the chest of Tacky’s murderer, “He was only protecting me!”
Club winced slightly as the woman’s fists pelted his chest. He was positive that by the morning the welts that were sure to develop would require him to wear a b cup, but he made no move to stop Nikki from lashing out. She kicked, punched without mercy; Club did nothing to defend himself from the onslaught, even when he heard the cartridge in his nose cracking. Minute after minute passed, Nikki’s anger seemed to have no cap, it just kept on building, the lack of resistance from the dog killer doubled the intensity of the feeling of hatred for him. He could defend himself, say sorry, or be angry right back at her, but the bastard wasn’t happy, he wasn’t sad, he was indifferent, like killing her dog was insignificant. She threw everything she had within her at the bounty hunter until her knuckles were skinned to raw. Nikki sank to the floor, sobbing through the thick mucus that had run down her throat from her nasal passages, all her energy drained, the granules of salt nipping as her sweat began to dissolve them underneath.
Club grabbed the tip of his fedora, gave the unseeing woman a nod, took Ty’s cell phone from the counter, and then walked silently to and out the screen door without turning back to see if the Colter woman even noticed his departure. When he reached the edge of the grass edge of the apartment complex’s property, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a massacred pack of cigarettes. He opened it up, looked for one that wasn’t crushed and lit the bent tobacco filled tube. He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes to envision the smoke curling down his throat and strangling his lungs. In time the Colter woman would see that what was done was the right thing – that if he hadn’t ended it then and there, the body count would have only gone up. She would get close to someone only that have to feel that loss over and over again because that dog would never let itself be upstaged as the woman’s ‘mate’. In time she would be thanking him for eliminating the long term emotional trauma for a short term hurting. In time, it always looks better in time.
Club was caught off guard when he felt a bead of moisture travel down from the corner of his eye to the side of his jaw line. Did he actually regret the Takitawah’s death, the pain he had caused for the Colter woman, even if it was for the greater good? To be sure, he patted himself down, his knees almost buckled when his hand reached the last rib on his left side – he could feel the sharpness of it as it almost protruded out of his side. The tear was in response to the physical pain, not any emotional triggers. He allowed a bitter chuckle to escape: perhaps he was still more human than not after all.

[karlsie]

I finally got a chance to read this newest Jared Club story all the way through. I see you even gave Dr. Phal a cameo performance. I like it. Jared Club has a strong character representation and needs a few more memorable personalities to keep him from hogging the whole show. I don't think you've made a mess of it. The progression is well measured, with no real diversions from your subject. Mostly all it needs are some punctuation corrections, an occasional correction in awkward language structure and the elimination of a few redundancies.

I'd like to break it up in parts for the fiction department of our mag, but i want to wait until we've finished running Mitch's dog stories. Serial stories are just beginning to grab reader attention, but i think if we continue making them a main feature of the mag, the interest will grow.

[The Late Mitchell Warren]

LOL How did Phal get in there? You have such a great writing style, Neo. We'd be honored to publish it, but don't hesitate sending it out cuz it's good.