Grit 1

‘Smack him in the fucking head — go on, dumb motherfucker won’t learn until he has a brain haemorrhage under his belt.’

‘Slight, this is the stupidest fucking job I have ever been on and you are the main fucking reason for that. How are we supposed to get money out of this bozo if he is in intensive care with a skull fracture?’

‘Look, Grit, you ain’t gonna get the fucking money one way or the other so you might as well do some fucking damage.’

Before he knew what he was doing he had a six inch blade protruding from the small man’s eyeball and Slight was trying to choke the life out of him.

‘You fucking arsehole — you blinded me. What the fuck’s going on? Are you fucking insane?’

‘I s’pose so,’ said Grit, grabbing the handle of his blade and pulling it, an eyeball and the stringy mess of the optic nerve after. He yanked, it snapped, and he wiped the blade — all very expertly done considering he had hardly drawn any breath since Slight’s meaty fingers had cut off the air supply running through his windpipe. He stabbed the little bastard in the throat and pulled it out, feeling gristle and meat slide on the blade.

The target span on his heel, gun on the end of a wrist poppingly fast motion that had bullets spraying towards the dying form of Slight and the soon-to-be-dead-if-he-didn’t-get-his-arse-in-gear Grit. Grit dropped and rolled and had his weapon in his hand at least as fast as the quarry had managed, but the guy was gone — running towards his vehicle no doubt; now clued in to the fact that there was someone out trying to kill him.

Grit got up and gave chase but he knew it was useless — fuck Slight and his neanderthal bullshit. A botched job meant a besmirched reputation, no money and a pissed off client. Some pissed off clients hired someone else but some of them put that on hold until they had dealt with the failed assassin. Grit, at present, had no idea what kind of client Jake Grimoire was, but he had a feeling in his gut that he was not going to like the outcome of this one at all. Slight’s associates might also represent a major obstacle to remaining alive as well. There was likely to be one hell of a lot of blood shed. Grit was ready. Time to get back to home base and make some hard and fast decisions.

Cameraman 1

He flickered the red light of the retinal reader over his left eye and downloaded the photographs for the day, plugged the tiny jack in behind his ear and downloaded both the aural records and the data from his speech centres: both sides of the conversation. A few more minutes and he would go and rest in the alcove and get his mind defragged.

Tonight it was a high society do — all the moneyed in the city crammed into one room to smile fake smiles and bullshit with each other in the hopes of forging alliances that would result in more money being pulled upwards from the less affluent. He was a plant, a mole — whatever kind of notional carbuncle you might find an adequate metaphor for shit floating in fresh water that it should have been flushed from. This wasn’t the first time he had engaged in gigs like this one and he always found them satisfying. He walked amongst these idiots and they were unaware of what he was intending to do to them. Every single secret that came his way had a price tag on it and he could blackmail the owner or use it to sink them. He preferred the long con so he usually used these titbits of information to initiate a plan that might take years to come to fruition. He had never played chess but he would have been able to think a considerable number of moves ahead of any opponent he was sure.

He had some people lined up for some of the information already; the rest wouldn’t take long to sell. Yeah, there wasn’t a single secret being flung around this place that shouldn’t have been kept under lock and key. It was arrogance that did it — the sheer belief in the idea that the people they thought they were controlling were just too damned stupid to ever wake up to what was really going on. They thought of the masses as being herd-like — a degree enough above retardation that they could carry out simple manual labour but that was about it. To bring their world crashing down around their ears would be a blissful thing to do.

He had done that already in a few small significant ways. He had exposed the paedophile ring that seemed to represent the police force’s backbone and half of the low level government officials in the city. He had led the press to the racism which proliferated in the security forces charged with looking after prisoners. Photographic evidence was the key to it all. He could get in anywhere and get the pictures that were required. Why? Because he was unassuming. No one noticed someone who moved politely and quietly through society — they always said it was the quiet ones you had to watch but most people were easily distracted by fireworks. A whisper in the right ear was his philosophy and it worked.

The doors swung open on his alcove. He sat down, placed his hands on the activation pads, and waited to be cleansed. Then he could rest.

Else City: Building Tension Extract 0

The suicides were on the top tier so they could jump off the roof if they needed to fulfil their need to re-enact their un-life’s defining moment.

The patricides shared rooms with the tulpas of their fathers so they might kill them again if they so desired. The floor they were on was known as the Oedipus Complex.

Matricides lived in the Norman Bates Complex, where their dead mothers voices blasted out of amplified speakers. There were a perhaps unsurprisingly high number of psychopaths on this floor.

Infanticides lived on the ground floor which had cruelly been dubbed The Crib. They cried like the babies they had sent to early graves.

The whole place was staffed by John Does — the unsolved murders that littered the culture like used condoms. They always looked puzzled, more like ghosts than anyone else.

He was to be booked in under suicide but he tried to tell them he had been murdered. The staff were not too bothered about John Does and where they went which was strange considering their prevalence amongst the staff.

He just put it down to red tape and from what he had heard it bound things tighter here in Else City than it did anywhere. He had come here to work on the police force to start solving crimes that others said had no solution. This building was the start of it all: his first case.

Grigori

It unfolded its wings, thinking of the act as prelude. Sharp teeth don’t always need a human sacrifice but he was damned if he was going to eat rotten fruit. The cloud swelled like a blood blister, a leech feeding on dreams with a bellyful of razor blades. It burst and silver and red rained down like coins and rose petals. Blood and sharp metal.

It ran a finger through the soft flesh of the sky, parting the almost labial folds of reality’s heart. And it reached in. it had fingernails like knives that were polished to a high sheen. it gripped what lay within — something that looked like a crumpled ball of paper but which was actually a three-dimensional model of a map it had seen back when it shuttled about in the shadow of god. It closed its fingers tighter and it pulled the model towards itself, smiled through the drench of blood.

This small piece of paper, which it was now unfolding, was the idea of god wrapped around a fossilised apple. The apple had once been offered as a gift — one bite had been taken from it then it had been set to rolling down a hill and had caused many avalanches. Isaac Newton was one of the pebbles that was hit. It pulled a tiny toffee hammer from its pocket — the hammer had an ambition to become as powerful as Thor’s hammer and it had been told that this was the way to do it. The hammer shattered the fossilised apple and a million shards embedded themselves as splinters in the eyes of wise men and made all the intelligentsia of the world blind.

The wings closed. No flight had been embarked on this time but a journey had been taken. It thought of this as end of the first part. The majority of the book was yet to be written, but some of the narrative was stuck in its sharp teeth. It smiled.

Wrapping Meat In Leaves

Paralysed — if a prehensile tale were to give you extra balance then what would a pocketful of death allow you? He had been shanked and it had severed his spinal column. They fashioned dice out of milk teeth and rolled away the blanket of snow childhoods that they had poured moon silver turned coin into like music for the empty hearts. He coughed and pulled out a barbed wire rose that cried tears of blood. Everything was momentarily holy and instantly blasphemous.

In the back alleys where an aborted foetus had risen up and taken spiritual hold of the mother who had evacuated it from its environment three young girls were subjected to involuntary circumcision and a feminist set light to herself like a Buddhist monk in protest.

The future was written by the monkey that was Shakespeare returned through a time portal on a tandem being co-piloted by Charles Darwin. They left thirty pieces of meat out in the sun and waited for it to turn into children or angels but all it drew in was the emissaries of Beelzebub. Confusion reigned in the land and rained down from heaven. From root to canopy ever single bird in the trees dreamt of Stymphalos, the omphalos of panic and they cried siren cries, harpy cries to draw in the living and torment the dead.

It is rumoured that Excalibur was found in a red telephone box near Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the guy who pulled it from the skull of a hobo was transfigured into the image of John the Baptist and pissed cinnamon dolce latte for three years afterwards.

The hobo went out and started speaking to dogs in an effort to raise an army that might rebuild Babel and storm the heavens. It was a very good year as the song said. Several was an angel suffering from amnesia that sold the eyes of child killers to thrill seekers and he was damned for an eternity to eat the screams of the victims.

They took a poet and dipped them in holy water and told them that they must rewrite everything using a broken pencil and the skin of a stock exchange guru who had gone broke and become the world’s wisest Zen practitioner.

Refulgent, Carrie leaned her head to the side and held up the conch shell — she could hear the sea raging inside and it frightened her. She dropped it to the floor and reams of code swam forth like mutant sperm to rewrite the world from the base level up. Birth had come from death. And that was that.

Me Took (Extract 1)

Shot through the head he trembled like a spastic limb, cut loose from the control of his master, another corpse that finally realised it was dead. The personality shifted into the maggot in his eyeball and left him like it were leaving an apple. Exodus meant finding some other corpse to occupy — never exactly the Promised Land but it was as close as a zombie ever got to being Christ-like or Lazarus if that was too lofty an ambition.

Fahrenheit was a killer of things supernatural. Some might have thought this would make him a really interesting guy to be around but he was one of the worst conversationalists in the history of human speech. Words seemed to fall from his mouth in a jumble no matter how much effort he put into organising them semantically and syntactically beforehand. Killing things was about all he was really good for — he was as much a machine as the gun he was firing.

Since the plague had leapt up from the avian species it had dominated for almost ten years previous, decimating all the wildfowl and domestic birds, earning it the name Headless Chicken, the number of zombies seemed to have grown exponentially. It was strange to think that someone had worked out a way to tap into the brain frequencies of the recently undead and actually become a zombie lord. Still, it was no stranger than the fact that there were actually zombies.

Mandrake eldritch was pretty close to death himself by all accounts — he was looking to the resurrection of the zombies as holding the key to his own intricate problem with mortality. He had been raiding scientific institutes that were researching anything from particle physics to stem-cells, to DNA sequences. To put it plainly Eldritch was clutching at straws.

At least there was one good thing about the kind of egotistical criminal maniacs of the type that Eldritch was — you didn’t have to go looking for the bastards because they craved the spotlight. Eldritch constantly sought to set himself up on centre stage in the world’s affairs and controlling the zombie horde seemed a perfect away to do that. Whereas before he had been just a decrepit old man now he was someone important. Fahrenheit would be happy to put an end to the miserable old fucker’s life.

One zombie did not a mission make. It was boring when there weren’t more of the critters to despatch and some of that boredom originated in the fact that it meant he had to do the thing solo. If there was a whole nest of the buggers then they would send Corday out with him. Corday was funny — a real stand-up. sure, when he had first discovered that he was being partnered by a woman he wasn’t happy, but the misogynist had been beaten out of him by being saved by this woman on more than one occasion where his inattention to detail had got him stuck in some serious shit. He radioed in his success and made his way over to the ATV. He poked his index finger in the lock and it scanned him and allowed entrance. He set it on autopilot and moved into the back to go and have a piss — his appointment with the undead had been moved forward by the inconsiderate grave haunter and he had been caught short.

It was a twenty minute drive, ten minutes to get through security, and fifteen minutes to pass through the decontamination process. When all that rigmarole had been gone through, Fahrenheit made his way to the briefing room for a hastily scheduled meeting.

‘Hey, John, how goes it?’
‘Fine, Fahrenheit,’ he paused ‘well, actually, pretty shitty. Eldritch sent his army tearing through a cancer research facility — not one single person left alive.’
‘What was he after?’
‘That’s what this meeting’s about.’
‘Oh, ok.’

Fahrenheit spotted Corday across the room — she held up a polystyrene cup which he supposed to contain his preferred blend of latte with some cheap whiskey swirling through it. He pushed his way through the group that had assembled; all the techs with their electronic notepads and such. He sat down next to her and inhaled sharply, disguising the act as being the result of the brisk walk over to the seat. She knew he liked her scent — that was why she wore it, because she knew it drove him wild and that amused her. She gave him his coffee.

The screen behind Commander Bruce clicked on and images of the facility that had just been attacked began to spool in an endless barrage of gore. Not one of them blinked, so inured had they become to this kind of shit since Eldritch had appeared. Fahrenheit swallowed his coffee in careless gulps. Corday watched him. They both listened to Bruce.

‘It appears that Eldritch was after some viral technology which has been developed that corrects the programming of damaged cells — he believes that he might be able to re-program his body so that he doesn’t get any older. He thinks he has found the elixir of youth. What he has stolen may represent a cure for cancer — needless to say we must get it back. Fahrenheit and Corday are to be in charge of this mission and they will have as much back-up as they require — at the moment we don’t know what that will be, so as soon as you are called on you must drop what you are doing and respond.’
Fahrenheit turned to Corday: ‘looks like our plans for the weekend have changed.’
‘What plans?’
‘For dinner.’
‘Oh, so you thought I was being serious? Silly boy. Anyway, let’s go get the briefing notes.’
‘Waste of bloody time — it’ll be the same shit we always have to do: go kill some zombies and rescue the object.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘What, I need to swot up on cancer cells?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Bollocks. You get my copy; I’m going for a drink.’

Sample And Hold (1st extract)

His poet’s tongue flicked at her nipple playfully and she moaned. She was not the most attractive woman who had been at the bar but according to his Geiger counter she was the least irradiated. He wanted to fuck someone where it wasn’t the equivalent of sticking your cock in a reactor and asking the gods of this fucked up world to bless you with cancer.

He was moving around the small villages in this area stealing samples of blood wherever he could, working on a vaccine to cure a plague that was, at the moment, contained. He was a member of the skeleton crew that claimed the title CDC. Centre for disease control? What a fucking joke. The whole world was sick and they were just some kind of notional balm to stop the dying from storming the city and demanding justice from the healthy fucks who had sanctioned the wars knowing that they would remain untouched in their lead-lined bunkers.

He was healthy because his job was considered important, but the way he was going he wasn’t going to pass the medicals for much longer. He was smoking Hiroshima 45s and the occasional hydroponic weed from the great lakes cannabis factory. He took masking drugs and system purge drugs that caused irreparable cell damage but which kept him his job. The stem cell nano factory at the base of his spine was having a hard job keeping up to him. Did he want to die? Sure, who didn’t?
if you were alive in this day and age where half of the planet had been left scarred by nuclear war and you didn’t want to end it all you had to be either masochistic or retarded or both; he was none of those.

She was exhausted after he had pounded her into the mattress and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep — not a good sign as far as he was concerned. She probably had something terminal. He reached over and pressed the remote control button on his brief case that would send out the mechsquito swarm to collect the blood. He was almost done in this locale and then he could go off and start collecting samples elsewhere.

He wanted to do things and she didn’t look like she was going anywhere soon so he would have to work round her; he’d have to ignore her. That wasn’t hard for him. He barely thought of the people out here as being human — why? Because their mortality rate cancelled out there presence faster than you could do anything to help them. Still, they might hold the key to saving the remainder of the human race.

There was a pandemic brewing and, with radiation weakened systems, who would survive? There were a lot less people alive and kicking for a disease to take on these days. There was very little support infrastructure and what officials there were passed laws designed purely to keep themselves alive. Public service was a dead notion — they held office because they wanted office space and the protection that officialdom offered them and that was that. The CDC stood between them and the hordes — this was how they saw it. If you were capable of stopping a disease or curing something the masses revered you and the elite saw you as useful — you had it good on all counts.

The pandemic? They called it rape and it boiled in the blood and bodily fluids of the sex organs and only there. Why? They weren’t sure yet. Why were some spared? well, if you ignored the stupid biblical prophecies that were being bandied about by the nutjobs who still believed in a god despite all the contrary evidence, it seemed there was some unique DNA sequence that was capable of switching off the cells in the viral version and the bacteriological one. He’d analysed countless samples thus far and they hadn’t been to isolate the exact sequence. Even if they did manage to narrow that down they weren’t sure why it occurred in some people and not others. They also needed to know with what kind of frequency it occurred.

Cicatrix

It looked like a puncture wound but from what he wouldn’t say. She stuck her pinkie finger inside it and said, is this from a tooth? He smiled, twirling his finger until one of her curls was wrapped tightly around it, and he yanked. She screamed and reflexively lashed out; slapping him in such a way that her freshly manicured nails dug four straight lines into his left cheek. He winced and then he smiled. This was how he collected scars — treating them like fun little accessories that you could mix and match.

He walked over to the mirror and placed his reflection within the depths of its surface. On the mirror there was variously, in no particular order: sputum, sperm, nasal mucus, pus and lipstick. The only thing really worth taking any notice of was the lipstick — it revealed a clue as to the whereabouts of the erstwhile love of his life who now appeared to be fully submerged in the refuge of her drag king alter-ego Bruce Truce.

This one: this girl — she didn’t really care for attachment. Until the last one had gone insane she had clung to him in the way that a barnacle clings to the side of a ship — embracing everything from tidal movements to sinking. The day that she had left he had woken to find her grating the end of his penis with a cheese grater whilst liberally splashing vinegar upon the damaged member. How had he slept through the initial abuse? Well, as usual, he had an inordinate amount of drugs in his system — the kind of amounts that might make even William Burroughs shudder with fright.

He had an appointment today at a place that was offering him a job stacking shelves — it wasn’t bad money and it didn’t seem to be overly labour intensive, which was of great concern. He wanted to get off the dole — give the job centre the old heave-ho and attain some self respect again. Everyone kept telling him that self respect was the universal panacea and that he would be skipping around like one of those women on the sanitary towel ads.

He disinfected his new wound. Knowing that it would be close to healed within a couple of days. He would use some of his ex’s foundation to cover the scratch marks and he would be ready to go. For the moment he wanted to get back to bed with this girl and fuck out what few remaining brain cells he suspected might still be floating around in her skull.

He stuck his finger into the half-finished pot of chocolate mousse and traced a pentagram on the mirror next to Bruce Truce’s new address. He uttered something under his breath, walked over to the bed, knelt down, and buried his head between the spread legs of his lover.

beautiful meat

The dreams clattered through several heads, the drunken figure of the sandman stood at the top of the stairs watching the idea hit every step, cutting into the meat of a path. It rested at the bottom and glinted like the unfolded truth of a straight razor.

Tara woke one day into permanent unconsciousness — transfigured by a thought that made a black flower grow from the centre of her chest. The flower sang Beatles songs and slowly her body was absorbed, as if by photosynthesis, into a riot of varicoloured petals. Her husband broke upon the rocks of her insanity.

He thought he saw a butterfly. Laid on his back beneath the migratory path of angels who had been living in the northern hemisphere he espied a metempsychosis he had never expected to see — the spirits of dead fictional characters ascending into some heaven that bled like ink from the bellies of a huge flotilla of clouds.

The babies surrendered their teeth. The mothers turned the tide into milk and menstrual blood. There was something holy afoot. The collagist sliced through established meaning and fashioned something Frankenstein-new from the hotchpotch syntax of the random.

There was a murder of crows gathered around a chalk outline. Gregory, the watcher, withdrew his semi-erect penis from his pants and anointed the representation of a god born from pure information. The data that had been collected from the carcasses of several philosophers coiled in Fibonacci curves the necromancer had fashioned. Something was delivered in that moment. The Siamese twin of good and evil, the bound polar opposites, arose from the hallowed ground and began to eat the world.

‘I am Christ, come to deliver you all — shepherd of the cracked mirror; defiler of the virgin; notional suicide of the individual in the soup of godhead!’

A chorus line of reborn Nazis using the names of the Knights of the Round Table encircled the world like a new equator. Everybody danced as atom bombs dropped from the stormy skies, and the cancer backbeat swelled to drown out all other music.

empire cyst

random patterns
are for gods and slatterns
the dance of atoms
is a repeating fractal
and none has cracked all
the codes tumbling slowly
through orbits about our heads
those superstrings are strange threads
stitched into tapestries that tatter
when we try to reconcile energy and matter

that teleological argument attracts
but every theory eventually cracks
as the flaw becomes apparent in the testing
trying to identify the states in which we’re resting
like immovable objects awaiting some catalyst
some supercollider spark of genius erupting
you’re looking in one direction and all else is missed
do you wonder about the universe you’re corrupting?
the universe will passively resist
the inquiries of a scientist
like the self-blinded man of faith
he spends his life chasing a wraith