kagablog

Kenzo Cold-Eyes drove a souped up space-cruiser with a blue glitter paint-job and Stingray fins. You could see him coming a mile away any time of the day. The car had a massive carrying capacity and the back cabin had been fitted with a semi-circular white couch, mini-bar and television. He would occasionally supplement his income by hiring himself out as a limo service for those who could afford it. Everybody knew Kenzo Cold-Eyes in the big party circuit and he was often hired to follow errant spouses with telephoto lens and a notepad. When he finally arrived at the house he had The Pink Samurai with him. Number Nun tried the television but the channel reception was fried. As much as they tuned about for news, all they could pick up was a soap opera broadcast on every public access channels. The soapie itself was a 24 hours default, screened only in times of trouble. The characters spoke an indecipherable language and the whole thing was shot on ancient video equipment to dismal effect. A mirror ball spun a tactless party shimmer over the grim passengers huddled in the back while Kenzo-Cold-Eyes gunned the car down a dark jungle road. Foliage swept ghostly blurs through the yellow headlights, catching in the eyes of animals. The occasional grass hut flashed past, but these structures grew sparse as the jungle became denser and more uninhabited. The front section of the cruiser sported two luxurious cream couches, well spaced. Kenzo Cold-Eyes had the wheel of course, blasting indecipherable arcade game jingles into his loopy cigarette smoke. The Pink Samurai had shotgun, an enormous pair of military issue night-vision goggles obscuring half his swarthy face. He scanned the darkness outside in drunken sweeps, the light glinting off his gold teeth and candy coloured armor. Number Nun occupied the back, along with Taty, Cherry Cola and the twins. Cherry Cola was sobbing hard, her head on Taty’s lap, refusing to speak about her experiences in the house. Subdued strip lighting illuminated them from below in muted aquarium shimmer, creating a chic cocktail bar effect that was by now thoroughly out of place. Number Nun was attempting to retune the television with optically projected infrared beams. In times of crises the wrestlers were known to jam all transmission, so the TV blackout was not entirely unexpected. Yet despite all odds, Number Nun still persisted in the hopes of uncovering rebel transmissions hidden within the noise.

“Not far now we hit outer Necropolis like bang on in,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes announced. “Via Pyramid Quarter, the jungle deep - City not safe man, three day total chaos! Everbody frogfucking!”

Cherry Cola let out a pitiful whine when she heard this. Taty clutched onto her, terrified.

“They made me do it with the green boy,” she whimpered from the depths of Taty’s arms.

Number Nun snapped to attention, instantly activating her eye filters. She scanned the girls with her spectral vision and quickly noticed an anomaly at the base of Cherry Cola’s spine. A baby Symbiote was hiding like a child, behind the tree stump of her coccyx. It noticed Number Nun and stared back at her through the shifting bone and glassy layers of flesh, its face already beginning to mimic the roller skating waitress’s like a crudely manufactured finger puppet.

“There’s one of those things inside you,” Number Nun mentioned.

Cherry Cola began to panic and scream, begging the android to remove it.

“Leave her alone!” Taty shouted. “Stop frightening her!”

Number Nun turned to Kenzo Cold-Eyes, adopting a confidential tone

“We need to head back into the city,” she muttered. “We have to get her to Daddy Bast’s chop-chop and slice this thing out of her.”

“Daddy Bast central zone number one,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes squinted fatalistically. “Ground zero-zero.”

“According to my estimations, it will take five hours for the parasite to reach her brainstem,” Number Nun insisted. “We have to try to save her.”

Taty’s attempts to restrain and comfort Cherry Cola fell apart without warning. The afflicted girl began screaming uncontrollably, thrashing about like an injured animal. Taty clung to the bucking maniac, pale and terrified. Number Nun flipped back the tip of her right index finger, revealing a hypodermic needle. She jabbed it into Cherry Cola’s neck and the roller skating waitress fell immediately limp, cluttering to the carpet like a mannequin. Kenzo Cold-Eyes slowed, pulling over onto a muddy verge. He cut the engine and the arcade game music died, leaving them with the ragged sound of Taty’s frantic breathing.

“What did you do to her!” she shrieked, regarding the fallen form in horror.

Number Nun brandished the syringe in irritation.

“Quiet Childbride, or I will put you to sleep as well.”

Taty shrunk to the far end of the cabin, squatting numbly beside Cherry Cola’s inert form.

“We die maybe we turn back,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes stated matter-of-factly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Number Nun tut-tutted.

The detective lit a fresh cigarette while The Pink Samurai scanned the trees outside. Soon they had turned around and were heading back into the city.

Upturned cars lay burning in the streets. The inner quadrants had transformed overnight into a sort of deserted war zone, bristling with craters and pockets of flaming debris. The passengers scanned furtively about whilst driving. Kenzo Cold-Eyes had his raygun out on the dash and The Pink Samurai was anxiously fingering the hilt of a rhinestone shotgun. Distant gunfire followed them around every street corner. The esplanade was less altered than they had anticipated. Despite the rubble and the damage, stragglers still loitered on the strip. Lights burned in the windows of the Nebula Shell Sea and there were people on the street. Some of the windows of the Dead Duck had been obliterated, but music still jangled from the juke creating an unexpected atmosphere of festivity amongst the patrons on the sidewalk. Cherry Cola had woken up and was leaning groggily against the sill, cuddled up in Taty’s arms, watching the lights with narcoleptic fascination.

“Thank fuck the duck is still diving,” she slurred with pride.

“Not so bad as imagined seems,” Kenzo Cold-Eyes reported pointlessly.

“Its just a power shift,” Number Nun stated. “Things will resume a sort of normality very soon.”

“Is the big Buddha taking over?” Taty asked, still morbid about the demise of Alphonse.

“It looks that way,” the android confirmed.

The Pink Samurai unexpectedly jumped from the slow moving vehicle, slamming the door behind him. They watched him stagger into the Dead Duck like a big pink cockroach.

“Don’t stop till we reach Daddy Bast’s,” Number Nun said to Kenzo Cold-Eyes. “We need to find Romeo The Dealer when we are done – he’s the only one who can get us out of town.”

The entrance to the wharves was a region of cluttered shanty shacks housing all manner of disenfranchised zone-sters and maritime drek. Massive, rotten warehouses loomed and receded in the headlights. Sailor types mingled with ebony skinned jungle hoodlums, clogging up doorways, smoking space-spice and playing antique games of chance with bird bones and hood ornaments. Strange orchestras of organ grinders drifted like lepers, emitting a haunting xylophonic ruckus wherever they went. They reached the inner dockyards where monstrous piers reached into the seething breakers. Decrepit vessels and abandoned freighters clung to these ghostly structures, harking back to a time when the town was still a thriving and legitimate seaport. The farthest and longest pier was shipless, save for a vintage cruise liner anchored about halfway down. The ship was monumental, a rusted hulk twinkling with many, tiny pinpricks of light and topped by triple funnels which loomed like fins against the gloomy cloudbanks. They passed through a small maze of crates and through the wreckage of a barricade, passing peasant women in shawls and limping, sickly men. The drive down the pier beyond was however, smooth and unobstructed. A wide, metal gangplank creaked against the stone of the pier, watched over by oil-dark men in beaded gowns. The men huddled beside the water, toasting bizarre fish in the fire of a garbage can. Their knives glinted in the oncoming headlights, creating long shadows against the barnacled flanks of the old ship. And it was only when they drew closer that Taty noticed the many mangy hyenas, all tethered to leashes like monstrous children, licking at human bones. Some had patterns shaved into their scrawny flanks, while the fur of others had been bleached and dyed improbable colours. A sign above the gangplank read: DADDY BAST’S VOODOO SURGERY in hand-scrawled script. They came to a halt and Number Nun exited the cruiser, addressing the guards in a sibilant jungle tongue. They seemed to recognize her and smiled big white toothy grins out of the half-dark. She exchanged pleasantries with them before leaning back in through the window.

“Daddy Bast will cure you,” she assured Cherry Cola.

She then opened the door and scooped out the drugged roller-skating waitress as though she were a flimsy toy. Too inebriated to protest, the usually feisty girl simply clung on as she was ferried up the plank toward a gaping hatch. Taty went with, clinging to Number Nun’s garments, too afraid to remain in the car. The Sugar Twins also followed suit, trailing like dazed pets. Kenzo Cold-Eyes wasn’t particularly happy at being left alone to wait in the car, but his good conscience kept him from voicing his displeasure. He simply watched them swallow into the side of the wounded ship, neurotically checking his watch and the dwindling charge status of his blaster.

The interior of the surgery ship was dim, encrusted with innumerable shrines to inconceivable deities. Candles glowed out of the darkness illuminating sacrificial chickens and wooden effigies of cigarette smoking Gods and lamb’s hearts festooned with nails and personal tokens. Patients were clustered throughout the constricted metal passages, either dying on makeshift gurneys or leaning against bulkheads, their limbs and faces obscured by leaf fiber bandages. Neon tubes flickered at intervals, illuminating some terrible biological catastrophe or another. Everywhere could be discerned the tinny sound of chanting and drumming. The nurses were also peculiar, clad in tight, shiny leathers and dehumanizing fetish gear, their faces deleted by suffocating rubber masks and tubes. Their doll-like, erotic nature seemed at odds with their roles as nurses and they limped painfully through the darkness on extended needle heels and metal pony hooves like a legion of afflicted insects. Some dragged trolleys of stained medical equipment through dripping holds while others engaged in sexual intercourse with the more seriously injured patients. The metallic, ringing wails of the wounded penetrated deeply into Taty, causing her to grit her teeth and clap her palms over her ears in anguish. She stumbled through this ophidian realm on a sort of autopilot, terrified at the prospect of being separated from the others. The small caravan clattered down iron stairwells and along unilluminated shafts until a dismal sort of reception area eventually loomed out of the darkness. It was a flame-licked niche, swathed in flower garlands and carvings of jungle spirits. A nurse was stationed in the dingy area, locked into a face-brace and collared cruelly to a post. She was sorting through a pile of severed limbs, her bare limbs spotted with all manner of blood and biological secretions. A drip was attached to her inner thigh slowly feeding phosphorescent green fluid into her veins. She smiled when she saw Number Nun though, instantly losing some of her previous inhumanity.

“Haven’t seen you down in the soup for awhile,” she giggled through stainless steel facial clasps.

“Where’s Big Daddy Sabrina? I have a waitress with some sort of alien internal parasite.”

“Fucking symbiotes,” the nurse spat left and right. “Nothing but symbiotes for the last few days, Daddy told us Mister Sister’s introduced some form of inter-dimensional contagion into the city.”

She peered at Cherry Cola, her face distorted by the punishing brace.

“Has it taken over her yet?” she enquired in a clinical manner entirely incongruous with her dreadful, slave-like appearance.

“Still crawling up inside the lower spine, eating out pain arrays, virtually undetectable.”

“Yeah, Big Daddy will wanna see her. We’ve only been getting Vickie-victims in the late stages so this could help. Take Cinderella down to the wait-pit and I’ll get the panther on the horn.”

The wait-pit was a long mess room that had been converted into a waiting area. Taty and Number Nun sat on uncomfortable seats for some time with Cherry Cola lying across their laps. The twins had drifted back to the deck somewhere along the way. All around the wait-pit, men in beads restrained hunch-ridden symbiote-sufferers in various stages of transformation. Their pitiful sounds were utterly abhorrent and fluid covered the floor, seeping through grilles into unspeakable gutters.

“So what’s up with the nurses?” Taty asked Number Nun, her nose clamped firmly shut. “Why they got up all pony style?”

“Daddy Bast enslaves and breaks those who seek to study beneath him, its part of his culture,” Number Nun recited, as though from an encyclopedia. “If they are subservient enough he slowly transforms their bodies and bequeathes powers unto them so that they may help him in his work.”

“What a creep,” Taty muttered.

“Oh, he’s not like that at all,” Number Nun replied quietly.

A pale skinned nurse in lace-up stilletoes and cruelly fastened straps approached them through all the blood and broken bodies. Clutched in her hand was the head of a flamingo, its serpentine neck twined about her bony arm like a fat rope.

“Big Daddy will grace you now,” she rasped, anointing each of their foreheads with a smear of bird blood.

The ‘operating theatre’ was sealed with a large, circular hatch in the floor. A metal ladder descended into the bowels of the vessel and the nurse and Number Nun preceded Taty down into stygian gloom. Cherry Cola was lowered in on a gurney, through a separate trapdoor. The chamber had originally been a storage area for liquid cargo and the interior walls were smooth and heavily bolted. It was very dark within and tiny lamps guttered sporadically. The floor was littered with human organs and the stench that arose from them was obscene in its intensity. Shark sized tadpoles hung upside down from the ceiling, suspended from meat hooks imbedded in their whiplash tails. Some of these beasts been slit open and their whitish entrails butterflied down to the metal surfaces in intricate arrays. A butcher’s block took center stage, illuminated by infrared bulbs. They could see Cherry Cola cranking down like a radioactive angel, alighting neatly upon this chopping block. The chains holding her gurney released and then slithered back up into darkness. The light caught like quicksilver in the eyes of an enormous cat. The monstrous apparition was lurking beside the table, observing them as they descended. Taty was almost too frightened to carry on once she has seen the creature, but Number Nun reassured her with a touch of her hand. Together they all approached the pool of red light, slipping and sliding in long puddles of coagulating blood. As they drew nearer the panther seemed to rise on its hind legs, attaining the height of a tall man. Large eyes glistened and glinted, lamp yellow above a semi-humanoid face. The cat man was smiling, long whiskers draped like an elegant mustache, the light absorbing disorientingly into his sleek black fur. He drew on a heavy velvet cape, swaddling his body up in its regal folds. This item of clothing further enhanced his manly dimensions, making one almost forget that he was in fact a cat. The nurse with the flamingo head preceded them, kneeling in supplication before the cat man, her forehead pressed into the cold blood at his feet. They watched as he withdrew a leash, attaching it to the slim collar around her throat. He pulled the leash gruffly and she jerked up to her knees, remaining at his side like a docile pet.

“It’s been forever since I’ve seen you in the confessional booth,” Number Nun said in an almost friendly fashion, her face and hands glowing like ice in the darkness.

“You are such a charming appliance,” the cat smiled back. “Even brought us a baby symbiote to play with – come up to the dining table and watch Daddy get his hands dirty.”

They clustered around the chopping block where Cherry Cola lay on her stomach. The girl was shaking with fright and internal trauma, her skin lathered over in a creamy layer of sweat. Daddy Bast leaned his heavy triangular head over her and sniffed deeply several times. The muscles in his thick neck rippled as he moved and Taty could easily discern the glint of heavy ivory teeth protruding from between cleft lips.

“Can you smell it?” Number Nun asked quietly.

The catman glanced up at her and winked unnervingly.

“Yes,” he purred. “Nurse, anaesthetize her.”

The nurse suddenly lurched up, baring needle-like fangs, which she then sank into Cherry Cola’s thigh. Cherry Cola screamed, spasmed and lay still. Taty let out a sharp yell and rushed reflexively to her aid, only to be firmly restrained by Number Nun. The nurse withdrew her fangs, licked venom from the wound and then sank languidly back to her bruised knees. Taty observed as she then reached beneath the butcher’s block to fetch a rope-bound bottle for the cat man. Number Nun meanwhile, had leaned over and was unbuttoning Cherry Cola’s uniform, slowly baring her slick back and defiled cotton panties. A tattoo of crossed cola bottles beneath a heart-shaped red cherry adorned her lower hips, creating an amusing parody of the classic skull and crossbones. Daddy Bast uncorked the bottle, releasing a stygian cloud of noxious green fumes. He took a mouthful, gargled deeply and then spewed it all over Cherry Cola’s exposed back. Taty grimaced in disgust, hiding behind Number Nun as the cat man began to undergo some form of suppressed fit, his large yellow eyes rolling back to show intricately veined undersides. His heavy paws sank down onto the skin above the tattoo, their fur becoming instantly matted by the fluid. Translucent claws retracted and elongated in syncopation with his deep bass purring. He began kneading and massaging her flesh in slow, heavy strokes, growling pleasurably. At one point his clawed fingers seemed to slide and fold bloodlessly into her wet skin. They trawled around the tattoo, sinking inexplicably deeper into her body. He began to probe sickeningly around her insides, hissing and spitting to himself. After a moment he froze, almost as though his claws had snagged on something. Taty became rigid with discomfort, imagining one of those barbed claws tagging on tender muscles or some vulnerable organ. The cat man tensed and began to gradually pull the symbiote out of the tattoo. The little green monstrosity arose cleanly through the skin, emerging from the red cherry and crossed cola bottles like some cheap special effect. It was hissing and spitting from its tiny, malformed Cherry Cola face, throwing up lewd finger gestures and scuttling helplessly in the claw grip of Daddy Bast. Cherry Cola was raised up from the hips as the things attempted to hold onto her spine with its twisted feet. But then, with a final yank it was extricated and thrust into a large jam jar. Cherry Cola fell back, her skin miraculously unbroken. A palpable sensation of physical relief seemed to breathe off her prone body and this instantly reassured Taty, causing her to view the monstrous cat in an entirely different light. She gazed up in awe as he raised the jam jar into the light. He shook it around playfully, grinning at the mandibled homunculous with a mouthful of tusk-like teeth. Number Nun also began to examine the creature, flicking her eye-modes to and fro, performing various forms of visual analysis.

“What is it exactly?” she asked the cat.

“Some sort of thing no doubt,” he answered flippantly.

“They say these parasites are transmitted through inter-dimensional intercourse,” Number Nun said. “Spread from a single source; some anomaly Dr Dali brought through from beyond.”

“That was the situation about three days ago, yes,” he replied, placing the jam jar on the butcher’s block.

“What do you mean?”

“After three days the host begins to change. The original personality is absorbed and replaced with that of a foreign hive-mind. The physical body begins to alter to match the make-up of the symbiote and we are left with grotesque, personalized mutant; a caricature of the former self, imbued with an alien consciousness. At the end of the third day the host is transformed entirely into a large version of this thing here. These newly formed hybrids can reproduce in the same manner as the original symbiote.”

“Can anything stop the transformation?”

“Large doses of carrot juice halt the process for an indefinite period of time, triggering all manner of chemical imbalances in the brain. Transformation is inevitable though.”

“You mean…”

“Yes. Dr Dali, in his infinite capacity for perverse annihilation has succeeded in raping the future. A now unstoppable epidemic blossoms amongst the sodomites and whore-folk of this town. Soon they will all be green and rubbery monstrosities, rubbing themselves up against the barge pole of their former existence. They will cry out for satisfaction from satisfaction itself, until all the slum regions and luxury villas are eaten alive and stripped of their populace by these appetite sick deviants. Until we are all drowning in the filth of another world.”

He let loose a stream of slippery coughing chuckles before skulking back onto all fours, padding into the far shadows of the echoing chamber. The velvet cape trawled off, soaking into the ooze which guttered all around. The nurse followed, crawling after him on all fours, her abandoned leash trailing behind like a tail. They both quickly vanished into darkness. Number Nun buttoned up Cherry Cola and hoisted her over a shoulder.

“Lets get back to the Shell Sea,” she announced decisively. “We need to find Romeo the Dealer and then leave town.”