The pounding, drumming pulse-beat of battle.
Grebok’s knuckles – raw, red, swollen – throbbed. Blood matted his locks.
The once shiny luster of Lord Chuckles’ blade was bedimmed by gore and bits of hair.
Violence for these two men – nay, these two heroes – was a thing of purity, a gleaming, crystalline moment in time. A thrown elbow shattered a jawbone. A broken chair leg became a skull-cracker, a teeth-breaker, a sternum-smasher. The two moved in tandem as they always did, one a desert sirocco from the south, the other a biting mistral from the north; whenever and wherever they met, death ensued, enemies fell, justice prevailed. The Storyverse would once more be protected against those who would undo its magic.
Today was no different. The pair of heroes crossed a sea of green. They boarded the pirate vessel. They defeated the captain’s guards. They left broken wreckage in their wake, a scene of righteous carnage sung to sleep by the gurgling moans of the defeated.
Together, the two stood at the door to the pirate captain’s quarters.
Lord Chuckles: blonde, close-cropped hair; steely gaze; blade held fast in tight grip.
Grebok: dark, tangled dreadlocks; eyes painted in iron filings; fists dripping red.
They shared a look. Grebok winked a black eye. Chuckles tightened his square jaw.
Together, they booted down the door. Wood splintered. Hinges hit the ground with a clatter.
Then–
Pop music. Bright walls. A poster of a slinky, scantily-clad 16-year-old girl riding a white leopard.
A scrawny kid with a mop-top of red hair and limbs like a tangle of broomsticks sat at a small computer. He yelped as they kicked open the door, and the keyboard in his lap spun to the floor.
Grebok, rarely one to examine his immediate surroundings, marched over to the teen and socked him in the jaw.
The gawky teen cried out.
“Suck fist, pirate captain!” Grebok said, then turned to Chuckles and gave the thumbs-up.
Chuckles, the smart one by only a scant few micrometers of smartness, paused. He tapped his pinky finger against the pommel of his sword.
“I’m confused,” Chuckles said.
Grebok narrowed his gaze. “Not me, brother. What’s to be confused about? We found the pirate ship. We beat the pirate’s crew into a bloody pudding. Now, pirate captain plus justice equals a day’s work.”
“Does that kid look like a pirate captain?”
“Sure?” Grebok lied.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m lying,” Grebok said, not lying.
“Who are you guys?” the teen croaked, rubbing his jaw. “What’s going on out there? Is that blood? Where are my parents? What about my sister?” He called out: “Sis! Mom! Dad!”
Grebok slapped him. “Stop yelling. I’m like, right next to you. I have sensitive ears. Now, stop your whimpering. We’re heroes. Retained by cosmic forces to make sure all is right with the natural order. You’re a pirate. You take a crap on the natural order.”
The teen whimpered.
“Hold up. I’m going to try to feel this out,” Chuckles explained, holding up a finger. “Okay. I got this. The pirates were keeping your family hostage. And the pirate captain put you here as a proxy – a dupe – so that we’d come in and slaughter an innocent, and he’d be all laughing and grog-bellied, and he’d say something like, Oh, you should see your faces, you shitheaded… hero… jerkfaces…“
“Don’t forget the Arr, matey,” Grebok added. “Or something about I cornholed me parrot for a bucket of rum. Pirates say shit like that all the time.”
“Right, what Grebok said. Have I nailed it? Speak up, kid, we ain’t got all day.”
The teen sobbed. “Puh-please don’t hurt me. Did you kill my fuh-fuh-family?”
“Does he mean those people outside?” Grebok asked as an aside. “The captain’s guard?”
Chuckles shrugged. “Who’s your family again, kid?”
“They were in the kuh-kitchen. Mom was making cookies. Dad was—“
“—smoking a pipe?” Lord Chuckles interrupted, wincing.
“My sister was doing her homework.”
“Sister,” Chuckles said, letting the word roll around his mouth. “Boy, this is really going south.”
“Are they okay?” the teen blubbered.
“They’re… not dead,” Chuckles said. It was true.
Grebok shook his head, chortling. “Though I sure wouldn’t call them ‘okay.’ Unless you consider comas and sucking chest wounds—“
Chuckles gave him a panicked shake of the head.
“I mean,” Grebok corrected himself, “they’re totally great. This stuff in my hair is just… jelly. Blood-flavored jelly.” He swirled a finger in his gory dreads, and popped the tip in his mouth. He almost threw up, but managed an awkward smile.
The teen howled, a wounded, pimply banshee.
“Yawn,” Grebok said instead of actually yawning, and then pulled a revolver whose fat cylinder sat pregnant with hot photon rounds. He pressed the gun’s gaping, deadly mouth against the teen’s temple. “Let’s finish this and go get a smoothie.”
“Whoa, whoa, Bucky the Bronco,” Lord Chuckles said, hurrying over and steadying his heroic pal. He eased the gun away from the boy’s head. “Relax for a minute. Our victory over smoothies will have its hour. Okay, kid. Forget your parents for a minute and stop with the cry-making. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was duh-duh-downloading music off the Infi-Net.”
Grebok whispered to Chuckles: “I don’t know what that means.”
Lord Chuckles whispered back: “I have no idea. Some kind of voodoo spell, so be wary.”
Volume back to normal, Chuckles continued: “Right, sure, you were, ahhh, loading clown music off the infinity tubes, fine, fine. That sounds pretty above board to me. Right? Totally legit. Nothing illicit about clowns, or the loading of clowns. Or even their music, which I imagine is a sort of creepy, jaunty pipe organ thing.” He paused, staring off at nothing. “Man, clowns are really terrifying. You just know that one would try to kiss you, and you’d turn away, but he’d still get his face makeup all over your cheek or chin, and somewhere you’d hear this distant sound: a clown-nose just honking in the night.”
Grebok took a step away from Chuckles. “If you say so.”
“Sorry. Right. Yeah. Okay, kid, you got your clown music—“
“It’s not clown muh-muh-music,” the gawky teen corrected. He stared up at the poster of the nubile girl on the slinking leopard. His mouth slackened. His face alighted with awe. “It’s from the yet-to-be-released Kendra Shields album. She’s a goddess. A pop goddess who probably smells of appletinis and angel tears.”
“I give a shit,” Grebok announced. “Can we hurry this up? Smoothies. Smoothies.”
Chuckles rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yes. Whatever, kid. You bought your music fair and square, we must have the wrong pirate ship or something.”
“It’s not a ship,” the kid said, “it’s a house in the suburbs.”
Grebok mumbled, “Tom-ay-toe, tom-ah-toe, nerd.”
“And I didn’t buy the music. The album isn’t out yet. It drops next week. I downloaded it early.”
“Stop jabbering at me and speak plain!” Chuckles barked.
“I found a site on the Infi-Net, and I—“
The teen’s lips moved to form the word, and the realization only dawned on him as the word squeezed from his lips like a squirming space-slug.
“—pirated it.”
“Wait,” Chuckles said, chewing on his lip. “So you are a pirate?”
The kid’s eyes went wide. “No?”
“That’s a really boring form of piracy. I mean, no grog. No buckled swashes. It’s just… it’s just weird to me.”
Grebok pointed the revolver once more at the teen’s head. But then he noticed something.
“No, what’s weird is what’s on the kid’s hand.”
Chuckles followed Grebok’s finger as he pointed.
A small black spot had formed between the boy’s thumb and forefinger. A little suppurating flesh pit, a slowly whirling black pool of skin that seemed to be… turning to puckered sludge. Like hot road tar, wrinkled and bubbling.
“Space AIDS, maybe?” Grebok winced. “Or the Star-Clap. Have you been making love to Nebula Ponies? Because, I assure you, that will earn you the Star-Clap. But bad.”
The black spot started to spread. The ooze enveloped the boy’s thumb.
“It’s cold,” the boy said, a tremor in his voice. He shook his hand like a dog’s head with an ear infection. “Get it off. Get it off!”
The black bubbling tar started to spread up his arm, toward the shoulder. In the shadowy ooze, the two heroes saw a winking, twinkling infinity of stars – a thousand fireflies, a million eyes.
It began to grow tendrils.
“Shit,” Grebok said.
“Double-shit,” Chuckles added.
The tendrils reached for them. Fast, like lashing whips!
