June Prompt

[grainnerhuad]

It was the melt.

[neonorth]

Mrs. Shuay had been the principal of the school for less than a year; she had expected a certain amount of ‘growing’ pains as the students and staff adjusted to the change in administrative practices: but she had not expected this. She had thought of sending the students home until the situation had been attended to, but after placing a call to the superintendent advising against doing so, she ordered the staff to continue on course as if it were a normal day. Damn dwindling enrolment, she thought, if it wasn’t for the fact that the school closure would have to have a public explanation, perhaps much of the collateral damage that had occurred already would not be expanded. The bright side of the situation was that the promised aid that the superintendent had promised her four hours ago should be arriving soon, other than the extra janitorial staff that had showed up a half hour after she had placed the call to clean up any of the obvious consequences of the situation that may alarm the student population. She also could not help but notice that while the superintendent had said that there was no major concern on her part, the corridor that joined the middle school had been blockaded to prevent any admittance to it.
Principal Shuay had just finished smoothing out the creases of her cream coloured business casual woman’s outfit with her hands for the two hundredth and sixtieth time when there was a knock on the door from of the reception room that she had been pacing in. Startled, she looked to see two men, a thin older looking black man with a smile and a man who looked like a biker stuffed who had lost a bet and had to where a business suit to a kegger.
“Mrs. Shuay? I’m Munjeb B’twan,” the black man said quietly, “And this is my protégé...”
“Christ-of-Fur,” the second man offered in a thick Northern accent.
B’twan shot the second man a stern look.
“We were called in because of an incident?”
Shuay smiled and approached the two with a hand extended.
“Well gentlemen, Mr. B’twan and Christopher...”
“It’s not Christopher and I’m not a...”
B’twan cut off the other’s protest by speaking slightly louder to bring Shuay’s attention to him. He decided that once the assignment was over with he would have a discussion with Christ-of-Fur about “the need to know” and who needed to know it. An elementary school principal, for instance, was not required to know contrary to the physical presence, there wasn’t a male psyche within Christ-of-Fur’s mind or that the term ‘man’ in reference to ‘human’ was not entirely applicable. He had hoped that he would have had a longer training period with Christ-of-Fur before she had been let out of the project’s facility into a real scenario – three weeks is too short of a training time; others he had trained had not been released into the general public for months. It particularly concerned him on the nature of the assignment, a melting was not a open and shut assignment for a seasoned agent, much less a rookie, to be given.
Shuay held her hand out for a moment before realizing that neither man would be returning the gesture, and then put it to her side.
“So, we’ve been told that there is a little problem that you need help with?” B’twan said that made him sound more irritated than concerned.
Shuay’s eyes darted about, attempting to find something, anything in the hot box like reception area of the school to focus on either than keeping eye contact with the piercing eyes of the men.
“We seemed to have developed, ah, hmmm, a little...situation...with one of our staff members,” she stated nervously.
Christ-of-Fur’s right side of her mouth curled up slightly. A little situation, she thought wryly – humans had a funny way to minimalize horrific events of their own making. She decided that if the woman was not going to be open about the ‘little situation’, she was going to concentrate to distil the woman’s voice into a mere sound in the background and let her other senses fill in the truth. Shuay’s voice faded to a whisper as Christ-of-Fur’s nose began to sift through the different scents that were swirling around her. She flicked her tongue out as if she were simply wetting her lips to taste the atmosphere to correlate what her nasal sensors were indicating. There was the salty, bitter taste in the air: blood, many different tastes of blood, some older than others as well as freshly spilled. The smell of excitement, urine, faeces, and sweat swirled around Christ-of-Fur; and the acrid perfume was becoming stronger.
Shuay, B’twan and Christ-of-Fur turned towards the day as the sounds of feet shuffling against the floor grew in the relative quiet of the school’s hallway. Mrs. Shuay let out a gasp.
In the frame of the door stood that once what may have been human woman but now had leapt from that description to something else entirely. It may have been the face of a plain looking piggish nosed woman, but as the clipped bangs curled up from where what had been a wide forehead that had collapsed from the inside without tearing the thin skin that held the flesh as a single piece outlined with the dirty blonde collar length hair it bore more semblance to a “Cabbage Patch” doll that had been run over by one wheel of a lawn mower. It had a similar build similar to Shuay’s roundish and compact; a white blouse ribboned with red with a knee length simple black skirt that ballooned out in back to reveal the one piece nylons the creature had put on in the morning that had been snug around the midriff but had now filled and sagged with excrement and liquid which bled down both sides of the legs leaving wet impressions of the heels it wore.
The creature’s right arm was held out to almost shoulder length to support what it held in its hands; the body of a boy that had been no more than eight. The creature’s fingers had impaled the boy at base of his throat, as if it had placed its hand upon it to guide the boy but had failed to stop applying pressure on its fingertips until the nails had buried themselves into the spinal cord. He hung limply from the creature’s hand, the tips of his sneakers barely touching the white tiled floor.
“Mrs. Shuay? I wonder if you had a minute to talk to young master Cody – I caught him at the water fountain without a hall pass,” the creature said as a thick layer of bubbly saliva cascaded over its bottom lip onto its blouse trickling along the half buttoned seam as if it were in a race with the secretions of sagging ample lactating bosom towards the finishing line of the elastic lining of the skirt.
“Of...of....of course, Mrs. Jackson, “ Mrs. Shuay sputtered out, her eyes desperately trying to pull themselves away from the dead stare of the student’s eyes.
The creature nodded and relaxed its grip. The limp corpse of the child slid from her fingers to the floor. Mrs. Shuay let out a muffled sob as the sound of a dull crack exploded into the room as the boy’s head bounced twice on the tile.
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Shuay – I hope this time master Cody learns his lesson.” The creature turned and limped from the office door back down the hallway.
B’twan caught Christ-of-Fur’s eye and with a nod confirmed what B’twan’s initial analysis of the situation had been: it was the melt.

[grainnerhuad]

Glad to see you back and writing and gorey. Very nice.

[neonorth]

Thanks and it's good to be actually writing something other than five second thought poetry - I'm not sure where the idea is going, I wrote this after I had written this:

Daniel Hardister stood at the junction of the pier surrounded by sailboats, the hot Florida Key sunshine beating down on his neck and head. The smell of the salt from the water irritated his nose slightly, and though he could hear the gulls, he could not see them and became almost paranoid that his thinning blond short hair would seem almost as a god sent toilet for the birds. He tried to chide himself for his thoughts, after all, it wouldn’t be happening here, but still his mind pushed the fear ahead regardless. His orders had been simple; he was to stand until an agent in training approached him and attempted to persuade him to hand over the document that was stashed in the inside left breast pocket of his dark brown blazer. He wondered if it was too late to find out who was in charge and ask if he could have some casual attire but considering that he had been anticipating a suspension rather than a cushy assignment, he wasn’t about to push his luck.
Hardister was a second generation CSIS agent; his mother had pushed him into following her footsteps when he graduated from University two years ago with a degree in Human Sciences. Daniel suspected it was because of his mother that he was accepted; his slightly rotund body, asthma and lack of athletic skills had caused him to botch the physical examinations and he was fairly certain that the psychologists that had done the personality and mental stability examinations had figured out that he had not really earned his degree but more bought it from one of his fellow students from the wrong side of the tracks who needed extra money just to survive in uber-expensive Toronto. At first he had been assigned to the incoming data section, where for a year and a half he did nothing but sit in a room with twenty other agents and read the personal e-mail correspondence of foreign dignitaries and dutifully marking the ones that may have contained something of interest to the higher ups. Six months prior to his current assignment, he was assigned to read one dignitaries e-mail exclusively, the daughter of one of the Arab ambassadors who had taken to the “Western Way” far more than she ought of and had started sending very un-Muslim pictures of herself in some poses that would get her stoned to death in her own country to the ambassador of a formerly Eastern Bloc country. Hardister had taken the photos and sold them to an amateur porn site – and was caught doing so.
Hardister had been suspended immediately and told that in three weeks his fate would be decided, whether it would be a termination of employment or termination and criminal charges. He worried for three weeks, not sleeping for the last week of his suspension and threw up twice while he was waiting for his supervisor to call him into her office. He had expected members of the RCMP to be in the office but when he sat down in the chair, he was handed a dossier marked “Project Pauper Prince”. He stood up, his supervisor pulled out a tranquilizer gun and told him to have a good sleep and he woke up on a single blanket-less cot however many hours and wherever the hell he was.
The room with the cot was small, barely the size of mid-sized house’s main washroom. There were no windows, the only light came from a forty watt driven lamp that sat upon a wall embedded shelf which also contained the folder his supervisor had given him. He opened the folder up and it contained two sheets of paper, the one below the top sheet was folded in two. The top sheet simply said, “Welcome to Florida. You are the mark for a controlled training simulation. Put the folded sheet of paper in your left inside breast pocket. Go out the door and proceed to the “X” marked on the pier and await for a trainee who will ask for the folded paper.” Hardister did as the paper instructed.
Hardister had been standing on the “x” placed in the middle of the pier’s “t” intersection for almost twenty minutes when a voice echoed across the marina, “Simulation will begin in five, four, three, two...” Just as Daniel had expected to the voice pronounce “one”, a figure emerged from the sail boat at the end of the marina’s dock, walking towards him. He wasn’t sure what to do about this; on the one hand he did have his orders, but on the other hand, when he was in training he had never been instructed to do an exercise without any clothes on. As the man neared, Hardister became more and more concerned – it looked like the man was more uncomfortable than he was, scratching himself just after he had walked a couple of steps. He closed his eyes for a moment and told himself it was just an assignment, just an assignment. He opened his eyes just as the other man reached him. The two stared at each other.
Hardister tried to ignore the man’s physical appearance, moving his eyes back and forth rapidly to blur his vision but against his wishes, his eyes wandered up and down the naked man. The man didn’t fit the stereo type of an agent in training – he looked in his mid-thirties rather than the youngish almost twenty year olds that had been in his class. The brown hair wasn’t cropped in the authorities dictate either, it was almost shoulder length, thinning the already whitish gaunt face and long bridged nose that seemed to be make the man almost hawk-like in appearance, down to the piercing brown eyes that seemed almost predatory in nature. The man also looked as if he were the opposite of Hardister’s anti-stereotypical agent physique; lanky, though he could tell that the muscles were well toned, they didn’t have the definition of one who was regimented to daily three hour work outs. Despite Daniels best efforts to do otherwise, he could not keep his eyes from glancing downward at the man’s groin; the man had his hand around his semi-erectness – the grip reminding him of the time he had gone deep sea bass fishing.
Daniel was about to say something when the loudspeaker graciously broke the awkwardness of the situation.
“Simulation ceased.”
The other man looked around for the source of the voice.
“What?” he said to the sky with a thick Northern accent.
“Trainee, please return to your staging area and put on the clothing provided for you.”
“Will the...clothes...help control this?” the nude man asked to the sky, pointing at the semi-erectness between his legs. “It’s really icky feeling when it hits my leg like that.”
“Trainee, the clothes will help with that,” the voice responded and added, “And as we have talked about before, it is less of a distraction if you leave it alone.”
“But it’s just hangin’ there,” the naked man protested. “Plus it feels kinda goo-“
“Return to the staging area, trainee,” the voice ordered, inferring any more discussion on the matter was closed.
Hardister watched as the man cupped his ‘junk’ with one hand and walked with a slight bow-legged quality back towards the sail boat at the end of the pier. He thought about voicing several immediate questions that came to mind but decided that it would probably be best just to continue silently standing on his mark.
If the deep blueness of the cloudless sky were to reveal its secrets come the night, an observer from the marina would have seen something out of place beginning from the third star to the left: a large pane of glass that stretched half the horizon wide and stretched almost to the apex of the stratosphere. If one peered at the center of the bottom ridge of the glass they would have sworn that what looked like a man’s shadow was slowly receding from view.
Munjeb B’twan leaned back in his swivel chair from the microphone, keeping his finger on the loudspeaker engage toggle though he had flicked it off as he watched the naked man walk down to the opposite end of the pier into the end sailboat that served as the staging area. B’twan had spent almost six months learning the control module that stretched in front of him; he knew what every one of the six hundred and seventy toggles did, he knew which of the twenty three non labelled buttons did and had programmed his brain to scan the eight hundred and three survalience monitors that lined the walls on either side of him.
Not exactly a stellar inaugural training run of the brand new facility that B’twan had hoped for, but it was certainly unique. He heard the elevator door behind him slide open. B’twan had been given the heads up that the “Big Man” was going to make an appearance and decided that he should act all business and avoid any direct eye contact with him.
“How is the trainee doing?” the visitor asked briskly as he walked up to the console and peeked downward where Hardister was standing.
“We are just about to begin, Mr. Prime Minister,” B’twan answered, omitting the fact that this would be attempt two.
“Well, proceed.”
“Yes sir.”
B’twan leaned forward and flicked the loudspeaker toggle open and informed that the simulation would begin starting in five, four, three, two,” then flicked off the loudspeaker.
Here we go again, Hardister thought to himself, steeling himself for the re-emergence of the naked man from the far sailboat. He found himself both relieved and surprisingly a little disappointed that the man had done as instructed and came towards him wearing a suit that resembled the same one Daniel wore – the standard CSIS business suit issue, down to the dark oak antique loafers. Daniel could see the man trying very hard to stop his hand from straying towards his groin area when he stood in front of him. Once more, there was silence between the two.
“Hello, Mr. Hardister,” the man said.
“Hello, Mr.....?”
“Christ-of-fur,” the man offered.
“Well, Christopher, what may I do for you,” Hardister asked.
“I believe you have something that I require,” the man answered, “May you please give it to me now, sir?” The agent held out his hand, which Hardister looked at but did nothing.
Was he supposed to just hand it over, the note was not specific on the what was to happen after the man had requested the paper.
Above the two men, B’twan saw the Prime Minister’s face flush red. He watched as the man turned and headed towards the elevator, mumbling quickly and incoherently to himself as the doors slid open to admit him. The Prime Minister obviously had not been pleased with what he had seen, which struck B’twan as strange since it was to be an exercise in interaction which to his expectations had run fairly well so far.
The agent gestured towards Hardister.
“Give me the paper, please,” he said, slightly more forceful than his initial askance.
“No,” Hardister responded, deciding that without clear direction, doing nothing was the best option. There was a sliding sound from the edge of the pier behind Daniel and he turned to see what and where the sound was originating from.
Both men stared at the man who was emerging from the rising tidal crests splashing against the wooden support newels. Hardister recognized the man, gave a rough elbow to the other man and whispered, “Look sharp, it’s the boss,” before snapping his body to attention, doing a heel turn to look straight forward in the direction opposite direction.
“End simulation!” The man shouted as he neared the two. The ocean, all but six sailboats that were along the pier in front and behind the two men and for the sail boat that served as the agent staging room at the far end of the pier, the yacht club and sky faded to green screen along the domed, windowless save for the observation deck, football stadium sized training room. By the time the man reached to two players in the scenario, the agents could see the trailers that the sailboats were attached to as well as the cylinders that made the boats and pier bob as if water, friction, wind and gravity had done so.
The Prime Minister looked at the agent in training with disgust, ignoring Hardister altogether - Hardister almost allowed a sigh of relief escape through his tightly pursed lips.
“What was that?” he asked with a quiet but menacing tone in his voice.
The agent instinctively folded his arms and began rubbing the sides of his upper arms as he looked down with flushed red cheeks at his left shoe tip that was scuffing the pier’s white washed planks back and forth. Hardister kept his eyes forward, trying not to let his breathing aggravate the Prime Minister and place any of his focus upon his own person.
“ANSWER ME!” The Prime Minister’s voice boomed.
The agent jumped and cringed, his eyes becoming rimmed with moisture.
“I-I just thought the man...,” he stammered while his bottom lip quivered, “...I just thought maybe there would be another way...”
“Another way?”
The agent’s head nodded slowly.
Something inside of Hardister; a small voice that asked, what way, exactly, was this trainee supposed to interact with you? It occurred to him that perhaps this was not such a good assignment as he first thought.
The Prime Minister laughed cruelly. He reached into the inside coat pocket and withdrew a small pistol, bringing its barrel to the temple of Hardister and fired. Hardister’s eyes flashed wide open; the brief moment that he remained alive he watched the flesh and bone of his forehead fold away from his head like a plastic bag in a parking lot in a wind storm. The agent in training stumbled back, losing his footing and falling onto his buttocks as Hardister crumpled to the pier’s slats.
“Over sixty million dollars has been spent on this facility,” the Prime Minister stated calmly as he replaced the pistol back into his coat, “For this way.” He hunched down to one knee and glared into the agent’s eyes.
“You will do it this way.”
After B’twan had seen the Prime Minister reaching into his coat pocket, he had decided that it was time that he diffuse the situation and had left his seat in the control room and walked briskly to the elevator. He grimaced in the elevator when he heard the pistol firing. A scowl crossed his face when the elevator’s door opened and he saw Hardister’s body thirty meters down the pier and the back of the Prime Minister just a head of it blocking B’twan’s view of the agent. He broke into a half run as he the sharpness of the Prime Minister’s words bounced around the football sized room. The Prime Minister gave a perfunctory glance of disgust as B’twan passed him and knelt down beside the cowering agent.
“I think you’ve said enough...sir,” B’twan said diplomatically, “I think your point has been clearly expressed.”
The agent looked desperately at B’twan.
“I just wanted to see if there was a different way,” the agent sniffled, “I didn’t wanna hurt him if I didn’t have to.”
B’twan looked questioningly at the angry man before turning back to the agent in distress.
“Who said you have to hurt anyone?” the handler asked.
The agent pointed a finger at the man standing before the two.
“He said on the moving drawing thing that my objective was to kill,” the agent said sourly, then looked at B’twan, “But you said that I was just ‘posed to get the paper that was hidden on him.”
Kill? B’twan thought for a moment about what the agent had said, moving drawing; it dawned on him what the agent meant.
“Why wasn’t I told that you were in video contact with the trainees? It’s my responsibility to handle any outside influences,” He half-shouted then demanded, “And when did the parameters of the mission change from retrieval to execution? “
The Prime Minister sneered at the kneeling black man.
“When is none of your business and when does a low level employee dare question his superior?” he barked. The Prime Minister snorted, “And considering how the trainee came to be...”
“But that’s different,” the agent said between nasal passage clearing sharp intakes of air, “that’s because I have to, not because you feel like I should!”
“Oh, stop your whining,” the Prime Minister commanded through a sneer as he stood up not breaking eye contact with the agent, “It’s time to grow up and be a man.”
“Sir, she’s only a little girl,” B’twan said curtly as he put his arm around the teary eyed agent.
“HE is a 36 year old man,” was the response spat back, “And unless HE wants to end up scavenging for rodents, HE damn well better act and think like it!”
“She has only had this form for two days,” B’twan countered defensively, “I think she has done exceptionally well; her coordination and balance integration has progressed exceptionally fast – most of the new entries into the project take several weeks to make the adjustment...sir.”
The Prime Minister fumed quietly at the two, he was about to question B’twan on where his loyalties laid when the sound of the elevator doors opening distracted his train of thought. He continued to glare at the two as the sound of footsteps on wood came closer. He did not find it necessary to turn around; he could hear the slight emphasis of weight placement onto the oncoming left foot necessitated by a bad right knee and the soft thud of an ever present black with silver aluminium trimmed briefcase against the right calf; Mustikos of the senior bureaucrat of Solicitor General’s Office and government liaison officer of the project.
“Sir, we have a few appointments back in Ottawa to attend to,” Mustikos informed the Prime Minister when he came to be two steps behind him. Mustikos gave B’twan a quick nod and clipped smile returning his face to a neutral expression before the Prime Minister gave the two one final glare and turned to him. Mustikos stepped aside to let the man walk ahead of him but the Prime Minister stood there for a moment before he turned back to the agent and B’twan.
“This isn’t a game, this is about destiny – my destiny,” the Prime Minister said, barely able to contain his anger. “For every great cause there is an expected amount of loss... Mr. Mustikos.” He held out his hand.
Mustikos clicked the right latch on the briefcase he was carrying, there was the sound of whirring and the front side rolled downward. Inside was a sawed off doubled barrelled shotgun which Mustikos took out of its foam casing and handed it to the Prime Minister who took it and fired at the agent’s chest while B’twan could do nothing but stare in horror.
The agent screamed as the shotgun’s pellet ridden load of rock salt exploded to dust against the skin after shredding through the clothes the agent wore. Where the skin did not erupt into geysers of blood, excruciating welts quickly formed cascading the synaptic nerves of the brain with pain sensory information. The shrillness of the scream caused the sailboats surrounding the men to vibrate dangerously close to their shattering point. The agent writhed violently, one arm swung out with such force that threw B’twan backwards, his body rebounding off the prow of the sailboat opposite and land prone just a foot from where he had been just a moment before.
The Prime Minister watched impassively as the circulated air slowly diffused the rock salt sediment from the agent’s person. When the agent’s screams had begun to quieten, he waited until the agent’s hands were clear of his face and fired the second load at it. The rock salt pellets were not smoothed ammunition but the raw jagged pieces smashed further into finer but as sharp as the larger one it had been chipped from, as the scatter pattern propelled the pellets they strafed across the agent’s face, marking their trajectory by leaving long slashes that blossomed open like bulbous crimson tiger lilies. The agent’s face twisted in anguish, mouth open but the pain was so intense it muted the scream pounding upon the walls of the larynx to be let out. With hands curled and locking into an arch the scream’s containment crumbled.
The agent’s eyes changed from their rounded hazel to almost diamond shaped smoke grey, fissures of flesh cracked in all directions from just under the quickly flattening nose, as thick jet black thick fur jutted from them. The smooth line of teeth broke as long pointed canines on the top and bottom thrust from both gum lines. The agent’s eyes rolled back into the eye lids and consciousness fled from its container. The agent’s body collapsed to the pier, the fur and fissures receding back as if an eraser had been applied, a moment later, though covered with blood, the agent’s face looked like it had been cast in wax.
The Prime Minister handed the shotgun back to Mustikos, who put it back in its foam casing and closed the briefcase’s front.
“You’d think it was human,” The Prime Minister commented to Mustikos then turned his attention to the still prone B’twan. “I concur with your conclusions on the potential of this candidate – you may continue with the training.”
Without waiting for a response, the Prime Minister turned down the pier and walked away with Mustikos two steps behind him.


I've also have other bits and pieces, a part about the Prime Minister wearing a Nazi uniform, his plan for world domination, a back history of Christ-of-Fur, taken mostly from the set up of the short story "lac la Biche" and a working title for something longer "Wendigo Wrong" - but I have nothing really substancial that I can say I have a beginning middle or end. I'm trying to write a quirky piece to submit and a Dr. Phal, but I'm finding out that I'm quite rusty.....

[grainnerhuad]

Gotta scrub that rust off. I love both of these pieces.