Maranatha - Chapter XIII, as told by Sybrand Brubaker
#13 of Maranatha
M A R A N A T H A
© Osfer, March 2005
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Contains material of an erotic and homosexual nature which may be illegal to
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Chapter XIII - As Told By Sybrand Brubaker
My name is Sybrand Patronius Olivier Randolph Brubaker. Quite a mouthful, to
be certain - let me assure you, while we're on the topic, that that has been
said to me for more then one reason. More than two, in fact.
Can you think what those are? No?
That's all right. It isn't because you don't have enough information about me,
even though that's probably what you're telling yourself. In fact, you can't
imagine accurately what those reasons are because you're an inferior intellect,
my sweet. Take comfort in that blessed mental inadequacy, because it absolves
you of a responsibility to personal ambition on a scale which has on numerous
occasions driven me to madness, and back again, and what delightful trips those
were, let me tell you. This is something which you are spared and in this matter
I'll accept no objection because I can assure you with wire-sharp certainty that
whatever cerebral faculties you possess and whatever psychological anguish and
damage you have experienced it is simply inconceivable that it compares in any
manner to that of yours truly. Please don't take offense at that.
Now why did I say that to you? Of course you should take offense. I said it to
hurt you. I like doing that, you know. Not just hurting you specifically, I
don't even know you and actually who do you think you are, that you should be
worthy of my unsplintered attention? Very few people are, you know. Very very
few people. Could you ever be one of them? Would you want that, I wonder.
Why don't I just stop babbling and introduce myself, so we can get on with the
story and we can properly get to know each other, something I would very much
like. To get to know you. It's something I like generally as well, getting to
know people, even more, possibly, than hurting them although actually that's a
silly comparison since the one naturally flows from the other, like blood from a
vein and consciousness from a glistening eye.
I told you my name, but nobody calls me by it fully, nobody who is now alive,
with one exception whom I'll introduce you to readily. I'm a lynx, though I'm
tall for my species and my cheektufts, which sometimes lend my kind a somewhat
comical or at least amiable look, are very modest. With some grooming I can pass
for another type of cat, if someone isn't too familiar with the feline family,
after all, the pointed ears are hard to miss and few other species with my
grey-speckled coloration have such ears. I'm fond of them, though. The
round-eared varieties strike me as too... cutesy. Is that a word? I think I've
read it. But you know what I mean. It's why felines are so popular as
submissives, and Lord, if I meet another snow leopard who professes to be
another male's full-time slave I'll... That's unfair. Some of them are actually
quite, quite good.
I may be tall for my kind, but I haven't lost any of our typical stockiness, so
that if I chose to, becoming a bodybuilder of some quality would be a none too
difficult task. My limbs are heavy and my torso broad, but these are qualities
which I try to downplay. I do only light exercises to keep certain muscle groups
in shape, but otherwise I focus on parts of my body which might otherwise get
less attention. My fingers, for example - how terrible my life would be if they
were to be injured. I trim my claws to the proper length and sharpness daily and
the exercise regimen I have adopted to guard myself against RSI, the bane of
anyone with dexterous fingers, is more involved than most people's daily
work-out.
The result is marvelous, though. When relaxed, I can type on average two to
three hundred words per minute, I can tell gold from silver and glass from
crystal and I can judge the temperature of an object or the air in a room with
at most one degree Celcius deviation, all this by touch alone. I can trail a
claw over another's hide, thorugh the fur, scratching the skin lightly enough to
draw a gash through only the very top layer of the skin and, again by touch
alone, trace the exact path of a blod-vessel so that it becomes excited and
widens while its neighbors remain unaffected. I can fold an origami panda from a
postage stamp, on which, with an ink-dipped pin, I've written the full partiture
for the violin of Pachelbel's Canon in D.
Merely - I say merely, but take my word that it is no trifling feat - by the
caress of my fingers I can bring a person, male or female, old or young, to
terrible, gnashing arousal without ever straying from areas of their body which
are normally exposed in pleasant society. Hands, necks, faces. Merely by the
grip of my hands, the twist of my wrist or the penetration of my fingerclaws I
can end a person's life. Male or female, old or young. Quickly or slowly,
depending on my preference and this does tend to vary, so there's no real
average to be drawn there - but always silently.
Perhaps that bothers you, that last part. Not the silence, the killing people
part. You know, already, that I like hurting people but perhaps you're of the
impression that I mean the gentle kind of hurting that some take quite some
pleasure from. Paddling, whipping, clamps on certain parts of the body, or a
safe helping of electricity, these are known to excite some people sexually.
When I speak of hurting, though, it can mean one of two things, and one of these
is the kind of hurting that precedes, or in another way of putting it, leads up
to the termination of one's life. Without becoming crass with gory details,
which I'm sure you're not yet fully ready for, I could describe certain acts
which fit the bill, such as the removal of parts of body which still serve a
purpose, the breaking of things that should normally be left whole and the
destruction of the body's tissues through genuinely unpleasant but, considering
my superior intellect, shockingly creative ways.
Murderer, killer, homicidal maniac, torturer, butcher. Yes. All of these, yes. I
prefer another term though, and no, don't worry, it's not 'artist'. I'm not that
tacky. Technically, I consider myself a hobbyist, which is a reference to a
short story which I know for a fact you have never read, and more accurately, an
amateur in the original sense of the word. Look at the word and see what it
derives from; an amateur is someone who loves what he does, who does it out of
love for doing it, rather than because of some apprenticeship.
That's the introduction, all you need to know about me other than that, for all
I've divulged to you about my tastes - and I'll have you know that I've been not
only very tactful about these tastes but also very, very modest - I'm terribly,
terribly sexy. My body possesses that degree of masculine grace that arouses
both genders, both the dominant and he submissive, though primarily the latter.
Without becoming androgynous, it lacks certain exaggerated features which wold
otherwise close off the interests of some people with certain tastes, but nobody
thinks my shoulders are too broad or too narrow, nobody thinks I'm too muscular
or too slender. Even my feline grace is tempered by the bulk of my limbs and
this makes me very easy to recognize and very difficult to describe.
I take liberties, praising myself, of course, but these insights are culled from
reactions gleaned from others as well as objective self-reflection, which my
superior intellect can easily manage, of course unlike yours. You are very
primitive, and I am very advanced. Remember that.
I am irresistible. Those who like to be penetrated lick their lips at the sight
of me, those who like to have smaller persons under them to take pleasure from,
look at me an decide to try something else for a change, consider that perhaps
if even I'm not receptive to their kind of sport, that simply anything that they
and I could do together, sexually, would be gratifying. Often I've wondered at
this gift of mine, this magnetism, which I'm not ashamed of emphasizing. It's
rather special, and whether it stems from my unique personality or was one of
the causative factors, even my grotesque intellect can't discern.
But I wander from the path. I was trying, and this is always challenging for me,
to depart from the topic of myself and enter into the story proper. The story
proper is that I have just endured a twelve-hour airplane flight, followed by a
taxi cab ride from the airport to the city, from there another six-hour train
ride to yet another city, where I stayed for another four hours before taking
the bus to Maranatha, at another six hous' travel time. All this was following a
forty-eight hour conversation with a young man I met in a bar on the other end
of the world, took home, had sex with a few times, and then proceeded slowly to
kill. It was very invigorating and even now I feel no need to sleep.
Fresh-faced and clear-eyed, with no luggage and a crisp, new suit, I arrive at
my destination. No, actually, I'll go back to describing myself just once more:
I'm beautiful. Even though my attire is somewhat out of place, it seems as
though I, like a mobile La Defense, determine fashion and that everybody else
with their shirts and ties and slacks needs to catch up, feels embarrassed at
how they're dressed. Over modest, soft leather shoes I wear simple black khakis,
my torso clad in a black long-sleeved silk sweater and a crushed velvet black
blazer over this, all terribly humble, and yet I don't go unnoticed. Heads turn
as I push the glass doors of the building and step into a lobby buzzing with
yuppies, men and women, eyes all gleaming with pride at their own achievements
and covetousness at those of others. This place reeks of schemes.
I walk up to a reception desk, one of three, decked up in that modern style of
plain white shapes and soft, tasteful lights, so devoid of visible function and
yet so very natural looking, such as those popular digital music players, the
ones with the circular dial and the white earphones. Behind the desk is a
squirrel, her fur as white as the desk she sits behind, making her smart suit
look all the more crisp. From my inside pocket I withdraw my only luggage, my
wallet, and from the myriad cards it contains I withdraw my identification. S.
P. O. R. Brubaker. She types this in, informs me which floor I'm being expected,
would I like an escort? No? The elevators are over there, she says. I like her.
I decide she isn't someone I'd ever like to kill, and this gives me a good
feeling. I go to the elevators.
The building is a paradise of glass and steel and the cleanliness makes me very
happy. I like things that don't look like anything alive has ever involved
itself with them, things so inorganic and artificial that their existence can
only be explained by assuming that they have always existed, or that it simply
must be so, the way that certain minerals form crystalline structures of
surpassing splendor without ever having been designed for that purpose. Don't
make the mistake of assuming this is rooted in some disgust I feel toward the
flesh, far from it. I love the body, the flesh and its myriad splendid textures.
And sensations? We'll talk about those later. Please don't mind the strange
directions my thoughts travel in sometimes. I'll kill you if you mind.
That was a joke, for you to laugh at.
Proceed.
Without being aware of the intervening period between admiring the
steel-and-glass spectacle of reflections at the elevators and the bing signaling
my arrival at the floor I have no memory of selecting, I step out onto the floor
and the door closes behind me. I don't know if there was anyone in the elevator
with me or not, I simply can't remember. This is quite ordinary for me.
I am in a reception area, far more modest than the one on the ground floor of
course, and decorated in a very different style. There is more metal here, more
dark colors, things look more solid and massive than the white, light, nearly
effervescent shapes downstairs. I walk up to the reception desk, made of the
same expensive light wood that covers the floor, hard and polished enough to
reflect with almost mirror-like clarity yet still able to absorb enough of my
step so as to make only a little noise as I walk.
My ears, pointed, tufted little wonders, suddenly turn and I catch a sound which
means nothing to me but the instinctual reaction is something I heed, so I
ignore the polite young skunk behind the desk and turn my head. The reception
area seems to double as some type of lounge space, there are earth-tone leather
couches scattered about, a number of small, stylish coffee machines, a soup
dispenser even and various people milling about them, leaning against walls,
showing that they're on their lunch break by having their suit jackets tossed
lazily over a shoulder, males and females casually flirting with each other in
that deceptively professional way.
Images overlay what I can already see, another instinctual response and I
witness what a part of my mind has calculated, from what I have consciously and
unconsciously observed, a glimpse of everyone's future. The two young wolves
boasting and chatting and punching each other on the shoulder as they converse
near a coffee machine, I see them naked together for the first time, embracing,
laughing and then teasing and then growing angrier and angrier with each other
as they both realize that neither of them is willing to be the first to take it
under the tail. I see them shouting at each other, and then the image fades.
A bitchy-looking older vixen with tight, deep red lips and her hair bound back
in a tight bob, cowing people as she passes them with obvious authority, I see
her sitting at home in a spacious apartment on a luxurious couch, sipping
chilled white wine and watching a romantic movie on a large widescreen
television, bursting into tears, slapping her own face to make herself stop and
finally going on a rampage, throwing her wine against the window and screaming.
An organized-looking female serval in a neat grey business dress strolls through
the space, speaking on her cellular telephone in a calm, collected voice almost
walks straight through a timid young puma who darts aside and opens the door for
her and then slinks off - I see them sitting in a movie theatre, holding hands,
laughing and talking with each other as they enjoy a comedy together.
I see security guards, and it is among these that I spy the only herbivores in
the entire room. This isn't strange, as the world of business is typically the
domain of the more naturally competitive carnivorous species. A Palomino, who
betrays all equines everywhere in their otherwise generally well-deserved
reputation for excellent physical condition by packing quite a paunch.
Fortunately, he's the only one of the guards who distends his uniform in this
manner, the others, two hares, assorted hoofers and a jackal, appearing in much
better shape.
For the guards I see what you would expect - I see them in bars, drinking
heavily and smoking liberally, some of them hitting on and failing to attract
the sexual attention of girls, others failing just as miserably in their
endeavors with boys. So focused am I in my lightning-fast analysis of all these
people that it doesn't even strike me as odd that there should be such a large
security presence in such a small area, my attention drawn instead to two
things. First, that there are two people I can see for whom I can see no future
projection, the jackal security guard, whose uniform seems ill-fitting now I
focus my attention briefly on him, and black panther dressed almost identically
to myself - black, remember, a black suit in velvet and silk - except that his
attire comes over as far too dramatic considering his pelt is already shiny and
black.
The second thing that catches my attention is that I recognize this person (his
name is Claude, in case I forget to mention this later) and that not only has he
set down the newspaper he was reading but he's scanning the room with the same
attention I gave it and he has now recognized me as well. I can't describe what
it's like when we recognize each other, to even attempt that would necessitate a
lengthy explanation of how I know, or I should say, know of Claude, which I have
no inclination to do, especially since it would explain nothing about the
quality of the gaze he and I share.
It is interrupted when a girl, a slender vixen with a white shirt and a grey
skirt, bumps my arm and she drops the papers she was holding but before they
even hit the ground my arm is around her waist and I lean forward and tilt her
over my hip, grabbing her flailing arm at the elbow before taking hold of the
rear of her skirt as well, bunching it in my other fist, and hurl the poor girl
head-first toward Claude.
Without waiting to see if he dodges or she hits him I turn and throw all my
weight into a three-foot sprint to the nearest guard. I take the gun from his
holster and in the time it takes me to properly orient it in my hand and unlock
the safety lever I hear the vixen scream and grunt as she impacts what sounds
like an empty couch. I push past the guard I just robbed and toward the pudgy
horse behind him, who has all of half a second to reach for his own weapon
before I dart past him and behind him just as I hear the loud pop of a bullet
being fired from a gun, a sound amplified to terrible proportions in a confined
space like this.
A second shot is fired but it's only when the third bullet impacts his massive
body that the horse actually wavers and teeters backwards, threatening to crush
me, but I crouch low and launch myself over the ground, between his legs,
blindly opening fire.
You might think this silly, that someone who has professed to possess a superior
intellect and has demonstrated some exceptional physical capabilities as well
(for comparison of speed, realize that only now the papers the vixen dropped are
starting to hit the ground) might do something a little cleverer with a handgun
than pointing and randomly pulling the trigger. I openly admit that this is a
monumental flaw of mine, but I simply despise guns and have always avoided
touching them or using them. I simply don't have any practice with these weapons
and even when I wield one in a life-threatening situation I feel so sick at the
mere presence of it that my instincts desert me and there is nothing to guide my
hand but feeble conscious mental processes.
None of the guards, as yet, have had time to so much as draw their guns. This
isn't because they are slow, but because Claude and I are very, very fast. I
can't speak for him, but I even experience time a little differently from usual.
Events occur at a more languid pace, the world is a slow-motion prison with
people poised in unbalanced mid-motion, paper pages falling with all the urgency
of soap bubbles, where my mind commands my muscles to move at the speed to which
I am accustomed, yet merely lifting my leg to move it forward means combating a
force of gravity that is many times what I remember it being and even the air I
move through feels syrupy, as if it intentionally hinders my movement.
Claude is running to the side, away from the direction I'm sliding in and I put
my hands, gun and all, on the floor, bracing them. My body tips forward and up,
legs flying upward and smack against the face of an antlered guard, the backs of
my knees smacking against his chest and as he tips over I am able to use his
body as a platform to raise myself up in so that by the time he lands hard on
his back, one antler splintering on the wall behind him, I'm crouching on his
chest behind the cover of a couch.
I am sexually aroused, you have no idea.
The couch I'm hiding behind suddenly comes toward me, pushed, no doubt, by
Claude's full weight and as I spring upward I hear the stag guard's ribcage give
a satisfying little cracking sound. I retract my legs in mid-air to clear the
top of the couch and avoid hitting the ceiling and as the couch slams into the
stag's vulnerable legs, Claude has just enough time to roll out of the way to
avoid my descending boots.
One of my feet plunges through the upholstery of the couch, the other on the
ground and in an attempt to extricate myself I throw my weight backward.
Instinct kicks in for some reason and I find myself falling backward, arms
stretched back, continuing the fall as a somersault, and just in time, too - the
other guards have gathered their wits and opened fire, rightly assuming that the
time for yelling 'Freeze! Police!' or whatever this security force might yell is
far, far past.
My body arches as only a feline's can and the somersault brings me to a
perfectly balanced stance right up against the desk and I am completely exposed.
On the positive side I now have a moment to get a full view of everything that's
happening in the reception area: Two guards are down, three more remain - the
jackal is conspicuously absent. There are people running away from the lounge
area, the females hampered terribly by their unwieldy shoes; tough luck for
them. The men have scampered already, such as are able to, down the two
corridors that lead away from the reception, a few others are crawling. One is
the vixen I used as a projectile against Claude, unsteadily moving on all fours,
clearly lacking any sense of balance; another is a man clutching his face and
crawling away from the fizzling remains of the soup machine which emits bright,
violent sparks and a spray of steaming hot water from its internal boiler, which
I imagine the crawling, screaming young man received full in the face.
Oh, yes, the screaming. I'm so used to it I don't even hear it any more.
The moose's antlers smack me across the jaw as his neck gives a satisfyingly
final crunch and I have to wonder how it is that I could be so foolish as to
smack myself in the face when snapping someone's neck, an act I've performed on
numerous occasions. Then I wonder how I came to be holding this bull who, at
twice my size, seems like he belongs more in one of those guard uniforms than in
the crisp white shirt and black tie he's wearing, where he came from and indeed
where I am.
I drop the dead moose I'm holding and look around. A large office space for a
few dozen employees, of a non-cubicle persuasion. Several other bodies are
strewn about the place, over chairs, desks, slumped against walls, blood
covering several motivational posters. 'Work from the heart' takes on a whole
new meaning when splashed with arterial spray. I'm not even going to make a joke
about the disemboweled canid sitting in an attitude of spine-snapped lethargy
with is innards spilling out over a poster saying 'Show who you are inside'.
Do my descriptions bother you? I'm sorry. I suppose I've become somewhat jaded,
but don't worry, I'll try to be less literal from now on, for the benefit of
your gentle, blemishless soul.
Some of the corpses have the distinct trace of my claws on them, others have
bullet-wounds. By the far door there lies a discarded gun and the body of
another guard in a pool of blood with a slit throat. I surmise that after an
altercation that cost more lives than did damage, Claude ran out of bullets and
obtained a knife of sorts. Good for him.
I check myself - spotless. Not a scratch, nor a drop of blood on my stylish
attire, neither mine nor anybody else's, except on my fingers. Claude doesn't
seem to be bleeding either, from what I can tell of his tracks. I straighten my
jacket out, roll my shoulders and my neck to get comfortable, and as I head
through the doorway Claude obviously exited from I take a chrome-plated
letter-opener from a desk stand. Hardly an elegant weapon, but it feels pleasant
in the hand and it has good balance and a nice, sharp point.
I walk through the door and immediately turn right, positively sprinting and
once I'm doing that, I realize why I was driven to do so. A gun-toting guard was
just approaching the doorway and now I've managed to rush forward fast enough
that he's holding his gun over my shoulder and firing it behind me. The bang is
terribly loud, but at least it occurred behind my ear and not beside it, in
which case I'd be deaf on that side.
Walking down the hallway - by the way, the guard is dead by now, I stabbed him
in the back of his neck - I notice that most of the offices are empty. From one
of them, an older greyhound comes crawling, drooling blood on the floor,
dragging his legs behind him that seem bent at all the wrong angles. The door
he's pulling himself through is splintered inward, no doubt Claude hurled the
poor old dog through the door and he landed very badly on the edge of the
glass-top desk behind him. Tough luck, old chap.
Moving past him in search of Claude, he grips my leg and whispers something like
"Yell we," which makes no sense so obviously he's suffered some brain damage and
with a quick punch of my letter opener into the base of his skull I put an end
to that little problem too. Actually, now I think of it, my ear still rings a
bit so he probably said "Help me". No matter, I'd have still done the same thing
for the poor fellow.
Claude appears to be on the run from me. This bodes well, even though he most
likely has a knife that's a good deal larger and sharper than my little opener.
I start to jog, passing through empty offices and corridors now, in no
particular rush. My quarry - I find it satisfying to think of him as such,
rather than 'my adversary' - hasn't anywhere to go. We'll have, likely, about
two minutes before security forces figure out what's going on and manage to
wrestle their way up the stairs through the throng of fleeing white-collars and
they're likely to have already given descriptions of us both, so there is no
point in attempting to pretend to be a fleeing worker, either. He's on this
floor, he's going nowhere and the only reason he's fleeing from me is to prepare
for our confrontation.
I'm not afraid in the slightest. Claude, for all his skill as a killer, is an
intellectualist. I'm a predator. He calculates every move he makes; I calculate
most of them but when I feel the rush of heat in my blood and the pull of
instinct on my muscles, that insistent tug of millennia of survival, I know when
to hand over the reins and sit back while I experience my body doing terrible,
marvelous things to other people. Claude relies on a lifetime of training which,
if I remember correctly, gives the panther forty years on the outside, which
doesn't stand much of a chance against, oh, the three and a half billion years
it took nature to make me.
Ego? Why, yes. Yes I have. On top of which, I'm never afraid. This isn't a
boast, you should know, I actually consider it one of my few weaknesses. That,
and my mental condition, which I can only surmise is schizophrenia. I'll admit
I've never had myself analyzed, nor have I performed any degree of research into
what schizophrenia is or isn't. All I know is that I have these little spells
where I don't experience what happens in between, though this could conceivably
be an issue of memory rather than consciousness.
I hear sounds at the end of the corridor I'm walking through. I'm in no
particular rush, so I take my time peeking into every office to check for
bodies, of which I find only two, both of them in the same office. It occurs to
me that it must be a dreadful fate, to go to work and to visit a colleague and
to sit down for a chat and then to be butchered as a mere collateral casualty of
two dueling murderers. Tough luck, eh?
There's sound coming from up ahead, and though the door is still quite far away
I can read the sign clearly: "Conference Room". I tug at my sleeves for the
requisite one inch of shirt showing past the sleeves of the jacket, smooth my
lapels and make sure my jacket is properly buttoned and look in the reflective
glass cover of a piece of disgustingly bland corporate art on the white wall. My
face is lit only by the glare of the overhead lighting and doesn't appear as
dashing as I usually like to present myself, but it will have to do. The sounds
I notice are those of, shall we say, involuntary lovemaking, a female's squeals
and a male's grunts. Good old-fashioned rape amid the slaughter. She sounds to
be of some sort of canine species, I neither care nor listen all too carefully,
because this really is a pathetically cheap trick to pull.
I walk up to the door, very quietly and listen. The lovemaking seems to be
occurring some way away from the door, to the right-hand side. There's a regular
thump but only the female is squealing, suggesting she's bent over a table or
some such, though curiously, she doesn't verbalize any complaints. I step away
from the door again and peer into the nearest office, where I find nothing of
the sort I'm looking for, it seems to be an office with the exclusive purpose of
facilitating internal meetings - the lighting is subdued, the walls and door are
soundproofed, there is only one computer with two flat screens so that both
occupants can look at what's on it.
Being in no rush, I walk to the next office. The female is whimpering now while
the male bangs away at her, losing himself in the rut - this is the time I
should make my entrance, when Claude's off guard. I find what I need in this
office and, bending my knees, I grab the chest-high filing cabinet at the base
and lift. I hear noises in my spine and shoulders that suggest the cabinet is
too heavy for me, but I pay them no more attention than usual. As an idol of
mine once said - and I admit, it has been copied far too often by others - "I'm
good with pain."
The cabinet threatens to tip me forward and that's fine, as long as I point it
down the hall in the right direction, breaking into a run, still mouse-quiet,
leaning into the run to propel the heavy, square cabinet further. One of the
drawers threatens to fall out, creaking far more noisily than my footsteps, but
it's too late to worry about that. With a final yell, a kiai, as it were, I hurl
the cabinet through the door. The faux hardwood door splinters into chunks of
plywood and thick varnish and amid the thunderous clatter of bullets peppering
the cabinet, perfectly following its trajectory - Claude's a good shot, after
all - I dash into the room and randomly pick left as my destination.
I'm in a conference room, with windows facing me and an elongated black table
centering the darkly tinted but brightly lit room. The view is gorgeous;
Maranatha looks absolutely stunning with the sun shining down on its citizens
with all the UV radiation it can squeeze through our planet's scarred ozone
layer and I can see it all the more clearly once the filing cabinet, its drawer
finally flung open when it skidded over the table's surface, bursts through the
window-wall in an explosion of prismatic, mesmerizing glass shards and a festive
cloud of paperwork.
Claude is damnably clever, though, in a way I'm ashamed I didn't see coming.
While he tries to wrest his panicked, devoted aim off the filing cabinet now
hurtling down God knows how many floors to a plaza full of brunching
businesspeople and point his half-spent guns at yours truly, he moves sideways.
I charge toward him, he moves to the side, running along the other side of the
table and it makes me giggle as I scramble to a halt to avoid the bullets that
pop and prattle into the expensive wallpaper on the wall ahead of me. Like I
said, Claude's an excellent marksman, so I don't have much faith in running
through a hail of his bullets, so I figure it best simply to stop in m tracks
and restart again when he tries to take fresh aim.
You'll have to forgive the laughter, really. I assure you it isn't hysterical
laughter, it's just terribly comical that my quarry should use such an
old-fashioned playground trick to keep me at a distance, and so effectively!
Fortunately, I know a trick and all it'll take me is one and one tenth of a
second, and possibly the use of my legs for the rest of my life, we'll see.
Rather than chasing after him, which might work since he's now reached the part
of the centre table where his two captives are coupling - if you haven't figured
it out, at this point, Claude had taken two living prisoners, one male, one
female and ordered the male at gunpoint to mount the female, so that I would
think, listening to the sounds, that Claude was raping her and that he was on
that side of the table, rather than hidden beside the door - I scramble back the
other way, keeping low so that the table's between Claude and myself and then,
reaching the midpoint of the table, clearly from the expensive end of the Ikea
catalogue, I sit down on my derriere, brace my shoulders under the tabletop and
with a roar and a creak in my spine and a pop in my knee and literally thousands
of calories of energy I manage to wrest the tabletop off its pedestal, the pegs
with which it was inserted digging into my neck as I toss it backward.
The motion is awkward and off-balance, which confuses me for a second and I
deduce with an inward groan, as the left end of the table smashes into the
window-wall first, that by disregarding the mating hostages I also disregarded
the fact that they were doing so on top of the table I was trying to
disassemble! So Claude is already out the door and running away, busily
reloading, by the time the right-hand side of the tabletop, intended to smash
him in the side of the head, crashes through the window as well, sending the
whole thing along with the male and female to join the filing cabinet on the
plaza below. By the sound of the screams, they seem to have landed amid, or
atop, a number of curious onlookers who came to inspect the cabinet and stood
close enough to be crushed by the falling bodies, or wood, or glass.
Fools.
A quick stretch reveals my spine is fine, a quick feel that my right kneecap is
in the wrong place. It's quickly popped back with a few judicious pushes of the
thumbs and a bending of the leg, and the pain is pleasantly refreshing. With
renewed vigor and, unfortunately, a limp, I pursue him some more.
Yet another hallway, how terribly boring. A dozen offices on either side, one of
the doors left open in the distance. Much closer, though, is the door to the
emergency stairwell and while it's an impressive feat, running to the end of the
hallway to open the door and then running back to take the stairs without making
a sound, all this in the time it took me to sort out my knee, it's not
impossible, and Claude is good. I stop at a janitor's closet on the way and pull
out the light little cart, tossing his mop and bucket aside and then quickly
yank every plastic bottle from the various shelves that has the red 'flammable'
warning on it along with a few rolls of wiping paper, all haphazardly arranged,
finally opening one such up (Mayk-it-Kleen or some such nonsense) and emptying
the contents over the exciting variety of chemicals. I carefully drive my
rickety, dripping cart down the hall toward the emergency door, stopping only to
relieve a dead guard of his sidearm, and only the stinking, disorienting fumes
steaming off the tray cart covers the sickness I feel at the mere touch of a
gun.
I push the door open and, as expected, there are guards coming up the stairs.
Their uniforms are of the same color as the ones wrapped around the bodies
Claude and I left on this floor, though there seem to be a great many more
running up the bland, white, well-lit spiral staircase, from what I can see, all
mumbling that strange hut-hut-hut that military people like so much. With a
kick, I send my little cart careening down the stairs and shoot at it before it
gets too far. Immediately all the guards duck under the cover of the guard
rails, on all the floors and floors of stairs spiraling down beneath me, so the
topmost guards fail to notice that the cart, covered with wadded paper soaked in
flammable cleaning substances, has now slightly caught fire. Tossing the gun
down the gap of the stairwell with disgust, I grab the handrail and hoist myself
upward, starting to follow Claude, pulling myself forward with every other step
on account of my limp.
I wonder which floor Claude went to?
When a sudden loud popping sound occurs, echoing madly through the vertical pile
formed by the emergency stairwell, soon followed by a sudden wave of heat and
red light and screams as the cart properly bursts into flame and continues
rumbling down the steps, spilling half-melted bottles of corrosive or flammable
materials for the entertainment of the guards it passes, I stop in my tracks and
chuckle. Claude's actually pretty clever.
I carefully go back down the steps, ignoring the sounds of screams and random,
panicked gunfire and the occasional whoosh-thud of a burning guard jumping over
the rail to put the flames out, only to find that they are indeed out by the
time he hits the floor several stories below. I stop briefly to admire the
spectacle - three floors worth of stairs are burning to greater and smaller
degrees, with men waving their arms and patting themselves to put the flames
out, or howling and protecting their eyes, or choking, or simply burning and I
wonder what it must be like to burn. I think I might enjoy it, actually, feeling
the fluids in your skin boil away before the surface cracks and peels away,
exposing the muscle for charring. Almost jealously, I regard the security people
whose last moments are so very interesting. Regretfully I pull my attention away
from the spectacle and go back to the floor I came from, shutting the door
behind me.
Clever, clever, clever. The old I-know-you-know-I-know-you-know, he didn't
double back. He opened the office at the far end of the hallway and continued,
the sly devil. I jog in a wobbly fashion on account of my annoyingly
uncooperative right knee, the joint burning every time I put my weight on it,
though I know that movement is good for a dislocated joint and besides, the pain
is comforting. I turn a corner and find this hallway to lead to a familiar place
- the earth-toned and now blood-spattered reception slash lounge, and it's from
there that I hear Claude utter the first word I've ever heard him speak: "Fuck."
I wince at the swear, not only because I'd taken him for the kind of elitist
who'd say "merde" or "mon dieux," if he were of a gentler persuasion, I honestly
don't know him well enough to predict that - but "fuck"? My neck hairs bristle
and my whiskers splay. Swearing upsets me. I don't like it at all. Do you swear?
If I ever meet you and I hear you swear, I'll kill you very very slowly.
In the closest thing to blind rage I've come in a while, and let me take the
time to point out that while it's true that I hate swearing, my current
emotional state is uncharacteristically extreme and can only be attributed to
the fact that I'm probably insane - filled with anger and fury I charge into the
reception. I hop over the couches, landing softly on the squishy belly of some
office worker, blood fountaining comically from his mouth and simply run. Claude
could have shot me a dozen times over If he were facing me, but he isn't. He's
prying open the elevator doors, pushing them apart with his bare hands, fingers
bleeding from the claws he tore while trying to get the doors open and in a
moment he looks at me over his shoulder.
I must be roaring or shouting, because my mouth is open and there's a lot of
noise, but I don't know for certain. What I'm certain of is that my body impacts
Claude's hard enough that he emts a sound like no other I've ever heard, simply
produced by the sudden collapse of his lungs during an attempted scream, and we
both fly out into the dark, deadly elevator shaft.
Things happen very slowly from this point forward. Slowly for me, at least. I'm
practically hugging Claude from behind. I like his smell, he smells clean, with
a modest helping of cologne, and he smells of blood and the pleasant oily,
sulphurous scent of gunpowder. He spreads his arms, as if to surrender and to
experience flight in his last moments, and I close my arms around him, feeling
my fingers sink knuckle-deep into the muscle of his stomach. We fall about two
floors before we hit the ceiling of a still-standing elevator, but I'm so busy
pulling the spasming Claude's insides out of his abdomen that we quickly roll
off.
My mind is occupied, while Claude comes apart under the attention of my fingers,
the details of which I'll spare you, as I promised previously. How fortunate I
am to have landed not only on that elevator just now, but also on another three
floors down and going down so the fall hardly hurts at all. How sad it is that
Claude is now all but dead, and after only such a short scuffle. Now, I
understand, gentle reader, that to you the massacring of an entire floor of an
office building and dozens upon dozens of honest, hard-working security
personnel, might be something you'd describe using words like "brutal" or
"excessive" or even "diabolical", but it's a fairly modest endeavour by my, and
Claude's standards. The Quebecois cat whose bits and pieces are coming away from
the trunk of his body so satisfyingly has some truly legendary achievements to
his name. Good, old-fashioned shudder-inducers like the burning down of an
orphanage to hide one single incriminating birth certificate, long forgotten in
a hidden basement room. Pro-actively administering one half of a two-component
poison to an entire flock of law school graduates so that, at any point, they
could easily be given the second component, causing their death, but leaving no
trace of harmful substances in their bodies - good, solid work, all of it.
And now? Now he's a few smears of blood on some unwashed concrete elevator shaft
walls, a few unrecognizable hunks of meat on elevator roofs and inter-floor
walkways and one scarecrow of a corpse, which I hold in one hand, my other
clinging to the rung of the maintenance ladder running down the side of the
elevator shaft. My arm, the one holding on to the ladder, hurts like my knee
does, from the sudden impact of halting my fall by grabbing the rung, so I drop
Claude's lifeless remains and switch hands long enough that I can pop my
shoulder back in its socket with a deft flick of my arm. Honestly, that limb's
been in and out of socket so often I can just about pop it at will.
Claude vanishes down the dark shaft and I continue climbing down. I figure that
there'll be some sort of boiler room downstairs from which I can plan some kind
of escape, but as I climb down and down I notice something very odd. The floor,
the very bottom floor of the shaft isn't concrete - it's yellow. Bright, shiny
yellow, with an ever-growing splash of red, the blood seeping from Claude's
gaping chest.
Grinning, I continue climbing down. I have a feeling about what I'll see when I
get there.
"Did you really think I'd need that?" I ask the stallion in his finely cut black
business suit, suited comfortably in a fold-up chair beside a coffee-table laid
out with tea and biscuits. I point at the inflatable safety-mattress behind me,
so large and bloated that I could probably have simply dropped from the floor I
jumped out of and survived. Two men dressed in black uniforms, different than
the other guards upstairs, are behind me, carefully removing Claude from the top
of the yellow balloon, slipping about on the slick blood, making it look like
one of those bouncy castles for children. "Tiber Ferrum, you really
underestimate me sometimes," I say with a chiding grin, doing my best Stern
Mother impression as I take a seat on the white plastic deck chair opposite
Tiber's side of the small table.
We're in a maintenance hallway at the base of the elevator shaft, which
stretches some distance behind him. The walls are dark grey concrete, lit from
overhead bulbs which emit an annoying flicker. Behind Tiber stands the jackal I
saw in the reception earlier, though he seems to have traded the blue security
uniform he wore upstairs for the black outfit also worn by two more guards, who
sling their weapons on their straps and use their free hands to peel my jacket
off my shoulders and lift my pullover up.
"Can it," says Tiber, the stallion looking at me with his usual unreadable
reserve and I cock my head, wondering what I said wrong, until a hare appears
from behind his seat. The young male crawls over on his knees, looking quite
comfortable to do so, dressed only in a tight white tank top and a pair of
cutoff jeans.
"Hi, I'm Cannit! Your friend Mister Tiber hired me to help you relax," the
cheerful lapine explains as the handsome youth kneels beside my chair and leans
over to open up my pants. Naturally, I've been hard as a rock during the entire
altercation and I melt back into the chair as a warm, talented mouth engulfs my
member, and I do indeed relax.
The stallion sets down his cup of tea and leans forward, while the guards each
fetch a pail ofsoapy water and begin scrubbing the blood off my forearms. I let
it all happen, lazy as a Persian prince, and interrupt the tall, striking horse
in his fine business suit before he can start. "Let me guess. You have a job
that needs doing, one with so many variables that you require an independent
thinker, who has no limits, to come up with a solution. You obviously didn't ask
me first, so you probably suspect that there is someone in this city who might
know who I am, and so you asked around and convinced Claude to visit. In the
time between this agreement and his arrival you changed your mind and invited me
anyway, timing the arrivals specifically to cause Claude and me to meet. This
boy gives really good head, by the way, you ought to try him."
Tiber sits back in his chair, content to let me do the talking. "I have," says
the stallion and I can feel the hare who's performing slow, deep, easy fellatio
on my needful manhood is grinning in agreement, though the suction nor the
delicious flicking of his tongue never waver. "Go on," Tiber says encouragingly,
looking at me with those unfathomable dark eyes of his.
I think for a second. "The timing is more critical even than simply causing us
to meet. You knew the situation would explode, that we would have no choice but
to go after each other," I says, sighing happily as my arms and face are washed
and then dried, the hare's head bobbing dutifully at my groin, his ears
comically bouncing in and out of view between Tiber and me. "You wouldn't want
that sort of thing happening in your office. So you're not in charge today.
You've taken some leave, or have business elsewhere, and this massacre happened
on the watch of the guy who stepped in to run your department in your absence.
He'd get all the fall-out, and you would be completely free of blemishes."
The four guards return into vie, two of them carrying a plastic deck chair much
like the one I'm lounging in, enjoying some pleasant oral and even more pleasant
company, reaching out for some tea - Darjeeling, with half a spoon of grass
honey and just a dash of lime - and upon that chair the remains of Claude are
laid out. Tiber doesn't blanch at this, and the hare can't see it, since he's
facing away, so I keep my hand on the back of his head to protect him from the
sight, and to quickly snap his neck in case he sees it and the fright causes him
to bite down.
I smile at Tiber and raise my cup in salute to him. "I'm not even going to ask
how you predicted that I'd end up in the stairwell," I say, sharing a chuckle
with the horse, the laughter echoing through the long concrete hallway, from
which emerges half a dozen or so men in white coats, all wearing green surgical
face-masks and blue latex gloves, some of them pulling two steel trolleys behind
them while others carry leather cases under their arms. Quickly, they surround
me and Claude, placing the trolleys between us and three of the men start
working on the corpse, though what they do I can't tell, while the other three
focus on me, and I simply let them.
Tiber clears his throat and everybody briefly pauses in their work, even the
jackal behind him breaking his guard-dog sternness and folding his ears for a
split-second, before solidifying again as the stallion continues and pours
himself a fresh cup of tea. "I have to leave for a while, an urgent... family
matter." He doesn't explain what that means, and I don't ask. The doctors
surrounding me are feeling my pulse, my throat, combing my damp fur,
occasionally pushing Cannit aside, who always manages to shift into a position
where he can continue performing his job. And a great job he's doing, let me
tell you. "I was interested in reconfiguring the standing structures in a
segment of this city's organized crime, though by various circumstances, that
seems to have backfired. I've prepared some materials for you-"
I hiss suddenly, and one of the doctors seems to think the hiss is in protest to
the syringe he's jabbing into my throat, but I nod to him to let him know it's
all right, and a warm tingle spreads through my veins as he withdraws the
syringe and pricks another into my wrist. The sounds of what delicious arts
Cannit is performing on my erection mingle with the sounds of what the doctors
are doing with Claude's remains.
"Don't worry," says Tiber in his deep, reassuring tone, assuaging my worries
that he's forgotten how I hate to be over-prepared for any job. "All you need Is
a list of names. I trust you'll figure the rest out for yourself. You're sharp
that way," he says, handing a business card to the jackal guard behind him, who
walks over, politely pushing his way past the doctors surrounding me to show me
the card and the names written on it for two seconds, and then walks away again,
tearing the card up. Meanwhile, two of the doctors are busy shaving the fur
around my neck and ears, my eyebrows and my lips and my wrist, all of which I
accept without question.
Clearly, Tiber wants me incognito while I'm on the job, and now the whole fracas
upstairs makes complete sense. Tiber loves nothing more than to subtly push two
great forces into competition with each other and seeing which one wins; it's
why he pitted Claude and me against each other and it's probably what he's been
doing with the upper-tier criminals in this city. The doctors, finished with
their shaving, each reach across me, their arms brushing against the hare's
ears, who irritatedly huffs around the penis he's so skillfully sucking on, and
pick up scalpels and forceps from the tray. I notice in the glint of metal the
letters S P O R engraved in each of the instruments and I smile at how
thoughtful Tiber is, not only providing the hare's mouth for my comfort, but
also my favorite brand of scalpel.
"You have the standing mandate not to kill too many people, though you will be
held accountable for none of your actions. I'll accept whatever decisions you
make in the field, as usual," says Tiber and sips his tea, the jackal behind him
visibly gulping and blanching as the doctors begin to cut into the skin of my
wrists, my hands, my neck and my face. It feels very interesting, those
laser-sharp incisions in so many parts of my body, and I'm pleasantly surprised
to notice that none of the substances they just injected me with were
anesthetics, so the pain is deliciously vivid. I close my eyes and moan happily
at the sensations, feeling the surgical steel slide through my skin like a shark
through a school of sardines.
"Just try not to kill too many people. You know," says Tiber and I open my eyes
to look at him. A piece of skin is removed from the side of my face and laid
carefully in a prepared tray on the trolley, while one of the doctors who was
working on Claude comes discretely our way to hand over a bowl containing a
patch of silky midnight-black-furred skin. A pair of scissors crip-crip-crip
through the cartilage of one of my ears. "You know," the horse repeats
earnestly, patting my sore knee, "I knew you'd beat Claude. And I'm glad."
I smile at him as he stands up, straightens his tie and leaves with two of the
guards, the jackal, the two remaining guards and the six doctors now all working
in silence, looking more nervous with every echoing hoofstep signaling Tiber's
departure. Only Cannit seems unaffected, the sweet, stupid thing that he is and
as more skin is removed from my face the sensations finally drive me over the
edge and I climax in the boy's mouth, my fist true orgasm in several months.
It seems to last that long - several months. I ride the high in fast-forward and
slow-motion at once, continuing to feel the icy cold burning sting of the steel
cutting my flesh and the warm muzzle engulfing me to the base and swallowing
hungrily, I feel like I'm literally floating, weightless, buoyed by the ecstasy
of extremes, on a cloud of downy-soft hare-fur and white-hot razorblades...
Finally I come down from my high, and once again, time has passed that I'm not
aware of. I'm standing outside the Sargasso building, on the plaza decorated
with an explosion-pattern of glass shards and papers and blood with in its
center a filing cabinet, a long wooden conference table top and two corpses
being busily photographed. Police and panicked onlookers are everywhere, the
former trying to herd the latter to make room for the ambulances arriving and
leaving immediately when a shivering, sheet-covered victim is delivered on a
gurney.
Amid all this I stand, with silky black fur on my hands and on my face, with
'cutesy' rounded ears atop my head, a black leather jacket hugging my shoulders,
buttoned up all the way, a pair of black leathers clinging to my legs. I look
better than Claude did in his suit, and he looked positively edible.
"Excuse me sir, you'll have to move," says an irritated bear in a cheetah in a
police uniform, pushing me away from the plaza and toward the side of a large
police van, I'm standing amid a crowd of truly terrified panthers and lynxes,
all of them looking worried. The bored-looking police-bear standing beside the
van's open door calls for a volunteer, and when none come forward, I raise my
hand, quickly lowering it before the stitches show, let alone my natural
grey-with-spots fur.
"This way, sir," says the bear gruffly as I push my way through the crowd,
listening to the babble of journalists and reporters juggling their need to
remain on-camera and interesting with their desire to bribe the policemen
preventing them from getting close-ups of the carnage. I step forward and from
inside the van a technician, a young rat appears. "Just hold still, sir," says
the bear, cupping my chin. The tension on my face causes pulling at the seams,
but my new hide sticks fairly well to my facial muscles. The bear holds my head
and the rat takes a snapshot with a large, clunky-looking plastic camera with a
strange red lens, then he turns my head and the rat takes another snap. "Just
one moment, sir," says the bear, keeping one hand on his pistol and the other on
my chin while the rat returns to the van's interior.
I see him setting the camera down in a cradle clearly designed for it, I see him
loading up the two pictures of my face on one screen, over which the computer
overlays yellow dots marking my eyebrows, nose, cheekbones, jaws while another
screen in the bank of monitors that lights the rat's face with their grizzly
black-and-white images shows footage from a security camera offering a blurry
close-up of Claude's face back in the conference room. Over his face the points
are drawn as well, and a large overlay on the screen with my pictures shows a
number of percentages, with the largest being an average match score of
fifty-nine per cent.
The bear releases me, nods and I push my way through a throng of disaster
tourists, reporters and emergency walkers and, with the sun not yet risen to
noon, I think I'm ready to take apart Maranatha City until I find the pieces I'm
looking for.
To be continued.
Available on paperback in 2005
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