John Flamel - The Metalscream before me. Best friend. Mentor. Smart-ass to the end.
Once victim to a permanent fucking head perforation by SHIELD - America’s one-time Nazi squad, since then disbanded into the night to be held unaccountable for their serial murders.
Now?
He’s floating above his burst-open grave, alive as he ever was. I’m trying to keep my mind from caving in as squiggly arrows and glowing circuitry encircle his glowing yellow hands, symbols of his special brand of technomancy. Eyes once dark are now burning bright with wild equations and symbols that seem far more complex than my own.
The worst part about all this is that he’s exactly the same as I remember him.
Tattoo across his glowing right eye - a bad-ass looking snake outlined in black.
His hair ‘s as untamed, unkempt and greyed-to-hell as it ever was; happens when an explosion of raw magic energy accidentally ages your body by a few thousand years.
He’s wearing the same leather jacket he always wore, unzipped to show his trademark body alteration slapped square in the middle of his bare chest. It’s a circular screen with an image of static playing over and over - like one of those useless twencen TV screens that never works. The static in his chest ripples and wavers about furiously, like the pounding of a once-silent heart.
Ol’ Static-Heart.
But it’s his eyes I can’t stop staring at.
Those fierce, wild eyes.
I see that same damn fire in his eyes, just like I remember it.
It can’t be him. It just can’t be.
And then he starts talking:
“Hey Litbit,” He says, with that damn smile of his. “You won‘t believe what I‘ve been up to.”
***
I scan his aura. It reads exactly the way it’s supposed to. The Bone Machine confirms it.
But how?
How on Earth is this possible?
“You’re dead! You’re dead you’re dead you’re dead you got shot in the head in the desert by goons and I couldn’t do anything, I swear I couldn’t do anything the Bone Machine wouldn’t let me do anything I begged and begged and pleaded but they wouldn’t let me go down there and save you I tried I swear to Thor I tried…” I hyperventilate out at John. He just smiles.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to take a breath there every once in a bit, would it?”
Goddamn smartass. I grin big and wide.
“I’m still mad at you, you know.”
“Yes, you are quite mad. I’ve been saying that for years.”
“Wrong kind of mad, Ashtray Head!” I shout, gesturing at the Bone Machine. “What I’m mad at, is you fucking off with life and wiring these freaking psychos into my nervous system! For months, I haven’t had a moment‘s peace. I mean, do you realize how many times Ken Montgomery‘s tried to see me naked? Do you? I swear, he‘s made it his life‘s goal!”
Kenneth Montgomery - the football coach turned technomancer turned floating skull inside the Bone Machine - turns to me and says: “Hey, us dead guys have to have something to look forward to, right?”
“Arrrrgh!” I growl and punch the horny dead guy in his stupid grinning skull. He’s gotten good and used to the treatment by now, and laughs it off.
“How are you treating the girl, my glowing dead mates?” He asks the Bone Machine, bemused at my shouting match.
“You can’t hear them. They’re hooked up to me, remember? Only I can hear what they’re saying.”
“Oh. Right. Brain’s a little worse for the wear I’m afraid. What with me having to re-build the bloody thing from scratch and all.”
“By the way, they say they’re torturing me daily, forcing vile meditation techniques upon me and lecturing my soul to death. Feeling guilty at all yet?”
“Nope. Should I?” I give him a glare that could melt through steel.
John turns his head to the side and I see the student-teacher lecture coming from a mile off. “And by the way, the only reason I had to bond them into your nervous system was because your insides were turned to jelly after SHIELD attacked our Mantic Gallery. Due in no small part, I might add, to the fact that were too slow to activate that ridiculously-simple teleportation spell I taught you.”
I cross my arms and mumble angrily. Talk to me like that…
“But enough of all that.” My anger recedes and I force laughter back into my gut when he starts gesturing goofy, like a madman. “There’s stories to be told, and drinking to be had!”
The Bone Machine chatter worriedly, and my stomach turns. “Uh, John? I’m actually…not…a big drinker…anymore…”
John looks at me square in the eyes and I can‘t decide whether he‘s serious or he‘s screwing with me. “Lit-bit, what did I tell you about magic?”
“Uh. That it’s totally awesome?” I offer.
He face palms and grunts with irritation. “I swear, I need much stricter hiring policies when I start taking on trainees. What I told you, you flat-brained simpleton, is that magic - technomancy - is best practiced on an upset stomach full of beer.”
“What? I never heard you say that.”
“You just did. Come. Be merry!” He says. With a flourish of swirling circuits and a shattering of quantum physics, he makes us both disappear.
***
We reappear inside The Negative Zone Bar. I’ve popped in here during my travels to Halo City a couple times, partly because they serve stuff other than the sauce at the bar. Funny John picked this place; I’ve been thinking about the night Chaz and I got high off milk recently.
John slaps his hand down on the bar and orders two Triple Chocolate Vodka Sundances and brains the bartender when he doesn’t know how to make them.
I sit at the bar while the bitchfest goes down. The Bone Machine and I argue about whether or not he’s the real Metalscream. I say that he is who he says he is. I already ran an aura trace while we were outside his empty grave and he scans warm and electric, just like I remember. But some in the Bone Machine, not to mention the gnawing, paranoid feeling in my gut, disagree with me.
And then, the memory of John’s death - the one I’ve been trying so hard to block out - hits me like an eighteen-ton cargo freighter. The doubts take over my mind.
I quietly screen through his aura with my more covert spells. Even though he remembers my favorite drink, I get this very bad feeling that he might be a clone. Or a robot dressed up to be a man. Or a zombie. An extremely friendly zombie, nevertheless, but probably a zombie.
“They don’t make bartenders like they used to. So why are you screening my aura anyway, Litbit?” He smirks back at me while the bartender scurries off to make the drinks with his testicles tucked nicely away between his legs.
“I don’t know, Ashtray Head. Why are you a zombie?” I ask accusingly.
“Litany, for the last time, it’s really me.”
“That’s exactly what a zombie would say.”
“Actually, zombies just do the moaning and drooling up on themselves bit.” He says as the bartender meekly brings us our drinks. “And I won’t be doing any of that until at least my fifteenth drink.”
“Well, then that means you’re an evil killer robot dressed up to look like John. Or a clone.”
“Could a clone do this?” He says as he grips the Triple Chocolate Vodka Sundance and tosses the completely-full drink on the floor. Before I can curse him out for wasting his perfectly beautiful drink, he has the mess of vodka, chocolate rum and broken glass perfectly re-assembled. He makes it float and bob around my head for effect.
I glare at him. “Well, if you are a clone of John, I think you could probably do that. Especially if you‘re an evil one. That‘s your Sundance, by the way. I didn‘t order any extra floor with it.”
He slaps his head, irritated, and takes a deep swig of the Sundance.
“For Shock’s sake, pick a mood, Litbit! Argumentative, relieved, angry, depressed, paranoid…I need a planner to keep up with your mood swings!”
“Did you poison my Sundance?“ I point to the untouched drink in front of me. “Evil people tend to poison other people’s Sundances. It’s what makes them evil.”
“Clean the stupid out of your ears, my silly little student, and please listen very carefully…”
The Bone Machine, for once, is being very quiet on me.
I squint my eyes suspiciously at him, and give him the benefit of the doubt.
***
One hour later, I’m talking to three John Flanels and loving up my fifth drink of the night, a creamy Chocolate Rum Martini. The room wriggles around a bit as John finishes telling me where he’s been the past few months.
“So, you’re saying you shunted off into your astral form just before they killed you?”
“Yes’m.”
“But that’s impossible! The ludgates, the ones that siphon off magical power! I saw the SHIELD bastards use them on you, John!”
“Ah, little ones. So naïve.” He says, waving around his beer like his arm is made of rubber. “Those things could never steal all our power, Litany. They’re tech-based. Whereas we, are both technological and magical creatures.”
“But I saw…!”
“You saw what I wanted you to see.”
“But…but why would you do that?” I slam the martini down and stare at him hard. “Why would you make me think you’re dead!”
“Because I…I didn’t want to get your hopes up.” He sighs, furrowing his brow while staring deep into his glass. “I didn’t lie to you, Litany. I was dead. My astral form started to decay almost immediately after my body was destroyed. I had nothing to anchor myself to this plane. My last chance was to fuse my spirit into the gravestone you created for me. Crafted from techno mantic energies, I was able to inhabit it, and since then…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Since then you’ve been rebuilding your entire body underground by re-arranging the atomic matter of dirt.” I breathe out. “That‘s insane!”
“Do you doubt my power?” So damn cocky. I’d kill him if he didn’t make me laugh so much.
“I’d be insane not to, you evil cloned killer attack robot zombie!”
“You’re drunk.” He wags his finger at me.
“Yeah, so?” I yell back. “Not the only one.”
“Careful, Litbit.” He says. “I could spin your soul into a gravestone and leave you rot.”
“Hahaha. Shut up.” I say, sipping my poison.
“Seriously, though. I’m really proud of the way you’ve handled yourself while I was resurrecting. I mean, you’ve done the job so well you’ve gone and got a God mad at you.”
Way to strike that nerve. “Yeah. Fuck if I know why though. All I know is that Rades got killed because of what I am.”
“It’s a dangerous biz, kid. No guarantees in this line of work. Just gotta put up, shut up and - most importantly - drink up. To Rades.” He holds his glass high in salute.
“Rades.” I say, and we toast his memory.
Out of nowhere, he starts chuckling, “Remember when you could barely recite a teleportation spell?”
“Yeah. Well. The senile sons of bitches you stuck me with helped.” I point at the Bone Machine. They’ve been chattering away angrily at each other since around drink two or three, but I tuned them out.
“They have at that.” He sips his drink and places it down just like I did a few minutes ago. He looks at me intensely, eyes sober-serious. “But I’m back now. It’s time I resumed my role as the Metalscream.”
“….what?” I choke. “Seriously…?”
“Time to take back the cabal of senility I’ve strapped to you. Time for me to reclaim my responsibilities. As keeper of the Bone Machine. As protector of the world from the perversions of the occulttech and all that jazz.”
“But…I…”
“Besides, going up against a Mad God sounds like a blast. Need to be in my prime fightin‘ form, naturally.”
“Well, I…”
“LITANY!!!”
“WHAT?” I scream back at him.
John jolts upright, transfixed.
“Litany, are you okay?” He asks, and I realize he wasn’t the one who called my name.
“Over here, you imbecile. And don’t give away to the enemy that we’re talking to you.”
I look towards the skull of Megan Forrester. The worst of the dead lot in the Machine.
“Decided to listen to us now? That’s good. Just would like to let you know that the…thing…that you’ve been talking to for an hour now isn’t really John.”
“What?” I mouth.
“Honey, just because you’re not making sounds with your lips doesn’t mean the creature can’t see them move. Now be a dear and stop being stupid for just one second, if you would?”
I clench my teeth and try very hard to suppress my rage.
“Now, did you notice how he pauses for exactly one-hundred and seven milliseconds every single time he talks to you?
I ever-so-slightly shake my head.
“Well, that’s alright. Our American friend - the dead football coach orbiting on your right - he’s the one that picked up on that little gem. He’s good at the whole stopwatch./counting thing. He’s been sounding off that fact at you for the past forty minutes. Oh, right, I’m sorry. You were too busy getting hammered again during that time to notice.”
I try very, very, very hard not to ram my martini glass into her eye socket.
“And our Russian friend - the scientist - he’s the one that finally cracked the aural cloak the creature’s been hiding itself in. Did you know it has the same aural signatures we found in Rade’s gun shop and all over that dead emo girl?”
My blood runs cold and I can’t catch my breath.
“Wait, darling, there’s more.” Megan circles around to stare my directly in the face. “I was the one that found the incantation that makes it all work. The one that lets the creature read the thoughts in your mind and uses them to pose as the previous Metalscream. Perhaps, if you didn‘t ignore us ‘senile, old farts,’ we might have been able to warn you before you were sloshed off your bum.”
I screwed up this time.
Really screwed up.
“Shock me…” I breathe out.
“Don’t believe them, Litany.” John grabs my shoulders, a panicked tone in his voice. “The entire Bone Machine’s been comprised. Your stalker has hacked the Machine. Separate from it, Litany! Hurry!”
I grit my teeth and ask him a question. “How did you know what the Bone Machine said to me…?”
The football coach counts to one-hundred and seven in milliseconds before John starts talking again. “Litany, you pick the worst times for these sorts of questions. Now get rid of it, before the emergent God inside that thing starts to---”
“Hands off, psycho!” I yell as my body ignites with techno mantic energies. “Now, tell me what the hell’s going on before I rip your fake static heart out.”
He smiles. His voice changes pitch for just a moment. “Litany. Is that any way to speak to the Divine?”
The pitch behind his voice seems strong enough to crush my very soul. His eyes glow red and I’m consumed by flames.
***
The blast of fiery energy sends me screaming through the front window and I hit the sidewalk rolling. I bounce along the ground like I’m a shocking bowling ball, and the pedestrians are my pins. Finally, I land face up on the ground, feeling the heat from the blast sizzling off my just-once-again-barely-thought-up-in-time shield.
John. My friend John. Just shot me out of a building.
I hear the noises of the panicking crowd as if they were happening to someone else. I lie there, sprawled out, mildly aware of the Bone Machine’s screaming in the distance.
I think I’m in shock.
I blink, staring off into space. From the corner of my eye, I see John floating toward me through the giant hole I left in the wall when he blasted me. Giant pentagrams and serrated blades encircle his fiery red aura.
No, not John. This thing - this creature - is not John.
It’s not him.
It’s not.
Adrenaline sets in and I’m all motion as the John-creature shoots flaming serrated knives at me. I dodge and hide behind a parked car, trying not to hyper-ventilate.
“Litany, honey. Things are getting a little too visible, if you catch my drift.” Megan the Bitch coos in my ear. Glazed-over and barely registering anything, my eyes wander over to the pedestrians watching the battle from the sidelines. She whispers something to me in Latin and I repeat her words. The cloaking field sparkles and explodes outward in a huff, radiating lies towards the passers-by.
Everyone, including the people in the bar, should just think that another mutant powers struggle is taking place in the streets of Halo City. They’ll be compelled to flee this place, instinctively, and they won’t know why. Even the police will avoid this place.
It’s just him and me now.
I duck out from behind cover and let the furious techno mantic energies well up in my hand. I aim at the creatures head and see John’s face…
My best friend…
It’s not him, Litany.
It’s. Not. Him.
“Why are you doing this?” I yell back at him as the blast dissolves out of my hands. I‘m trying to sound tough and bad-ass but instead I’m almost crying by the time I end the sentence.
“Because some debts can‘t go unpaid. I didn’t want you to find out this way, Litany.” He says sadly, maddened circuitry swirling around his hands. He fires away at me, dissolving through objects as fast as I can seek cover behind them.
“Debts? What shocking debts? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I…I lied about how I got back to this physical plane, Litbit.” I can feel the sadness welling up in the back of his throat.
“Dammit! Cut the shit, John!” I yell, jumping over an explosion. “Spill your guts or I‘ll spill them for you!”
“Who do you think brought me back to life?”
A chill runs down my spine as I realize what he means.
“You mean…?”
“Yeah. Him.” John’s body jerks unnaturally as he fires another blast at the ground below me. I jump above it, but as it hits, it spreads, coating a solid four square feet beneath me. When I land on the still-glowing ground, my feet sink up to my ankles in liquefied asphalt. With a hushed whisper, he solidifies the ground again, leaving me trapped inside.
I wobble around, trying to regain my composure as he walks over toward me. I fail to regain composure and instead fall flat on my ass. I curse up a thunderstorm of angry, colorful words and glance over to my mad friend. He’s holding a hand full of bouncing, ticking bombs orbited by razor wire. As he closes in, I can see the sadness in his glowing, pupil-less eyes.
“He’s got a toggle on my motor centers. He’s controlling me like a puppet. I… I’ll try and make this quick, Litbit...”
Son of a bitch.
A fury rises in my gut and occulttech energies swirl in parabolic arcs around my pinned legs. My power explodes outward, turning the sidewalk that once trapped me into so many shrapnel shards.
“What…?” He stammers, bringing his hands up to protect himself as huge chunks of granite fly toward him.
I bring my hands up to face my enemy and - clearing my mind of all distractions just like the Zen Master taught me - I channel every last bit of techno-mantic power I have into one furious burst. Spiraling Pac-Mans stream into John’s neck with the force of a hurricane and the pinpoint accuracy of a laser, severing his head clean off his shoulders.
I teleport over to the bouncing head and spit on it. “Fuck off, whatever you are.”
“Litany…I‘m so sorry…”
That’s about the time I lose it completely. “Use your real voice, you shocking turd. Don’t you DARE use John’s!”
I stare in horror as his face starts to glow red, eyes all blackened coals as he bleeds a reddened smile at me. He starts cackling then, beaming from ear-to-ear, a psychotic Circus reflection of my best friend with nothing but hate in its eyes. With a loud pop, there’s a hole in his head - in the same place I saw the SHIELD agents shoot him - oozing with congealed blood. With the laughter of a perverted sadist, it switches back to its real voice. That booming vile thing that could shatter mountains with a whisper, and speaks to me with blood coating his lips. “You will…suffer dearly…for this…”
“JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY!” I stomp on John’s head, over and over, tears flowing out of my eyes as I crush his brains out onto the cracked and potholed-to-hell ground. “And don’t you ever. Ever. EVER call me Litbit!”
After a minute or so I stop stomping the head. My shoulders slump heavy and I sigh, looking around the craters and debris that remain from the battle.
That motherfucker.
Even if a Mad God were controlling his every move, the real John Flamel would never try to kill me. Not even out of mercy. The thought just wouldn’t enter his head.
That, and he’d never stop resisting the creature, right up until the bitter end. He wouldn’t just… give in like that.
I breathe out. My body doesn’t stop shaking. It’s still in denial about what I just did.
I just defeated the proxy of a fucking God. By myself.
Out of breath, I collapse onto the ground and watch as the stomped-to-shit severed head blurs and resolves back into the form of a tiny doll head. Confused, I turn my attention to the headless corpse a few steps to my right, and instead of flesh-and-blood I see nothing but a decapitated doll.
Curious, I pick up the doll head - a blackened-brown monstrosity that feels like leathered skin that’s been out in the sun too long. It’s got sutures of razor wire for a mouth. It’s eyes are thick and crusty - like bloodied scabs. I feel the bits of hair in the doll’s scalp and think of really thick horse hair.
A voodoo doll.
I almost got the shit kicked out of me by a goddamned voodoo doll.
“Hey! Do you know anything about this voodoo doll?” I’m addressing Madame Girard, the Voodoo Priestess watching this all from inside the Bone Machine.
“This is not a voodoo doll, child.” She says in a soothing, grandmotherly voice.
“What are you talking about? Of course it’s a voodoo doll.” I snap back.
“You’ve been watching too many movies.” I start to growl, but the damn priestess interrupts my inevitable rage-fueled comeback. “Voodoo dolls are artifacts meant to bless people. This thing is more of a puppet. A proxy to this God-creature given form and power from some outside source. There is nothing Voodoo about this.”
“So what the shock is this, then?”
“I believe I can answer that!” A smug know-it-all voice booms robustly from deep within the bowels of the Bone Machine. Alejandro the Greater. Legend in his own mind. Usually hearing his cocky-beyond-all-reason attitude makes me laugh.
Usually.
“What you are holding my fine young lady, is a bonified person puppet made out of the skin of a Roving Gloreothrog Pouncer.”
“Person puppet?”
“Person. Puppet. Puppet made to resemble a person. Ingenious thing, really. It uses a spell to draw upon a victim’s memories and molds itself to look, taste, touch, and sound like whomever the victim is thinking of. Once, Vallenditus the Strange attacked me with a person puppet made out of dried tea leaves and shavings from the tallest Redwood trees of that century. My dear girl, you should have seen me that day. He’d caught me off-guard with it, shaping it to look like some peasant girl whose virginity I‘d stolen earlier that evening. It’s not an easy feat, catching me off-guard like that I may tell you. Nevertheless, that peasant girl in particular was…”
I grab his skull and stare him straight in his hollowed eyes with the Look of Death. “Get. To. The. Point.”
“Well naturally! The point is that you can make a person puppet out of almost anything. But this one’s made from an animal I’ve only ever happened upon once in my travels. An animal you can only find in one place…”
“Only one, huh?” I smile murderously.
Naturally, it ends up being some backwards-ass hell dimension that he calls “The Forever-sprawl of Twilight Madness.”
I could care less.
The fucker that’s screwing with my life is there.
The one that killed Rades.
The one that almost killed Chaz.
And the one that brought John’s memory back to life and forced me to kill him again.
I will go to Hell and back if it means I can rip this mother shocker’s head from his shoulders and shove it right up his ass.
I disappear from the sidewalk, nothing but soothing thoughts of murder in my mind.
***
TO BE CONTINUED, OF COURSE.
AND NEXT ISSUE, LITANY IN FACT, DOES SHOVE SOMEONE’S HEAD UP SOMEONE’S ASS. SO ENJOY THAT ENTICING BIT OF MENTAL IMAGERY, WON’T YOU?
***
Once victim to a permanent fucking head perforation by SHIELD - America’s one-time Nazi squad, since then disbanded into the night to be held unaccountable for their serial murders.
Now?
He’s floating above his burst-open grave, alive as he ever was. I’m trying to keep my mind from caving in as squiggly arrows and glowing circuitry encircle his glowing yellow hands, symbols of his special brand of technomancy. Eyes once dark are now burning bright with wild equations and symbols that seem far more complex than my own.
The worst part about all this is that he’s exactly the same as I remember him.
Tattoo across his glowing right eye - a bad-ass looking snake outlined in black.
His hair ‘s as untamed, unkempt and greyed-to-hell as it ever was; happens when an explosion of raw magic energy accidentally ages your body by a few thousand years.
He’s wearing the same leather jacket he always wore, unzipped to show his trademark body alteration slapped square in the middle of his bare chest. It’s a circular screen with an image of static playing over and over - like one of those useless twencen TV screens that never works. The static in his chest ripples and wavers about furiously, like the pounding of a once-silent heart.
Ol’ Static-Heart.
But it’s his eyes I can’t stop staring at.
Those fierce, wild eyes.
I see that same damn fire in his eyes, just like I remember it.
It can’t be him. It just can’t be.
And then he starts talking:
“Hey Litbit,” He says, with that damn smile of his. “You won‘t believe what I‘ve been up to.”
***
I scan his aura. It reads exactly the way it’s supposed to. The Bone Machine confirms it.
But how?
How on Earth is this possible?
“You’re dead! You’re dead you’re dead you’re dead you got shot in the head in the desert by goons and I couldn’t do anything, I swear I couldn’t do anything the Bone Machine wouldn’t let me do anything I begged and begged and pleaded but they wouldn’t let me go down there and save you I tried I swear to Thor I tried…” I hyperventilate out at John. He just smiles.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to take a breath there every once in a bit, would it?”
Goddamn smartass. I grin big and wide.
“I’m still mad at you, you know.”
“Yes, you are quite mad. I’ve been saying that for years.”
“Wrong kind of mad, Ashtray Head!” I shout, gesturing at the Bone Machine. “What I’m mad at, is you fucking off with life and wiring these freaking psychos into my nervous system! For months, I haven’t had a moment‘s peace. I mean, do you realize how many times Ken Montgomery‘s tried to see me naked? Do you? I swear, he‘s made it his life‘s goal!”
Kenneth Montgomery - the football coach turned technomancer turned floating skull inside the Bone Machine - turns to me and says: “Hey, us dead guys have to have something to look forward to, right?”
“Arrrrgh!” I growl and punch the horny dead guy in his stupid grinning skull. He’s gotten good and used to the treatment by now, and laughs it off.
“How are you treating the girl, my glowing dead mates?” He asks the Bone Machine, bemused at my shouting match.
“You can’t hear them. They’re hooked up to me, remember? Only I can hear what they’re saying.”
“Oh. Right. Brain’s a little worse for the wear I’m afraid. What with me having to re-build the bloody thing from scratch and all.”
“By the way, they say they’re torturing me daily, forcing vile meditation techniques upon me and lecturing my soul to death. Feeling guilty at all yet?”
“Nope. Should I?” I give him a glare that could melt through steel.
John turns his head to the side and I see the student-teacher lecture coming from a mile off. “And by the way, the only reason I had to bond them into your nervous system was because your insides were turned to jelly after SHIELD attacked our Mantic Gallery. Due in no small part, I might add, to the fact that were too slow to activate that ridiculously-simple teleportation spell I taught you.”
I cross my arms and mumble angrily. Talk to me like that…
“But enough of all that.” My anger recedes and I force laughter back into my gut when he starts gesturing goofy, like a madman. “There’s stories to be told, and drinking to be had!”
The Bone Machine chatter worriedly, and my stomach turns. “Uh, John? I’m actually…not…a big drinker…anymore…”
John looks at me square in the eyes and I can‘t decide whether he‘s serious or he‘s screwing with me. “Lit-bit, what did I tell you about magic?”
“Uh. That it’s totally awesome?” I offer.
He face palms and grunts with irritation. “I swear, I need much stricter hiring policies when I start taking on trainees. What I told you, you flat-brained simpleton, is that magic - technomancy - is best practiced on an upset stomach full of beer.”
“What? I never heard you say that.”
“You just did. Come. Be merry!” He says. With a flourish of swirling circuits and a shattering of quantum physics, he makes us both disappear.
***
We reappear inside The Negative Zone Bar. I’ve popped in here during my travels to Halo City a couple times, partly because they serve stuff other than the sauce at the bar. Funny John picked this place; I’ve been thinking about the night Chaz and I got high off milk recently.
John slaps his hand down on the bar and orders two Triple Chocolate Vodka Sundances and brains the bartender when he doesn’t know how to make them.
I sit at the bar while the bitchfest goes down. The Bone Machine and I argue about whether or not he’s the real Metalscream. I say that he is who he says he is. I already ran an aura trace while we were outside his empty grave and he scans warm and electric, just like I remember. But some in the Bone Machine, not to mention the gnawing, paranoid feeling in my gut, disagree with me.
And then, the memory of John’s death - the one I’ve been trying so hard to block out - hits me like an eighteen-ton cargo freighter. The doubts take over my mind.
I quietly screen through his aura with my more covert spells. Even though he remembers my favorite drink, I get this very bad feeling that he might be a clone. Or a robot dressed up to be a man. Or a zombie. An extremely friendly zombie, nevertheless, but probably a zombie.
“They don’t make bartenders like they used to. So why are you screening my aura anyway, Litbit?” He smirks back at me while the bartender scurries off to make the drinks with his testicles tucked nicely away between his legs.
“I don’t know, Ashtray Head. Why are you a zombie?” I ask accusingly.
“Litany, for the last time, it’s really me.”
“That’s exactly what a zombie would say.”
“Actually, zombies just do the moaning and drooling up on themselves bit.” He says as the bartender meekly brings us our drinks. “And I won’t be doing any of that until at least my fifteenth drink.”
“Well, then that means you’re an evil killer robot dressed up to look like John. Or a clone.”
“Could a clone do this?” He says as he grips the Triple Chocolate Vodka Sundance and tosses the completely-full drink on the floor. Before I can curse him out for wasting his perfectly beautiful drink, he has the mess of vodka, chocolate rum and broken glass perfectly re-assembled. He makes it float and bob around my head for effect.
I glare at him. “Well, if you are a clone of John, I think you could probably do that. Especially if you‘re an evil one. That‘s your Sundance, by the way. I didn‘t order any extra floor with it.”
He slaps his head, irritated, and takes a deep swig of the Sundance.
“For Shock’s sake, pick a mood, Litbit! Argumentative, relieved, angry, depressed, paranoid…I need a planner to keep up with your mood swings!”
“Did you poison my Sundance?“ I point to the untouched drink in front of me. “Evil people tend to poison other people’s Sundances. It’s what makes them evil.”
“Clean the stupid out of your ears, my silly little student, and please listen very carefully…”
The Bone Machine, for once, is being very quiet on me.
I squint my eyes suspiciously at him, and give him the benefit of the doubt.
***
One hour later, I’m talking to three John Flanels and loving up my fifth drink of the night, a creamy Chocolate Rum Martini. The room wriggles around a bit as John finishes telling me where he’s been the past few months.
“So, you’re saying you shunted off into your astral form just before they killed you?”
“Yes’m.”
“But that’s impossible! The ludgates, the ones that siphon off magical power! I saw the SHIELD bastards use them on you, John!”
“Ah, little ones. So naïve.” He says, waving around his beer like his arm is made of rubber. “Those things could never steal all our power, Litany. They’re tech-based. Whereas we, are both technological and magical creatures.”
“But I saw…!”
“You saw what I wanted you to see.”
“But…but why would you do that?” I slam the martini down and stare at him hard. “Why would you make me think you’re dead!”
“Because I…I didn’t want to get your hopes up.” He sighs, furrowing his brow while staring deep into his glass. “I didn’t lie to you, Litany. I was dead. My astral form started to decay almost immediately after my body was destroyed. I had nothing to anchor myself to this plane. My last chance was to fuse my spirit into the gravestone you created for me. Crafted from techno mantic energies, I was able to inhabit it, and since then…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Since then you’ve been rebuilding your entire body underground by re-arranging the atomic matter of dirt.” I breathe out. “That‘s insane!”
“Do you doubt my power?” So damn cocky. I’d kill him if he didn’t make me laugh so much.
“I’d be insane not to, you evil cloned killer attack robot zombie!”
“You’re drunk.” He wags his finger at me.
“Yeah, so?” I yell back. “Not the only one.”
“Careful, Litbit.” He says. “I could spin your soul into a gravestone and leave you rot.”
“Hahaha. Shut up.” I say, sipping my poison.
“Seriously, though. I’m really proud of the way you’ve handled yourself while I was resurrecting. I mean, you’ve done the job so well you’ve gone and got a God mad at you.”
Way to strike that nerve. “Yeah. Fuck if I know why though. All I know is that Rades got killed because of what I am.”
“It’s a dangerous biz, kid. No guarantees in this line of work. Just gotta put up, shut up and - most importantly - drink up. To Rades.” He holds his glass high in salute.
“Rades.” I say, and we toast his memory.
Out of nowhere, he starts chuckling, “Remember when you could barely recite a teleportation spell?”
“Yeah. Well. The senile sons of bitches you stuck me with helped.” I point at the Bone Machine. They’ve been chattering away angrily at each other since around drink two or three, but I tuned them out.
“They have at that.” He sips his drink and places it down just like I did a few minutes ago. He looks at me intensely, eyes sober-serious. “But I’m back now. It’s time I resumed my role as the Metalscream.”
“….what?” I choke. “Seriously…?”
“Time to take back the cabal of senility I’ve strapped to you. Time for me to reclaim my responsibilities. As keeper of the Bone Machine. As protector of the world from the perversions of the occulttech and all that jazz.”
“But…I…”
“Besides, going up against a Mad God sounds like a blast. Need to be in my prime fightin‘ form, naturally.”
“Well, I…”
“LITANY!!!”
“WHAT?” I scream back at him.
John jolts upright, transfixed.
“Litany, are you okay?” He asks, and I realize he wasn’t the one who called my name.
“Over here, you imbecile. And don’t give away to the enemy that we’re talking to you.”
I look towards the skull of Megan Forrester. The worst of the dead lot in the Machine.
“Decided to listen to us now? That’s good. Just would like to let you know that the…thing…that you’ve been talking to for an hour now isn’t really John.”
“What?” I mouth.
“Honey, just because you’re not making sounds with your lips doesn’t mean the creature can’t see them move. Now be a dear and stop being stupid for just one second, if you would?”
I clench my teeth and try very hard to suppress my rage.
“Now, did you notice how he pauses for exactly one-hundred and seven milliseconds every single time he talks to you?
I ever-so-slightly shake my head.
“Well, that’s alright. Our American friend - the dead football coach orbiting on your right - he’s the one that picked up on that little gem. He’s good at the whole stopwatch./counting thing. He’s been sounding off that fact at you for the past forty minutes. Oh, right, I’m sorry. You were too busy getting hammered again during that time to notice.”
I try very, very, very hard not to ram my martini glass into her eye socket.
“And our Russian friend - the scientist - he’s the one that finally cracked the aural cloak the creature’s been hiding itself in. Did you know it has the same aural signatures we found in Rade’s gun shop and all over that dead emo girl?”
My blood runs cold and I can’t catch my breath.
“Wait, darling, there’s more.” Megan circles around to stare my directly in the face. “I was the one that found the incantation that makes it all work. The one that lets the creature read the thoughts in your mind and uses them to pose as the previous Metalscream. Perhaps, if you didn‘t ignore us ‘senile, old farts,’ we might have been able to warn you before you were sloshed off your bum.”
I screwed up this time.
Really screwed up.
“Shock me…” I breathe out.
“Don’t believe them, Litany.” John grabs my shoulders, a panicked tone in his voice. “The entire Bone Machine’s been comprised. Your stalker has hacked the Machine. Separate from it, Litany! Hurry!”
I grit my teeth and ask him a question. “How did you know what the Bone Machine said to me…?”
The football coach counts to one-hundred and seven in milliseconds before John starts talking again. “Litany, you pick the worst times for these sorts of questions. Now get rid of it, before the emergent God inside that thing starts to---”
“Hands off, psycho!” I yell as my body ignites with techno mantic energies. “Now, tell me what the hell’s going on before I rip your fake static heart out.”
He smiles. His voice changes pitch for just a moment. “Litany. Is that any way to speak to the Divine?”
The pitch behind his voice seems strong enough to crush my very soul. His eyes glow red and I’m consumed by flames.
***
The blast of fiery energy sends me screaming through the front window and I hit the sidewalk rolling. I bounce along the ground like I’m a shocking bowling ball, and the pedestrians are my pins. Finally, I land face up on the ground, feeling the heat from the blast sizzling off my just-once-again-barely-thought-up-in-time shield.
John. My friend John. Just shot me out of a building.
I hear the noises of the panicking crowd as if they were happening to someone else. I lie there, sprawled out, mildly aware of the Bone Machine’s screaming in the distance.
I think I’m in shock.
I blink, staring off into space. From the corner of my eye, I see John floating toward me through the giant hole I left in the wall when he blasted me. Giant pentagrams and serrated blades encircle his fiery red aura.
No, not John. This thing - this creature - is not John.
It’s not him.
It’s not.
Adrenaline sets in and I’m all motion as the John-creature shoots flaming serrated knives at me. I dodge and hide behind a parked car, trying not to hyper-ventilate.
“Litany, honey. Things are getting a little too visible, if you catch my drift.” Megan the Bitch coos in my ear. Glazed-over and barely registering anything, my eyes wander over to the pedestrians watching the battle from the sidelines. She whispers something to me in Latin and I repeat her words. The cloaking field sparkles and explodes outward in a huff, radiating lies towards the passers-by.
Everyone, including the people in the bar, should just think that another mutant powers struggle is taking place in the streets of Halo City. They’ll be compelled to flee this place, instinctively, and they won’t know why. Even the police will avoid this place.
It’s just him and me now.
I duck out from behind cover and let the furious techno mantic energies well up in my hand. I aim at the creatures head and see John’s face…
My best friend…
It’s not him, Litany.
It’s. Not. Him.
“Why are you doing this?” I yell back at him as the blast dissolves out of my hands. I‘m trying to sound tough and bad-ass but instead I’m almost crying by the time I end the sentence.
“Because some debts can‘t go unpaid. I didn’t want you to find out this way, Litany.” He says sadly, maddened circuitry swirling around his hands. He fires away at me, dissolving through objects as fast as I can seek cover behind them.
“Debts? What shocking debts? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I…I lied about how I got back to this physical plane, Litbit.” I can feel the sadness welling up in the back of his throat.
“Dammit! Cut the shit, John!” I yell, jumping over an explosion. “Spill your guts or I‘ll spill them for you!”
“Who do you think brought me back to life?”
A chill runs down my spine as I realize what he means.
“You mean…?”
“Yeah. Him.” John’s body jerks unnaturally as he fires another blast at the ground below me. I jump above it, but as it hits, it spreads, coating a solid four square feet beneath me. When I land on the still-glowing ground, my feet sink up to my ankles in liquefied asphalt. With a hushed whisper, he solidifies the ground again, leaving me trapped inside.
I wobble around, trying to regain my composure as he walks over toward me. I fail to regain composure and instead fall flat on my ass. I curse up a thunderstorm of angry, colorful words and glance over to my mad friend. He’s holding a hand full of bouncing, ticking bombs orbited by razor wire. As he closes in, I can see the sadness in his glowing, pupil-less eyes.
“He’s got a toggle on my motor centers. He’s controlling me like a puppet. I… I’ll try and make this quick, Litbit...”
Son of a bitch.
A fury rises in my gut and occulttech energies swirl in parabolic arcs around my pinned legs. My power explodes outward, turning the sidewalk that once trapped me into so many shrapnel shards.
“What…?” He stammers, bringing his hands up to protect himself as huge chunks of granite fly toward him.
I bring my hands up to face my enemy and - clearing my mind of all distractions just like the Zen Master taught me - I channel every last bit of techno-mantic power I have into one furious burst. Spiraling Pac-Mans stream into John’s neck with the force of a hurricane and the pinpoint accuracy of a laser, severing his head clean off his shoulders.
I teleport over to the bouncing head and spit on it. “Fuck off, whatever you are.”
“Litany…I‘m so sorry…”
That’s about the time I lose it completely. “Use your real voice, you shocking turd. Don’t you DARE use John’s!”
I stare in horror as his face starts to glow red, eyes all blackened coals as he bleeds a reddened smile at me. He starts cackling then, beaming from ear-to-ear, a psychotic Circus reflection of my best friend with nothing but hate in its eyes. With a loud pop, there’s a hole in his head - in the same place I saw the SHIELD agents shoot him - oozing with congealed blood. With the laughter of a perverted sadist, it switches back to its real voice. That booming vile thing that could shatter mountains with a whisper, and speaks to me with blood coating his lips. “You will…suffer dearly…for this…”
“JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY!” I stomp on John’s head, over and over, tears flowing out of my eyes as I crush his brains out onto the cracked and potholed-to-hell ground. “And don’t you ever. Ever. EVER call me Litbit!”
After a minute or so I stop stomping the head. My shoulders slump heavy and I sigh, looking around the craters and debris that remain from the battle.
That motherfucker.
Even if a Mad God were controlling his every move, the real John Flamel would never try to kill me. Not even out of mercy. The thought just wouldn’t enter his head.
That, and he’d never stop resisting the creature, right up until the bitter end. He wouldn’t just… give in like that.
I breathe out. My body doesn’t stop shaking. It’s still in denial about what I just did.
I just defeated the proxy of a fucking God. By myself.
Out of breath, I collapse onto the ground and watch as the stomped-to-shit severed head blurs and resolves back into the form of a tiny doll head. Confused, I turn my attention to the headless corpse a few steps to my right, and instead of flesh-and-blood I see nothing but a decapitated doll.
Curious, I pick up the doll head - a blackened-brown monstrosity that feels like leathered skin that’s been out in the sun too long. It’s got sutures of razor wire for a mouth. It’s eyes are thick and crusty - like bloodied scabs. I feel the bits of hair in the doll’s scalp and think of really thick horse hair.
A voodoo doll.
I almost got the shit kicked out of me by a goddamned voodoo doll.
“Hey! Do you know anything about this voodoo doll?” I’m addressing Madame Girard, the Voodoo Priestess watching this all from inside the Bone Machine.
“This is not a voodoo doll, child.” She says in a soothing, grandmotherly voice.
“What are you talking about? Of course it’s a voodoo doll.” I snap back.
“You’ve been watching too many movies.” I start to growl, but the damn priestess interrupts my inevitable rage-fueled comeback. “Voodoo dolls are artifacts meant to bless people. This thing is more of a puppet. A proxy to this God-creature given form and power from some outside source. There is nothing Voodoo about this.”
“So what the shock is this, then?”
“I believe I can answer that!” A smug know-it-all voice booms robustly from deep within the bowels of the Bone Machine. Alejandro the Greater. Legend in his own mind. Usually hearing his cocky-beyond-all-reason attitude makes me laugh.
Usually.
“What you are holding my fine young lady, is a bonified person puppet made out of the skin of a Roving Gloreothrog Pouncer.”
“Person puppet?”
“Person. Puppet. Puppet made to resemble a person. Ingenious thing, really. It uses a spell to draw upon a victim’s memories and molds itself to look, taste, touch, and sound like whomever the victim is thinking of. Once, Vallenditus the Strange attacked me with a person puppet made out of dried tea leaves and shavings from the tallest Redwood trees of that century. My dear girl, you should have seen me that day. He’d caught me off-guard with it, shaping it to look like some peasant girl whose virginity I‘d stolen earlier that evening. It’s not an easy feat, catching me off-guard like that I may tell you. Nevertheless, that peasant girl in particular was…”
I grab his skull and stare him straight in his hollowed eyes with the Look of Death. “Get. To. The. Point.”
“Well naturally! The point is that you can make a person puppet out of almost anything. But this one’s made from an animal I’ve only ever happened upon once in my travels. An animal you can only find in one place…”
“Only one, huh?” I smile murderously.
Naturally, it ends up being some backwards-ass hell dimension that he calls “The Forever-sprawl of Twilight Madness.”
I could care less.
The fucker that’s screwing with my life is there.
The one that killed Rades.
The one that almost killed Chaz.
And the one that brought John’s memory back to life and forced me to kill him again.
I will go to Hell and back if it means I can rip this mother shocker’s head from his shoulders and shove it right up his ass.
I disappear from the sidewalk, nothing but soothing thoughts of murder in my mind.
***
TO BE CONTINUED, OF COURSE.
AND NEXT ISSUE, LITANY IN FACT, DOES SHOVE SOMEONE’S HEAD UP SOMEONE’S ASS. SO ENJOY THAT ENTICING BIT OF MENTAL IMAGERY, WON’T YOU?
***